North Carolina’s renowned Penland School of Crafts, founded in 1929 by Lucy Morgan, has an immersive class structure where students take only a single, full-day course for up to a two-week period. There are no standing faculty at the school and classes are taught by national and international artists and craftspeople. With this deeply engaging instruction format, the school says that “the ideas and information gained in a two-week session might take a year to absorb and process.”

Today’s entry in our Video Vault series is a tour of the Penland campus and studios during the spring or summer session of 1959. This portion of the film begins in the dye house with the process of hand-dying wool yarn – from boiling the dye on a wood fired brick stove to air-drying the dyed wool and everything in between – after which the tour moves on to one of the weaving studios with a demonstration of a flying shuttle loom.

See the rest of the Penland tour in the ACC Library Digital Collections.

Heather Carroll is an art historian with an interest in museums and archives pursuing her MLIS degree from St. Catherine University and a Museum Studies Certificate at the University of St. Thomas. This summer she’s a 2016 Windgate museum intern working with ACC Library staff to digitize and edit audio, video, and film footage from the ACC archives.