Canelo Project "Artistry in Clay and Lime" workshop sort-of-review

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/

Here are our blog posts that include info on our other clay workshop experiences. (In case you are concerned, ours is a non-monetized blog so I am really just reposting for the benefit of folks who are looking at this thread in search of clay workshops.)

This thread includes info about volunteering for Cornerstones -- a fantastic nonprofit that works on historic preservation of earth-built sites in the southwest. They are based in New Mexico but I've seen they have also done projects in NM, AZ, CA, maybe others. We just helped making adobes for one day. Many of their adobe/plastering projects are much more in-depth and some require a committment of a week or more. They are free and include good instruction from their excellent adobero who is also happy to evaluate your soil for you and share his knowledge.
https://www.brownkawa.com/post/giving-it-our-best-shot-part-i

This thread includes info about a 2-day plastering intro from Southwest Solar Adobe (SWSA). It was a good quick overview, was very inexpensive, is run by a great guy, and gave us a good taste. This might have been enough for our needs if we had a lower-stakes project to start on, if we were more confident, or if we had good materials to work with on-site.
https://www.brownkawa.com/post/giving-it-our-best-shot-part-two

In our case we are retirees working on our first natural materials project which is our forever home, and our on-site soil is mostly silt. For these reasons we felt the need for more in-depth and wide-ranging instruction we found at Canelo.