2013 Mother Earth News Fair - Workshops

Like most festivals that we attend, the workshops were my primary focus at the 2013 Mother Earth News Fair. I started planning my schedule weeks in advance, as soon as the schedule was made available online. Unfortunately, though, the schedule changed several times, which caused me to waste a lot of time. It seems that, until the program guide is finalized, it is probably not wise to spend very much time trying to plan a schedule.

The workshops were offered in fifteen different time slots, spread out over the three days, with four on Sunday, six on Saturday, and five on Sunday. There were fourteen different stages to choose from, many of which were themed, such as the Renewable Energy Stage or Organic Gardening Stage. I learned my lesson in the past, and so tried to attend workshops that were fairly close to one another, or at the very least, didn't require constantly traversing the grounds, or moving from inside to outside, then back inside every hour.

My initial schedule included attending fourteen workshops, with the only "down time" occurring while I was volunteering at the Earthineer booth. I ended up, however, skipping the two workshops after that one as well. The first of these was the Herbal Soap Making workshop, which was led by Rusty Orner of Quiet Creek Herb Farm & School. Andrea had taken the workshop in the past, and thought it would be good for me to take as well. By the time I got to the stage, however, the seats will filled and several people were sitting on the floor or standing around the edges. I decided to go back to the Earthineer booth to help them out instead of attending the workshop. I planned to attend the Ecothrifty Living workshop by Deborah Niemann as the last workshop on that day, but I really was just taking it as a filler. Andrea decided to skip her last workshop, so I did the same, so we could look at the exhibitor booths together, and then call it a day.

I had initially planned to do a single post in which I summarized all of the workshops I attended. However, after writing up the summaries, I decided that the resulting post would be too long for a single post, so am splitting it into separate posts. Workshop summaries will be posted by day, with one post each for the Friday Workshops, Saturday Workshops, and Sunday Workshops.