My new friends.

Here is our workspace and the amazing workers within it: Sang, my amazing interpreter/co-teacher, is so good at making the books now, she doesn’t need me at all.. She is standing to the left of me in the first picture. Her English is amazing & her patience with my non-existent Vietnamese is hilarious.

I am here teaching a 6 day workshop to 6 new potential craftspeople in hopes that the product I have created will turn into a viable means of income for one or two of them in the near future. This past week we have been learning how to make and sew a set of four small traditional stab binding journals.

: Ly and Nhung, who will take over the project once I am gone. They are amazing.

: Ms Ly (pronounced Lay) whose precision and attention to detail astounds me. She will be very successful with this product. Here, she is learning to paint the symbols that will adorn the front of each book.

: Nhung!

: Ms. Thu, an embroiderer by trade, learning how to make some recycled magazine journals.

: Ms Nga, quiet and persistent, getting better each day by leaps and bounds. She is also starting a new product line, these beautiful hand knitted scarves.

: Mai, who is our typical hilarious teenage boy of the group, he’s always trying to go off on one of the lady’s three wheeled motorbikes, but he really has an amazing eye for pattern and design.

So this is my group and this is where we work. We are next to Sinh’s beautiful art studio where he paints outside and plays us Norah Jones on his laptop for background music. It really is a wonderful place to work, even when its raining or windy. The boys come after morning school and sit outside our front door and make lanterns in the afternoon so usually everything is a buzz. Next door is the actual store front where the goods are sold and the original workshop members that Sherry trained years ago. They are all pros now making their products each day in shifts as they sit and meet new people from all over the world that wander in and have tea, or have a sit and chat, or just walk by on their tour groups.