When's the last time you made something with your hands?
Not for work. Not for a deadline. Not because someone needed something from you. Something where you looked down at the end and thought, I made that.
If you have to think about it, keep reading.
I've spent 15 years feeding people through Maven Meals. But the thing that got me into this work in the first place wasn't food, exactly. It was the making of it. The hands-in-the-bowl, flour-on-the-counter, watch-it-come-together part. The food was always the proof that something real happened.
This year, I took that feeling and built something around it.
What Mischief & Makers Camp Actually Is
It's a weekend. August 7 through 9 at Iola Gardens on Vashon Island. You take the Friday evening ferry (the water crossing is part of it; once you're on the boat, the weekend has started), and you spend the next two and a half days making things, eating meals I'm cooking for you on-site, and sitting around a fire with about 35 other people who showed up for the same reason.
There are nine workshops, and you choose four. Every single one is taught by a working artist with real credentials and real studio practices. These aren't hobbyists giving a demo. These are people who have built careers making things, and they're going to sit down with you and show you how.
The rest of the time? There's a sauna. There's a campfire. There's coffee that's always on. There's a long table in the garden where meals happen slowly and nobody's in a hurry to clear the dishes.
No schedule to optimize. No content to create. Just a weekend where your hands are busy and your brain gets to rest.
The Artists
I spent the better part of a year finding these nine people. I wasn't looking for instructors. I was looking for artists who are deep in their own practice and happen to be extraordinary teachers. People who would make you feel like you walked into their studio and they pulled up a chair for you.
Here's who's coming.
Mandy Greer | Reclaimed Fiber Coiled Baskets
Mandy has been making art for 30 years, and her resume reads like a museum catalog. She's shown at the Seattle Art Museum, the Henry Art Gallery, the Frye, and Bellevue Art Museum. She won a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 2011 and an Arts Innovator Award from the Chihuly Foundation in 2012. Her most well-known project involved over 30 community crochet events and a 200-foot fiber river installation that traveled from Seattle's Camp Long to the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York.
At camp, she's teaching something completely different: coiled basket-making as a meditation practice. You'll work with reclaimed fibers and vintage yarns from her own collection, spiraling outward in a rhythm that feels more like a walking meditation than a craft project. Expect to leave with a basket at least 7 to 8 inches across and a technique you can do at home on a Tuesday night with whatever fibers you have lying around.
Ben Beres | Ebru (Turkish Paper Marbling)
Ben is a printmaker, sculptor, glass artist, and professor of printmaking at Cornish College of the Arts. He teaches vitreography (printing with glass plates) at Pilchuck Glass School, and he's one-third of SuttonBeresCuller, a collaborative art trio that's spent over two decades making experimental work across Seattle. He also co-founded Mini Mart City Park in Georgetown, turning a contaminated gas station into a pocket park and cultural center. That project took 15 years.
Recently, Ben traveled to Istanbul to study Ebru (Turkish paper marbling) with master printers, learning a technique that UNESCO recognizes as intangible cultural heritage. At camp, you'll float pigments on the surface of a thickened water bath, manipulate them with combs and styluses, and pull prints. The pace is fast, loose, and experimental. Expect to walk away with 10 to 20 unique prints, and no two of them will look the same.
Yulia Ivashchenko | Nuno Felting
Before Yulia ever touched a sheet of merino wool, she was a marine scientist with a doctorate, studying whales. She's Russian-Ukrainian by birth, trained in watercolor and technical drawing at art school, and spent years doing research that made international headlines. Then she moved to Vashon Island in 2017, started working with Dorothy Duncliffe at Dova Silks, and found felting.
Nuno felting is a technique where wool fibers are worked into a sheer silk base to create something lightweight and drapey. In Yulia's workshop, you'll design and felt your own scarf using merino wool, rayon fibers, and silk. She brings a scientist's understanding of why the fibers bond the way they do and an artist's eye for color and texture. You'll leave with a finished, wearable scarf and enough understanding of the technique to keep going at home.
Yoshi Nakagawa | Linocut Printmaking
Yoshi pulled her first print in 1999 and hasn't stopped. Born in Tacoma, raised by Japanese parents in Portland, she grew up with her mother's collection of ukiyo-e woodblock prints by master printmaker Hasui Kawase. After college, she lived in Japan for two years, then spent eight years in Seattle and nine years in Oaxaca, Mexico, immersed in one of the richest printmaking communities in the world.
Her work draws from the natural world and Japanese textile patterns, filtered through everything she absorbed across three countries. At camp, you'll carve your own design into a linoleum block and print it by hand with oil-based ink on washi (Japanese mulberry paper). If you want, bring a rough 4"x6" sketch. If not, Yoshi will help you figure it out.
Monica Wilson | Bundle Dyeing
Monica moved from Seattle to Vashon Island ten years ago to have a closer connection with nature and grow a bigger garden. She was quickly drawn to natural dyeing because of its intersection of plants and textiles, two things already central to her life. Now she's a mixed media artist whose work combines botanicals, textiles, nature, and craft through her practice Solidago Grow.
The first dye plant she grew was indigo, a green, leafy, unassuming thing that produces beautiful teal blues straight from the garden. That was the moment it clicked. You're not picking a color from a swatch book. You're working with living materials, and the results are never quite the same twice.
At camp, you'll use flowers, plants, heat, and water to create a vibrant silk scarf that's entirely your own. Monica preps the fabric so you can focus on the good part: choosing your botanicals, bundling them into the silk, and discovering what the plants decided to do. You'll leave with a finished scarf and a take-home booklet so you can keep experimenting.
Alyssa O'Cotter | Dried Flower Wall Hangings
Alyssa has been growing and designing with flowers professionally for eight years at Sweet Alyssum Farm on Vashon Island. If you've been to Seattle Growers Market, Queen Anne Farmers Market, or the Vashon Farmers Market, you've probably seen her work. Her style leans into what's actually blooming rather than what's trending.
At camp, you'll work with a wide variety of dried botanical flowers and pods to build a wall hanging from scratch. No experience needed. Just a table full of beautiful materials and an artist who knows how to help you turn them into something you'll actually hang on your wall. Alyssa will also share her tips for foraging and drying your own materials, so you can keep making long after you get home.
Carly Reiter | Stained Glass & Cedar Suncatcher
Carly is a stained glass artist on Vashon Island and a K-12 STEM educator who has always woven art into her curriculum. During the pandemic, she returned to working with stained glass and discovered she could combine traditional techniques with digital fabrication tools to create a new kind of lead-free stained glass art. She works with repurposed glass and wood, and occasionally folds in urban-foraged finds like the copper electromagnets hidden inside discarded toys.
At camp, you'll make your own stained glass and cedar suncatcher. You'll learn to break and shape glass, layer it into laser-cut cedar shingles, and finish everything off withsome good old-fashioned sanding. It's part craft, part problem-solving, and entirely satisfying.
Court Walker | Hand-Built Ceramics
Court is a ceramic artist working on Vashon Island and in Seattle, specializing in hand-building and pottery painting. At camp, she's running the Friday night workshop, the one that kicks the whole weekend off. You'll arrive, settle in, eat dinner under the lights, and then walk over to ceramics. Have a glass of wine, get your hands into clay, and meet the people you'll be spending the next two days with. It's the perfect way to start.
Janice Lichtenwaldt | Intentional Memory Wire Bracelets
By day, Janice is a leadership coach in the Seattle area. But the thing about spending your days in conversation is that sometimes you need your evenings doing the opposite. Something quiet. Something you can hold. She's been making beaded jewelry for years, and her craft keeps growing: she's a trained silversmith, studies lapidary, and is learning gemstone cutting.
At camp, she's bringing something anyone can learn in an afternoon and keep doing at their kitchen table for years. You'll make memory wire bracelets with intention, starting with a short practice to name what you want the piece to hold. Then you'll choose from a spread of stone beads, glass, crystals, and charms to build a bracelet that becomes a kind of wearable talisman. Something you can glance at on an ordinary Tuesday and remember what you're doing here.
The Food
This is a Maven Meals production. I'm cooking every bite of it.
Six meals from Friday dinner through Sunday brunch, plus a to-go lunch for the ferry ride home. Seasonal, Pacific Northwest, cooked on-site at Iola Gardens with ingredients from the property. If you've been ordering from us, you already know what that means. Now picture it outdoors, on a long table under the lights, with nowhere to be and no container to microwave.
Saturday night is the one I've been planning in my head for months. A proper, coursed outdoor dinner cooked over live fire. The kind of meal where you lose track of time and then someone hands you a s'more.
Dietary restrictions? Fifteen years of feeding people. Nothing surprises us.
The Weekend, Step by Step
Friday evening. Take the ferry to Vashon. (The water crossing is part of it. Once you're on the boat, the weekend has started.) Settle in. Dinner is outside under the lights. After the dishes are cleared, you walk over to ceramics with Court. Glass of wine. Hands in clay. You're in it now.
Saturday. Workshops in the morning. A long lunch in the garden. More making in the afternoon. Then that dinner. Campfire after. S'mores are non-negotiable.
Sunday morning. One last workshop, the unhurried kind. Brunch with people who were strangers 48 hours ago. Then the ferry home with lunch in hand and something you made on your shelf.
What Every Ticket Includes
Nine workshops (you choose four). Six chef-prepared meals plus a to-go lunch. The sauna. The campfire. S'mores. Coffee that's always on. The only difference between tickets is where you sleep.
Tickets
All four indoor room types sold out fast. Here's what's still available:
Sleep Under the Stars | $575 Tent camping on the Iola Gardens grounds. Wake up to birdsong and morning mist. You're steps from the garden, the sauna, and the long table where breakfast is waiting. This is the way to do camp.
Day Camper | $545 All the workshops, all the meals, all the making. You just sleep somewhere else. Perfect if you're already on the island or want to arrange your own stay nearby.
Why I Made This
I started working on Mischief & Makers Camp because I missed making things. Not for the business. Not for content. Just making. And I kept meeting people who felt the same way but didn't have a place to go do it.
So I built one.
If something on this page made you think that sounds like exactly what I need, trust that feeling. These spots won't sit around.
See you at the table.
heidi