Our web mistress has published a new book, Master Your Craft: Strategies for Designing, Making and Selling Artisan Work. This book helps beginning and intermediate crafters create award-winning work by outlining a powerful creative process, then offering advice through each step. It also provides an introduction to design – visual, functional, and practical – to jumpstart you on your journey to mastery.

Insights from 22 master artisans appear throughout the book, across a broad range of media: glassworking, metalworking and jewelrymaking, woodworking, and of course textiles! Textile artisans include surface design artists John Marshall and Ana Lisa Hedstrom; tapestry weavers Archie Brennan, Susan Martin Maffei, and Tommye Scanlin; felter Andrea Graham; and milliner Wayne Wichern. Many of these artisans have also been Black Sheep program speakers!

Tien will show and tell us about it at our first meeting, Sept. 15, as well as have plenty of copies for purchase and signing. (If you can’t wait until Sept. 15, you can order the book from her at http://www.creatingcraft.com/books/masteryourcraft/ .)

Reservations will be made at Buck’s Restaurant for dinner at 5:30 pm and you can come unannounced, Buck’s is happy to accommodate us. (We have “our own waiter”!)

The meeting will be held IN THE CHAPEL, to the east of the community room we usually use at Woodside Community Church on Woodside Rd. Door opens at 7 pm, program runs 7:30-8:30 pm, followed by refreshments and a short business meeting. Y’all come!

Summer programs are simple, home-grown and laid-back. Reservations for dinner at Buck’s Restaurant on Woodside Road will be made for 5:30p.m. The usual meeting site at Woodside Community Church down the road will be opened at 7 pm. We are giving Melanie a break for the summer, so bring something light to share, or a carton of lemonade.

Tonight’s program will feature Ann McDonough sharing with us a fascinating class she took at CNCH this spring from Cameron Taylor-Brown.

We will have a round table program for which everyone brings in various pieces of woven cloth collected from their travels, or even “cheap” dish towels from World Market — something interesting. In small groups, we’ll examine these fabrics for weave structure, what makes this cloth interesting (or not), fiber type, etc.

Dinner reservations will be made at Buck’s Restaurant on Woodside Road at 5:30 as usual. Do come and enjoy our chats there.

The meeting room at Woodside Community Church, just past the library, will be opened at 7 pm for set up by early comers. We’ll watch a documentary video owned and shown by Barbara Shapiro about the worldwide history and development of Indigo. Our taste was whetted during the May meeting by seeing part of it; now we get to see it all.

There will be no business meeting. If you have cookies or snacks to share, please bring them. Melanie is away.

Our meeting will be held in the Goldstar Room at the Veterans’ Memorial Senior Center in Redwood City, located at 1455 Madison Ave., Redwood City. The room will be opened for us from 7 pm until 10pm. We’ll begin with CNCH Show and Tell, as well as whatever anyone else has to bring of their own, and show in the remaining time a DVD, “Blue Alchemy: Stories of Indigo”, owned by Barbara Shapiro. The DVD lasts 79 minutes, so the current idea is to show the whole video at one of our summer meetings (that leaves one other summer meeting to bring in an idea for!).

Reservations for dinner will be made for 5:30 pm at Galeotti’s Pizza, at 3121 Jefferson Ave., Redwood City.

We will have refreshments in the Goldstar Room room, and a short business meeting afterwards.

“From Rugs and Patterns to Tapestries and Concepts:

A Path of Over Forty Years of Weaving”

Michael Rohde will highlight the program at our regular meeting Thursday night, April 21. He will show slides and discuss his lifetime of creativity. His passion is tapestry, and you can see many examples on his website www.michaelrohde.com. He is also leading a workshop for us on Saturday, April 23, “Four Selvedge and Wedge Weaving Techniques” (see separate posting in Workshops).

The Guild’s regular meeting will be held at Woodside Community Church parish hall on Woodside Road in Woodside. The site will be opened at 7 pm. For those who want to come to dinner beforehand, where we will first welcome Michael Rohde, reservations will be made at Buck’s Restaurant on Woodside Road at 5:30 pm. Everyone is welcome!  The program is scheduled for 7:30-8:30 pm, followed by refreshments and a short business meeting.