Bandon Art Retreat

In October 2011, I organized, an art retreat to Bandon, along the beautiful Oregon coast. We stayed at a new retreat center, above Forget-Me-Knots quilt shop. She has fixed up the whole upper floor with bedrooms, large kitchen, and living areas. There is a huge work space with big tables, and natural light from floor to ceiling windows overlooking the "Old Town" area and Marina. The rates were very reasonable, and it is very quilter friendly, with large cutting tables, irons/boards, and a full wall of design space. To contact her -- www.forget-me-knots.net The weekends seamed to conflict with a lot of members scheduling, so we kept changing the date, and went the end of October with 5 artists. It was a small, intimate group of wonderful ladies, we talked, and talked, and laughed, and shared ideas on quilting and arts in general. In fact 2 of the ladies did ceramics instead of textiles, as one was getting ready for a big ceramics show in Grants Pass. We arrived Friday afternoon, and got all our MANY supplies up the stairs, and settled in. After a potluck dinner, we worked on our own projects and stayed up 'til dawn. No really we crashed out at about 10pm. Saturday morning pastries and coffee got us off to a good start. Vera was working on her ceramics, cleaning up some round "objects" that she had thrown on the wheel, they are parts for her garden art. Our new friend Dorothy, from Grants Pass, was painting some ceramics pieces she had made from a t-shirt design, they were colorful figures, that she was going to add wire armature too. Kay was doing a variety of things, scrap booky pages, with textile trims and embellishments. Lorrie was trying to finish a UFO of a turkey table topper quilt. I just wanted to play, I started with a big piece of black fabric on the design wall, and started to cut flower petals from my hand dyed fabrics, and sticking them on the wall. Later in the weekend Dorothy was doing some hand needle felting with silk fibers, and wool, to make small gift bags for her children, to fill with her handmade glass beads. I free motion machine stitched leaves onto painted Lutrador and melted Tyvek, and cut them out to make them 3-D. We went out to lunch Saturday, and on a field trip to several locations, more on that in the next post. Dinner was potluck again, we had way too much food for the 5 of us!! We had invited the local Bandon Art Quilters to join us for dinner and Show & Tell, but they were unable to come. Sunday morning Lorrie and I went for a long walk on the beach, taking lots of photographs, it was cool and foggy and the sun was just rising, with NO wind. After a little more artsy stuff, we cleaned up and headed for home. One of the best things was having the quilt shop downstairs, where we could go down for supplies, they have a large assortment of embellishments, Shiva Oil Sticks, books, and other tools, and a beautiful selection of fabrics. We had a wonderful time, and will definitely make it a yearly event, hopefully more members can participate next year.
Photos:
1. Lutrador & Tyvek leaves
2. Amy's project
3. Kay relaxing
4. Dorothy's project
5. Dorothy painting
6. Dorothy needle felting
7. Lorrie's turkey quilt