Greetings from beautiful Napa on this glorious May day! 

I’m going to get to the point: I have pulled the plug for an in-person event for Craft Napa next January. I’ve said all along I wanted to be as transparent as I could regarding the decision-making process for this, so here goes. I posted this yesterday both in the Craft Napa e-newsletter and on the Craft Napa website:

Join Us for a Boutique Crafting Experience
 
Craft Napa 2021
January 13-17, 2021
  
With health and safety concerns of COVID-19 lingering for the foreseeable future, we are creating a multi-media, immersive event next January. We are planning a very fun adventure and time together, so please save the dates!
 
 
More information to follow in early June.

 We are going to bring Craft Napa to you, in the comfort of your own studio. In early June, I will be announcing a bit more about the concept, and share important dates (program announcements, timelines, add-ons, registration, etc.). 

Personally, I am very relieved to be making this decision now rather than waiting until later. All of the science points to the fact that we more than likely will not have a vaccine widely available prior to January 2021. Even with practicing social distancing, deep cleaning of rooms, etc., I don’t feel it’s prudent to be offering  an in-person event for clientele that for the most part, are over 60 years in age, and considered to be a bit more vulnerable to suffering the consequences of COVID-19. I’ll feel a lot more confident hosting an in-person event when the vaccine becomes widely available–hopefully by the middle of next year.

Making this decision now frees me up to plan for something really, really fun. So I hope you will check back in early June!

In the meantime, I am continuing to interview quilters, fabric designers, and mixed media artists, every single day (weekends included) at 1:00 PM Pacific over on Instagram (Pokey Bolton account). I have been doing these for more than 30 days, and some are uploaded onto the Crafting a Life YouTube channel, but the last 11 days of interviews are now all available right on my Instagram account. So far we’ve gotten a sneak peek of a number of fabric lines debuting this spring, learned some tips and best practices for moving to online teaching, not to mention take a candid and inspiring peek into people’s studios! It’s amazing to me what people have been making in terms of art, and also people’s coping practices for staying sane through this pandemic. 

A sample of some of Leslie Tucker Jenison’s Warehouse District fabric line for Robert Kaufman that she shared on my IG Live. This fabric line will be available in August.

Soon I am going to be putting up more merchandise (i.e. Craft Napa project bags, and metal water bottles) on the craftnapa.com website, and will post a giveaway here when available.

Stay safe and well,

Pokey

I began teaching for the first time in more than five years this past month.  It felt SO fantastic to teach again after so long! This was the first time I taught in my own barn, and after doing it once (thankfully with success) I plan to teach several micro retreats next year here.

Last month I taught a two-day class on layered surface design techniques including indigo and shibori, deconstructed screen printing, Gelli-plate mono printing, and Thermofax screen printing. Below are my class samples I had posted to promote the workshop:

Some student work below. (They got inventive about where the fabrics could dry.)

More work:

Gina Lee Kim had worked back into her fabric with screen printing with fig tree leaves she found at my place:

Fabrics drying on my porch, getting ready for the second round of surface work:

I limited this first class to five students, and it was a great crowd!

I made a small scrap quilt using some of my samples:

All in all, a fun time, and I am planning my next surface design retreat retreat (limited to seven students) for March 21-22, 2020. Meanwhile, there are a lot of classes being offered at Craft Napa 2020 that still have some spots! All of the Craft Napa workshops can be found here.

Hope everyone is enjoying a fantastic November!

~Pokey

I’ve been a little MIA since the last time I blogged here, which I know, I know…was in February. I have a couple of good reasons though.

First, I’ve been getting everything ready for the next Craft Napa to take place January 15-19, 2020. I can’t believe it’s our 5^th edition already!  I contracted 17 teachers for a total of 41 workshops over the course of five days.

I am a one-person company, and it just takes a lot of work and double-checking to make sure I don’t make mistakes in the scheduling, the contracts, editing all of the info. for the site, etc. It takes me a year to pull this event off.

Springtime is probably the busiest time planning for Craft Napa, at least until I open registration in early June. My spring looks something like this:

• Gather and study the workshop proposals. I don’t make these decisions lightly or alone—I vet them by a group of artists, quilters, and crafters and they gave me their honest opinions on each one.
• Negotiate (or in my case re-negotiate several times) the host hotel, catering, and meeting space. This past time it took several rounds of contract revisions, and frankly, a lot of time.
• Meet with BERNINA and Meissner’s Sewing and make sure they were happy with the previous year’s event with the number of machines they brought (and sold), and make sure that they want to sponsor again!
• Contact the accepted artists and double check their schedules to confirm availability and times. Also make sure I don’t overbook the rooms requiring a machine per student (easy to do).
• Contract the artists for said days and times (and don’t make a mistake and double book them).
• Schedule all the workshops for the meeting rooms and in my art barn for each day and evening.
• Schedule special events and book talent (i.e. wine tastings, special luncheon speakers, wine train, or artists’ market as examples).
• Start planning and price out any special event or session that requires catering, and figure out a reasonable cost per person.
• Edit all of the above, gather all of the images, and load everything onto both the main Craft Napa website and also the sister site for registration (CVENT) for launch in early June. In my case, I open registration six months prior so people can plan for the new year. 
• Plan an e-newsletter and social media schedule.

This spring while choosing, contracting, and scheduling the above, I also completely overhauled my company’s website: craftnapa.com.

Why?

I met with several website developers in early spring, and I was told the same thing by each one of them: a business website’s functionality and branding should undergo a makeover minimally every three years.  This makes total sense to me, given how fast technology changes and the functions of a site become outdated.

Take for one, the slider (also called a carousel): not only does a slider kill your SEO on a front/homepage, but it is also considered, shall we say, pas de la mode. My front page consisted of a slider, so I 86’d that, and replaced with what I am trying to publicize at the time: right now that’s Craft Napa.

Other functions I wanted to be able to feature included making every image on the site Pinterest-able, and every materials list for each workshop printable with a printer prompt. 

The overhaul took weeks, but I am pretty pleased with how it looks. Some snaps of the site:

Above: A smaller image of the top of the home page. There is a navigation bar at the top (not shown).

Scroll down a bit on the home page and there is the option to view featured workshops:

Above: I wanted the ability to feature workshops and rotate them out to give prominent airtime for each. This also gives me the option to feature workshops outside of Craft Napa down the line.

This page (below) is a snippet of the overall Craft Napa Workshops page where everyone can preview images of all of the 41 workshops offered at one time for this event:

I also switched ecommerce services from Shopify to Stripe which has great functionality and is less expensive (if you have an e-commerce site and want some info about Stripe, feel free to email me). And I continue to use CVENT for all of my registration needs, which I have been using since 2015 with huge success and ease of execution.

With registration open now, I can breathe a little easier and plan some other ventures, which I will announce in the next couple of months. And now that the summer solstice is just about here and we are entering the second half of the year, I still have a full plate of things to do for Craft Napa including:

• Order merchandise and the totes for the swag bags.
• Plan for a SUPER fun 5^thedition and scheme up some memorable and community-building offerings throughout to commemorate it.
• Reach out to companies for swag and door prizes. This is a hard thing for me to do (asking for stuff), so I try and give as many shout-outs as I can (pre-, during, and post- Craft Napa) to the generous folks who take the time and investment, and send goods for Craft Napans to play with and read about.
• Plan on some elective activities that people can add to their registration line-up (like wine tastings or a visit to the Culinary Institute of America chapter downtown).

On another note, in a couple of weeks I am heading to Monterey to go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium to take some photos and gather some information to promote Craft Napa’s soon-to-be-announced fundraiser. I don’t have the name or the particulars defined yet, but I will give you a clue as to what it’s about: how to help save our oceans and get away from single-use plastics like water bottles, which are beyond devastating to our environment and sea life.

Until next time, which will be in early July (I promise) have a happy start to summer!

Yours,

Pokey

I can’t believe our 4^th edition of Craft Napa has come and gone!

This year was a lot of fun, thanks to our teachers and all who attended. 16 teachers taught 38 classes over the four-day period, in everything from surface design, modern quilting, free-motion, collage, encaustic work, batik, indigo and shibori, printmaking, screen printing, monoprinting, making dollies and monsters, appliqué, stenciling, and watercolor. We introduced a welcome dinner to Craft Napa this time around, and had a special luncheon lecture with Jennifer Sampou, which was incredibly inspiring.  

Our Artist Market was a hit (some vendors sold out in the first 5 minutes…note to vendors…bring more stuff!), and we held our first- ever movie night!

We also raised more than $2300 for our Stay PAWSitive fundraiser, which benefited animals that were displaced, hurt, or surrendered due to the Paradise fires. I still have a lot of postcards as donations came pouring in at the last minute. To raise more money, I am going to bundle the fabric postcards I still have on hand, most likely in sets of 5, and offer them online on the Craftnapa.com site starting February 1^st.  

Some fun class and event pix:

Sandra Johnson sharing her latest indigo-dyed fabric she made in her Indigo, Dye, and DIY workshop.

Students in Leslie Jenison’s Mark-Making Potpourri workshop getting good and messy in my barn.

Teacher and author Gina Lee Kim with her son Steven working the Artist Market.

Frances Holiday Alford coming to night class in her pajamas. (If you know Frances, this isn’t a surprise.)

Teacher Libby Williamson helping a student free-motion a painted fabric collage piece.

Student working on her Picture This! Faces in Fabric portrait in Jamie Fingal’s class.

Soy was batik fabric by teacher Jeannie Palmer Moore that was laying on her teacher table. (It was very tempting to steal.)

Student work in one of Maria Shell’s workshops.

Pup portrait in progress in Jane Haworth’s Pet Portrait workshop.

Students working on their Polygon Play quilts with Jennifer Sampou in the barn.

This one is coming together spectacularly! (Photo credit Jennifer Sampou)

As is this one! (Photo credit Jennifer Sampou)

We were incredibly honored that Tim Jenison joined us at Craft Napa for a viewing of “Tim’s Vermeer,” and to host a Q&A afterwards.

We also learned what Tim has been working on for the last four years in Tasmania, and it is an equally ambitious project that he will be announcing to the greater public very soon.

And on a more personal note, I got to reconnect with a former coworker of mine, Amanda Schlatre (many may remember her when she worked in Special Exhibits at Quilts Inc.). I was delighted when I saw she had signed up for Craft Napa, and it was fun catching up and learning what she is now doing for the Houston Rodeo.

 Lastly Craft Napan, Jollyne Toste who had also attended Jennifer Sampou’s Polygon Play retreat last March in my barn, brought her finished quilt for show and tell. Look how beautiful it is! This picture was taken behind my barn. (Photo credit Jennifer Sampou)

Next year will be our 5^th edition, which I can’t believe has come so quickly. I am planning on some special commemorations, swaps, and gatherings for this anniversary and scheming a fun time. If you have ideas for special events, I am all ears—just email me at pokey@craftingalifellc.com.

Save the dates! CRAFT NAPA 2020

January 8-11, 2020

I want to extend super special thanks to our sponsors BERNINA of America and Meissner’s Sewing for providing sewing machines for classroom use, and being on hand  to help everyone use the machines.

Also special thanks to Dharma Trading for generously providing surface design supplies for class use) and selling supplies most of Craft Napa. They are running a special discount just for Craft Napans and friends. Visit https://www.dharmatrading.com.   Use coupon code CRAFTNAPA10 to rceive 10% off your order!

I’d also like to thank the following companies for donating swag to the totes and also providing materials for classroom use. Note that a lot of them have a discount code on their products (some expire soon) so check them out!

• Quiltfolk Magazine Thanks to the publisher, Michael McCormick, most (if not all) Craft Napans received a complimentary copy of Quiltfolk! Want to subscribe? Use the coupon code CN19 for 15% OFF at Quiltfolk.com. It’s “CN19” and can be applied in the cart. 

• UPPERCase Magazine– And more thanks to Janine Vangool who also provided magazines, and has a special discount for Craft Napans, too: Receive $15 CAD off UPPERCASE subscriptions, gift subscriptions and renewals with this link. https://shop.uppercasemagazine.com/discount/craftnapa?redirect=%2Fcollections%2Fsubscribe

• Quilters Select—Did you see all of the incredible goodies provided? MANY thanks to Alex Anderson, Quilters Select, and parent company RNK for generously providing all of these incredible supplies! Visit https://quiltersselect.com to see all of their offerings!

• Craft Industry Alliance—This is an informative and comprehensive networking trade organization for professionals in the craft and art industry. They also have a wonderful online magazine that offers tips for developing and expanding your business. Use code craftnapa2019 to get a discount on your membership! https://craftindustryalliance.org

• Havel’s’ Sewing—This is personally a favorite scissor, rotary cutting, and mat company of mine! If you have not tried their products yet, I recommend doing so ASAP. They cut like butter. Visit https://www.havelssewing.com.
• C&T Publishing & Jennifer Sampou for generously donating door prizes and patterns! https://www.ctpub.com  and https://www.jennifersampou.com
• RJR Fabrics for providing complimentary charm packs for all by CRAFT NAPA teachers Leslie Tucker Jenison, Jamie Fingal, and Victoria Findlay Wolfe. https://www.rjrfabrics.com

• Robert Kaufman Fabrics for providing door prizes of gorgeous fat quarter bundles. http://www.robertkaufman.com

Thanks to all!