Trade School is a school where you barter for instruction, which "celebrates practical wisdom, mutual respect, and the social nature of exchange." Esther told me about it, and Mich and I signed up for a felting class called Feltmaking for Nomads, taught by an artist named Hope Ginsburg.
I was just about to launch into a big description for you, but then I realized that I should quote from Trade School's website, because it will give you just as good a grasp of what actually happened as if I would write about it. Quoting. Starts. Now.
Feltmaking for Nomads is a three-hour wool felt-making workshop in which you will produce a piece of felt with an inlaid design of your choosing. With the new skills that you’ll acquire, you could go on to make bowls, socks, or a weatherproof house for life on the steppes. We will briefly go over the history, technology and mythology of wool felt which may or may not have originated on Noah’s Ark. You will get very clean making felt, so be sure to wear clothes that can withstand soap and hot water. Materials will be provided. Nomadic futures will be conjured.
Hope Ginsburg is an artist who lives and works in Richmond, VA. Her ongoing project “Sponge” is headquartered at the Anderson Gallery at VCUarts, where she teaches classes like People: Of, By, For and Colablablab. Hope is a felt-maker, neophyte aquarist and honeybee enthusiast. Feltmaking for Nomads will run concurrently with Hope’s exhibition about the first five years of “Sponge” at the CUE Art Foundation (March 24-May 7, 2011.)
In exchange for:End quote.
But did you catch that In exchange for: part? I signed up to bring a felt object from a workshop I intend to teach in the future. But between the time I signed up to bring it, and the time the class actually started, I had forgotten that it was a barter item and not a show and tell item. So I brought this wonderful felted bar of soap that my friend Carol had given me that her friend Bernice had made. It's basically continually felted around the soap, and you can just get in the shower and scrub with it and it gets all soapy. It's great. Except it's not really the thing you want to give away to your felting teacher, it having spent a good deal of time already in your armpits. I did offer it to Hope anyhow, and she tenderly returned it and suggested that I should keep my armpit felt. I told her I would send her something else, and now I'm a little obsessed with thinking about what that might be.
Here's the thing the blurb won't tell you. Trade School is wonderful! It's in an old school on Prince Street, it's run by a bunch of young people who are committed to alternate economies, it's run efficiently and with a high level of teaching (at least our class was) -- and it brought together an extremely interesting spectrum of attendees. Middle aged immigrant women artists, a retired street belt salesman, 20-somethings in hipster flour sack dresses and felt/plastic jackets. If you go on the website, you will see other classes they offered this semester (and btw, you can still sign up for some) like Squat the Condos, How to Teach a Class, Edible Glass, Balloon Animals 101...
Mich and I spent some time thinking about what class we might teach, and we came up with Clean Up As You Go, and by the way we'll be making macarons. (I am really good at cleaning up as I go, and Mich knows how to make macarons, and is planning to teach me in the next few weeks, which I am sure will show up on this blog.) We also came up with the idea that we could teach a 1970s-style class about women's bodies and reproductive health. Speculums and mirrors and all. Would you take either of our classes?
The classroom, and the wool, before we started:
What I made:
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