LUDLOW, Vt. – The Fletcher Farm School for the Arts and Crafts will be participating in the Vermont Craft Council’s Open Studio Weekend, to be held on Saturday, May 28 and Sunday, May 29. Several of our members will be demonstrating such skills as quilting, silver fabrication, collage, decorative painting, and creative metalworking.
The artist registration fees will be waived for anyone signing up for a class during the Open Studio.
In addition, we will be hosting a retrospective of the work of Fletcher Farm Graduate Pamela Friend Gwinn (neé Spalding), 1943–2021, who was a Fletcher Farm School for the Arts and Crafts graduate in Early American Decoration. Pamela was known as “The Stencil Lady” at the School. She enjoyed a thirty-year (plus) artistic career thanks to the Fletcher Farm School. Her reputation for meticulous artwork persisted throughout her career, teaching, hobbies, and retirement play with sailors’ valentines – seashell mosaics. She was a prolific artist until her death.
Please stop in to explore her life’s work and play, and you are welcome to visit with her daughter, Natalie, at “open-box” show and tell sessions on the arts and crafts she mastered. Sessions may include: stenciling overlay demonstration, primitive painting process, beaded jewelry show and tell, theorem designs, reverse paintings on glass, and shell mosaic designs.
We invite the public to stop by to see the demonstrations and talk with Ms. Friend’s daughter about her work. The Open Studio will run from 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. each day.