Our 2023 launch was a record breaker! We opened the office door to ringing phones, and our website logging in your orders. We were all so happy to reconnect with you and get planning for the upcoming year. You let us know you’re excited about our workshops (a couple sold out within the first two days!), and that you’re eager to get back to Mineral Point (our lodging is booking up!). We marked the day with sparklers like a bunch of kids — and we’ve got the photo evidence to prove it.

Looking forward we’re getting ready for our first workshops of the year. Beginning in March, Carole Spelic’s Warp & Weave offers three days to learn (or re-learn) how to set up a loom and work on your projects, and Richard Moninski’s Drawing for Beginners one-day workshop to engage with a new skill is sold out! During January we’ve begun our Winter Writers Reading Series featuring award-winning Wisconsin writers; if you missed an event, you can check out archived readings on our website. Readings continue through March, so check out our website or Facebook page for events.

April will be here soon and with it, our programming heats up: the first Open Forge, favorites like Robust Rag Rug, Coppersmithing 101, Pathways to Publication, and Mending Hearts. New this year we’ll welcome Jen Rubin, executive producer at Love Wisconsin and co-producer of the Moth StorySlam in Madison, for her workshop Dynamic Storytelling: Find, Shape, & Tell Your Stories. Whether you’re a short-story writer, love a hot mic, or the friend who captures everyone’s attention, this workshop will engage you in how to turn an anecdote of something that happened to you into a story that illuminates a central truth about your life. 

We hope you’ve been enjoying our website’s new graphics and category re-design — in sharing our offerings for this year, we’ve revamped the way our pages look. And we couldn’t have done this without Jacki Thomas, our Internet Marketing Technician & Webmaster. Jacki has been a part of Shake Rag Alley since 2017, making gorgeous graphics, managing our website, and assisting with our writing programming. We want to thank Jacki for all she’s done; although she’ll still be a part of the Shake Rag Alley family, she’ll be spending more time on her own writing. Big love to Jacki & we wish her all the best,
                              
Christina Kubasta                                          
Director of Education