ProzART - art retreat in Poland in August 2013

I am still catching up with blogging after my return from Poland at the end of August.  From 15 to 18 August I was able to participate (together with my sister Beata) in ProzART, an art retreat organised by (from the right) Eliza aka Druga Szesnascie, Ewa aka Cynka, Marcin and Finn (in the next photo).  Words cannot describe what a fantastic experience that was, I truly had an amazing time and was so glad to meet Polish scrappers, stampers etc, who I only knew from visiting blogs.  It was also great to meet women from Israel, Finland, Romania and Norway.

We arrived with my sister at the Czempin train station, it took us about 7 hours to get there from Olsztyn by two trains:

We then walked to the research centre run by a hunters association and located in a beautiful forest:

At the centre, they breed  endangered spices and care for sick and old animals and birds:

He reminded my of Harry Potter books:

Raccoon:

A baby rabbit:

Squirrels are red in Poland and very cute:

Wild pigs:

A hawk:

They train them to fly and return on a command:

In our room we were greeted by a pile of Prima flowers on our beds, what a lovely surprise:

In fact, we received lots of flowers over the weekend, we were served another pile for breakfast:

There were other surprise awaiting us, like bags strung in the dinning room for people to leave messages for other participants, it was fun to create and receive messages at the end of the retreat:

On the first day we had a photo session with Marcin and relaxed for the rest of the day.

We explored Czempin and found a lovely little coffee shop:

On Friday we had a free day but enjoyed a tour around the research centre facilitated by a wonderful Mr Henryk:

On Saturday I was more than ready to start creating:

The first class was with Karola and we created a shabby chick style scrap layout with a picture taken by Marcin two days before: 

 Next class was with Finn:

This is what I created:

At night we had a group competition to create a canvas with a quote which we drew from a pile of quotes.  We only had half an hour to complete the canvas.

The quote means: dreams versus reality.  This is what we came up with and ...

... drum roll - we came second!

Presentation:

At night, we had a bone fire with sausages:

Mr Henryk attempted to show us to play the French horn:

On Sunday, we had a class with Kasia Krzyminska aka Czekoczyna.  This was my favourite class.

This is my creation:

I finally met Guriana who I "met" through blogging and our international art exchange:

I also got to meet Miszelka (on the right) after admiring her blog for some time.  Agnieszka Barska (on the left and below) was not known to me before but she is a fantastic person, full of fun and wisdom.

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Sadly, we had to wave good-bye on Sunday and we all headed home.