We had an amazing day here at Little City Farm yesterday, participating in the 2nd annual spOtlight Festival! Throughout the day we featured 6 workshops demonstrating natural fibres and herbal arts - natural dyes, spinning & carding, wet felting, herbal oils & salves, soap making, and papermaking - we wanted to teach a variety of simple, traditional processes that can be done at home using inexpensive materials. There was a nice flow to the day as each workshop touched on topics that had been mentioned in previous workshops (for example, after learning about various fibres and how to dye them, we could move on to how to spin the roving into yarn, or felt the roving into fabric objects).
Thanks to everyone who dropped by to participate - we had more than 50 attendees, including many new people we had not met before - an we only wish we could have accomodated everyone who wanted to register! As a result of larger numbers of interested public than we had expected, several of the workshops had to be demonstration rather than hands-on. Hopefully if we participate again next year we can make the workshops longer or offer them more than once so as to be a little more indepth and allow for more direct participation. At least we plan to be offering several of these workshops again later in the summer/fall/winter, so hopefully people who didn't get a chance to participate can join us then. These workshop dates will be posted on our website. Finally, we want to thank the Ontario Arts Council for the funding they provided in order to make all these workshops FREE to participants! A comment heard over and over again was how much this felt like a relaxed community gathering that was accessible and affordable for anyone to take part in.
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