ROCKPORT — ​Join The Rockport Garden Club on Thursday, Nov. 2, at 1 p.m., at the West Rockport Baptist Church, to hear Amanda Affleck as she shares her life’s work as a fiber artist and natural dyer. She is a weaver, gardener, dyer, and teacher.

Affleck offers workshops “in a beautiful little valley at the end of a dirt road in Midcoast Maine." She will share her passion by demonstrating how to ease colors from wild and cultivated plants in the garden. 

She and her husband live on a farm where they raise many flowers and plants, which produce vivid colors when harvested, often dried, and then soaked (and often boiled) with a particular combination of chemicals.

For Affleck, it was love at first touch. Her interest in fibers and textiles, working with a drop spindle in her hands, created a lifelong love for fiber arts. Of Armenian heritage, Affleck read her great-grandfather’s memoirs and discovered that her affinity for her art comes from a long-standing family tradition of carpet making. She has spent over thirteen years working with textiles in various traditions, including wet felting, spinning, knitting, sewing, shibori, paste resist, botanical printing, and, most recently, weaving.

In her spare time in the summer, she conducts classes for children and adults, teaching the process of creating dyes.

All are welcome to Rockport Garden Club events and presentations.

Founded in 1934, the Rockport Garden Club is committed to Town Beautification and supporting a scholarship program. The Spring Plant Sale and the Holly Berry Fair are the club’s primary fundraisers. For more information about the Rockport Garden Club and its many civic and social activities, please contact rockportgardenclubmaine@gmail.com or go to www.rockportgardemclubmaine.com.