Craft classes let travelers in on local scene
Courses and tours around the world exhibit area trades
As I sit at my loom overlooking the Mekong River in Laos, the gray-blue water and jade-green trees distract me from the meloncolored silk I’ve spent the morning weaving.
Thank goodness for Mrs. Vanthong, the patient master weaver supervising my efforts at Ock Pop Tok, a crafts center on the outskirts of Luang Prabang, a dreamy city where jungle landscapes meet French Colonial architecture. I’m here for a half-day weaving course that involves dyeing silk with plants harvested on-site, spinning it into thread and then, over several hours of hard work, weaving a surprisingly professional-looking silk place mat.
Travelers have long dipped their paws into local culture with cooking classes and tastings of wine, beer and chocolate. But, perhaps because of DIYmad millennials or the current vogue for worldly, fair-trade goods and fashion, there are increasing options to learn regional crafts too. “Many of my clients, particularly ones with kids, are asking for hands-on experiences,” says Bethesda, Maryland, travel agent Michael Diamond, whose Cobblestone Private Travel sets up tilemaking and pottery classes for clients going to Marrakesh, Morocco.
Some courses consist of an hour or two of demonstrations by a local craftsperson with a chance to try your hand at their art and create your own memento. Other classes might take all day or a few days, depending on your level of interest and available vacation time. Some programs employ refugees or people who might otherwise be living in poverty; all let you interact with locals in a deeper way than a stop at a souvenir stand.
Artistry tours are cropping up too, leading creative-minded adventurers on longer odysseys into, say, Oaxacan weaving or Indian bamboo-bicycle making. Founded in 2015, VAWAA (Vacation With an Artist; vawaa.com) links individuals or small groups of travelers to 69 artists in 23 countries for “mini-apprenticeships” of four to seven days. You cover your lodging and meals, then spend four hours or so a day cutting out leather shadow puppets in Malaysia or sewing denim jackets in a Los Angeles design studio. And ACE Camps (acecampstravel.com) take groups of 10 to 16 people on retreats spanning five to 11 days and focused on, for example, batik in Swaziland or flower arranging and pottery throwing in southern Japan.
Here are some places you can exercise your creativity as well as your curiosity.
This fiber-arts center employs weavers and dyers from nearby villages who teach batik, basket making, silk weaving and other traditional crafts, including some aimed at kids. Courses run from half a day (dyeing a cotton napkin) to three days (weaving an ikat scarf ). The five-room Mekong
Villa offers lodgings.
Ock Pop Tok
Visitors to Bagru, India, will see vibrantly colored woodblock-print textiles drying in the sun in a giant communal field, as has happened for centuries in this textile hub. Studio Bagru holds workshops demonstrating how artisans chisel teak into intricate blocks, then painstakingly use them to stamp patterns on cotton using natural dyes. Students then imprint scarves, shawls or bags with patterns.
Studio Bagru
Fifteen minutes outside central Marrakesh, Beldi Country Club, a Kasbahstyle hotel and garden complex, has small glassblowing and pottery-making workshops spinning out the region’s trademark candy-hued tagines and teacups. In the pottery shop, kids and adults get messy turning clay pots, cups or bowls on the wheel.
Beldi Country Club
Do all current design trends — the return of macrame hangings, pots of succulents — originate in Los Angeles? Maybe, and students can learn how to do these and other crafts at Makers Mess, which holds classes in a slick storefront. Participants scoot an Eames chair up to a long wooden table for instruction in producing marbled clay coasters, felted pet portraits, leather sandals and, yes, macrame.
Makers Mess
In a bright, industrialchic workshop at this New York museum, adults and kids 4 and older can try glass blowing, etching and fusing. Slip on safety goggles for highly supervised classes at one of the world’s largest showplaces for glass, where students turn out a pendant, a picture frame or even a wineglass.
Corning Museum of Glass