We went to a workshop at the Canelo Project in southern Arizona with the Steen family at the end of last September. It was amazing, and we felt it was money well-spent. They are the "source" for almost every bit of clay advice we get from other experts, if you dig far enough! Yet their workshop was less expensive than many. They are extremely generous with their knowledge and much of the workshop took place in their home.
I wrote a blog post about it for others who might be interested.
https://www.brownkawa.com/post/canelo-clay-and-lime-workshop
Highlights:
This was an in-depth workshop: we were there for 4+ days, so we could rotate through projects and get to the additional layers to build on (one project curing while we worked on the next). In other workshops we had done previously we worked on snapshot examples which gave us a taste but didn't feel like much experience.
There was plenty to do for a group of 10 , and we kept busy! More experience building.
It was wide-ranging. We did clay-sand base coat, clay-sand-straw sculpting base coat, Clay finish coat, layered clays for carving multicolor designs, lime brown coat, lime finish coat, and fresco (a permanent color technique that uses mineral color which becomes part of the lime stone finish -- never fades, never rubs off)
We completed projects which was satisfying! We re-surfaced a weathered clay building with brown and finish coats of earth plaster. We finished a building that had a lime scratch coat with the final lime coats and fresco.
We also had our own panels for exploration where we could try out everything they were teaching and try out our own ideas without worrying about messing up their buildings.
Their whole family was involved. Our workshop was taught by Athena (mom) and Oso (son), but Bill (dad) was around for discussions and also arranged a little earth floor tutorial for us at our prior request Benito (son) joined in for some of the activities and was around in the evenings. They are all gems, and they had wide-ranging and widely overlapping areas of expertise and were all generous with their knowledge sharing. They also had different ideas about some of the techniques, so we ended up with a flexible pool of information. And they all share an encouraging can-do approach, so we felt empowered to explore.
They have camping and beautiful natural cabin accommodations, excellent food for a full-board option, or well-equipped camp kitchen for on-your-own fare.
It was a warm, fun, in-depth, high-quality, confidence-building experience!
Here is their workshop page:
https://caneloproject.com/workshops/
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