Building Community in a Most Creative Way
By ML Ball
Photographs by Sabrina Eberhard
Imagine you suddenly get an urge to take up embroidery, or create paper mâché ornaments, or delve into wrapping paper printmaking. Where can you go to learn these skills? Cottage Courses!
Founded in 2023 by artists Polly Shindler and Natalie Baxter, Cottage Courses are hands-on maker workshops held at Troutbeck in Amenia and a few other venues. Shindler is a painter whose color-saturated pieces depict domestic life, interior scenes, and urban and rural landscapes. Baxter, a fabric artist, creates soft sculptures and quilted wall hangings that whimsically comment on controversial social and political issues. Both artists exhibit at galleries and art fairs around the country and internationally. Sessions are taught by Shindler, Baxter, and visiting artists, and run the gamut from apron making to quilting to foraged wreath making.
How did it start? At a swimming pool, of course.
“It was summertime, and Polly and I were often at the pool at Troutbeck together,” Baxter recalls. “We started talking about holding some workshops and sharing what we do, our techniques and whatnot, and then we said, ‘What if we held them here?’ Troutbeck’s management said, ‘That sounds great, let’s do it!’ So it very organically evolved into what it is now.”
Over the course of the 12 workshops held so far, Shindler and Baxter quickly noticed something wonderful happening, besides participants learning new skills and expressing themselves creatively.
“The people who come to our workshops, they miss being around other people,” Baxter shares. “They might have families and friends, but this is an outlet for human interaction that
we’re providing. They’re there to be around other people as well as try new things.”
Shindler adds, “The community building is really what we love about it. Cottage Courses is a wonderful way to meet your neighbors, or people who live within an hour or so radius. People even come up from the city. They all want to create something.”
For both artists, offering imaginative ways for people to connect with each other has been an absolute joy. Says Baxter, “People are more interested these days in slower crafts, like quilting. Everyone has this inherent need to create that they don’t always pay attention to, and Cottage Courses provides that. We give people the tools, we give them the space, and we give them the allowance to make something that we’ve figured out how to do on our own, which is the way artists figure out things.”
Participants—or guests, as Shindler and Baxter refer to them—range in age from four to 74. “A lot of people do it in pairs,” Shindler says. “They do it with their mom, they do it with their kid. For one workshop, a woman, her daughter, and her grandchildren all came. It’s a really nice way to commune with your people, as well as meet new people and learn a new skill, in a beautiful location you wouldn’t normally go to. Everybody leaves with a very positive feeling.”
What could be better than that?—cottagecourses.com