As usual, Portland was fabulous! Okay, it was cold and wet. But you know what? It was so much fun to be in Portland that I barely even noticed.

Once again, PNCA hosted a fabulous event. And once again, it was an inspirational and educational weekend. My classmates were inspiring, encouraging, and fun folks, and Lizzy House is a little dynamo.

We spent the first day in a classroom doing a lot of sketching and learning how to do repeats on paper. This was an entirely computer-free class, which is definitely a switch for me. A good one, I think, to get me out of my comfort zone, if you will.

Here’s Lizzy showing us some new top secret stuff she is working on!

Day two we did block printing. Here’s Lizzy demonstrating how to do the printing.

And here are a couple of shots of me (courtesy of my friend Sarah Moon, who was writing an article on the class).

And here is my block-printed fabric. Pretty cool, huh?

On the third day, we moved on to screen printing. I had done some simple block printing before in one of my design classes, but I had never done screen printing. There’s a lot of waiting involved in screen printing. And a lot of just cool equipment and general messiness. Here’s Lizzy demonstrating on her screen print.

And here’s me with mine (again, courtesy of Sarah Moon).

And this is my final screen print!

You can see it a little better up close. It’s the Thien Mu Pagoda from Hue, Vietnam, with a palm tree and a little person in a conical hat.

While learning how to do the repeats and the printmaking were all a lot of fun, the best parts of going to Portland to take this class were spending the weekend with my creative and inspiring classmates and meeting Lizzy. She’s a fabulous. l mean, really fabulous. After talking to her over the weekend I am energized and revitalized regarding the projects I was working on, and all hyped up to work on some new projects as well! She even gave me some great feedback on my Project Selvage entry, which I really appreciated!

I can’t tell you how much I would love to have a mini Lizzy House looking over my shoulder all the time giving me the kind of encouragement she gave us all over the weekend. I have a tendency to get bogged down in things and think that something isn’t going to be doable. But Lizzy has a very can-do kind of attitude that is the kick in the pants (to borrow her phrase) that I could really use on a regular basis!

One last photo of Lizzy and me. To see more fun photos from the class — with more of my classmates and all the messy steps and cool equipment — check out my Flickr set. PNCA also has photos on Flickr here, and one of my classmates has a set here as well. Enjoy!