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Have you ever wanted to try batik and hand-dyeing? We have a very special surface design class coming up on January 12–18, 2020 with Jessica Kaufman: Studio Batik: Many Techniques, Amazing Results. Jessica has studied batik methods from Indonesia and India and is the owner of WAXON Batik & Dye Studio in Asheville, NC. With over 16 years of teaching experience and an MA in crafts education, Jessica has taught batik and tie-dye to summer campers, school children, high schoolers, and adults all over the country. We are lucky to have her for a week-long intensive focusing on this gorgeous and functional art form. Enjoy our interview! [caption id="attachment_18944" align="alignright" width="209"] Photo by Nicole McConville[/caption] CP: When did you first come to the Folk School? When were you a host? JK: I grew up with relatives in Penland and would visit the school for community days, but couldn’t align my work schedule in a way that would allow me to take a class there when I was a young full-time teacher. Someone suggested I take a look at the John C. Campbell Folk School and it was absolute love at first sight. The week-long classes, offered year-round, were a dream come true. I saved my pennies and booked a clay class over my spring break in 2005. I was teaching in a Haywood County public school and this class just lined up with my vacation days. Ted Cooley was our class assistant and two young women I knew from Asheville were the Hosts. I immediately saw the potential for myself there. I took a few more classes as a student, and then, in 2009, I served six months as Host. I was the last six-month host (the school went to a four-month system after that) but I wished it was still a 2-year position, as it was in Ellie Wilson’s time. I would have signed up instantly for that!

Karen and Paul Rusello look forward to receiving their Folk School catalogs. “We dog-ear the pages, marking certain classes, looking for a week we’re both interested in,” said Karen. They’ve been coming to the school together for the past five years. Karen has long been a spinner and knitter and now that Paul is weaving, they’ve installed a loom at home. Paul also fondly remembers his first woodturning class: “It was February and just so great to spend an entire week in a woodshop. And then I looked outside and it was snowing. We cut logs in the snow. It was just really special.”

They reach for the full Folk School experience when here, including swinging ‘round at our contra dances and ingesting the magnificent scenery from our hiking trails. They enjoy sitting family-style in the Dining Hall. “You never know when you’re going to sit with a blacksmith who’s also a beekeeper,” said Karen. “I find that most people who enjoy making things have trouble doing just one thing.”

Orchard House It is Thursday afternoon. Outside the writing studio window, the day is bathed in sunlight, the limb patterns on the grass motionless. Inside the studio, writers are at work with pen or laptop, or staring out the window, or sitting chin in hand. Chairs squeak, the printer clacks, the clock ticks. Small sounds that only accentuate the silence. The writing group is focused, which is different from a focus group . . . or maybe it isn’t. I wondered, on Sunday before I arrived, who these people in the class would be, what they would be seeking, what they would be bringing. On Monday, as we tiptoed toward one another, I began to find out. Talking and listening, deciding what to offer up from our own personal stories, we began to trust. This is what I expected. In the afternoon, we scattered across the campus, each of us to a different studio. The instructor had told us, “Write about what you are seeing, hearing, feeling there.” I heard only birdsong as I walked outside; all the other students were sequestered in class. Rounding the mulched curve to the Woodworking Studio, I saw steam. The porch was steaming. I asked the man tending the steam if I’d found the banjo-making class. “You have,” he said. “I’m one of the instructors and I’m about to begin a steam-bending demo. Feel free to go inside and look around.” Noise! The moment I opened the studio door I was met with a wall of noise. Not from banjos playing, but machinery noise. What I saw was clusters of students working so intently that they didn’t even notice my presence. I expected to be questioned; instead, I was invisible.

When students show up at an Intermediate-level fiddle class, they already know how to play some tunes — maybe some fast ones, maybe some waltzes; tunes learned from a friend or teacher or family member, tunes laboriously acquired from a scratchy old recording, or tunes read out of a tunebook. But it’s pretty much a sure thing that those students don’t all know the same tunes as one another. One of the things we do as a class is learn a common repertoire, starting with whatever tune I teach on the first evening. That first tune is always something uncomplicated so that students weary from a day of travel can easily locate it under their fingers and bow.