Someone asked me recently about how I come up with ideas for classes and I thought it would be fun to talk through how I design a class from the first idea to a finished workshop. This owl project is a great example and it actually ended up turning into two different classes for me, which is great!

Where I got the idea

I teach often for the local county library system and we always ask students for an evaluation at the end of class. A couple of the comments mentioned that students wanted more classes with paper art and they loved a recent one we had done with recycled materials. The libraries also had a theme or mascot for their spring classes which was owls. So I decided to put those together into a class: making recycled paper owl ornaments.

I start with materials

You might be surprised to know that one of the considerations I think about right away is materials. I often have a materials budget per student that I need to stick to. This includes both acquiring the materials themselves, and also any time that it takes me to prepare them. So if I need to dye something or cut pieces or make mini skeins of yarn, I put that together with my materials costs. A recycled paper class isn’t a high cost for getting materials, but it does take time to source enough of everything to make up 43 kits. Sometimes that is more of a challenge than you might think. Even if I am teaching an in-person class, I think about materials and what is practical for students to acquire before class or what I need to supply to make it easy to come and jump right in to the project. For beginner classes, I don’t like to make anyone go out and purchase a bunch of bookbinding tools, for instance, before they have even taken the class to see if this is something they like doing. I usually sketch out the materials costs on a scrap of paper with some quick Google searches to make sure I can get everything I need within budget.

For the classes I teach with the libraries, we mail out materials kits because the classes themselves are held on Zoom, so there is also a size constraint so everything fits in the envelope. I also need to think about things that are practical to mail. Paint, liquid glue, and magnets, for example, aren’t the ideal things to put in the mail. For these Zoom classes, I try to limit what the students have to supply themselves to scissors, pencil and occassionally a ruler. Everything else is in the kit.

Figuring out learning goals

I like to also make sure that we aren’t just doing a cut-and-paste kind of project, but there is some kind of new skill that students are learning. Those skills could be something like a new embroidery stitch or a way to tear down paper.

So for these owls I decided that we would:

  • make an ornament with paper-covered chipboard, teaching bookbinding skills of making covered boards
  • create a mixed media illustration with mixed scrap papers and stickers
  • design our own patterned paper to help make colors blend/coordinate

Make a sample

Next I make a sample project. I am not really an artist who sketches everything ahead of time. I usually jump in and just start trying things. I have a couple of drawers of scrap paper in my studio, so I grabbed some scrap and started to make a project.

Fun fact: I looked at the date on this photo and I made this sample in June 2025. I didn’t teach this class until January 2026. I always take photos of samples and intermediate steps as I make them because there is often a huge lag between when I propose a project and when I actually teach it so I forget what I did.

As I made this sample I thought about how I would teach it to students. I decided to make pattern pieces for the head and body and have the students create the pieces for all of the other shapes. This would give them a starting point to get everything the right size to fit on the background and would help give some confidence about making your owl look like an owl. I made pencil sketches of the pieces I made and then re-drew them in Illustrator so I had pattern pieces I could print for them to cut out.

I decided to use little circle stickers for the eyes to give this a little more mixed media vibe and because cutting tiny circles is a pain-in-the-%$#@ and I don’t want to cause anyone to be frustrated. Ultimately I also made the entire piece slightly bigger than the one shown in the photo here because I decided that the pieces were too small to cut easily, especially for more beginner level students. Since I had drawn those pattern pieces as vector illustrations, this was easy to do.

Take photos.

Usually this is the point in a project where I write a class description and take some photos of my sample. When I am teaching classes, there is usually a “proposal” phase where I send something off to whoever I am partnering with for the class and they approve the idea before we move forward. Writing class descriptions is hard. I’ve learned over many years of doing it to be as concise and factual as possible. I’ve learned this the hard way as you might guess. Sometimes the people editing the description down the pipeline don’t understand anything about what I’m teaching and the class description ends up being something completely different than what I intended to teach.

Now we wait.

I try not to do any more prep than this until I have a signed contract. Rarely do teachers get paid anything for prep time. Unfortunately I have had venues ghost me or cancel projects at this point, so I am really careful about doing anything like making handouts or actually sourcing materials until I know it’s pretty sure that it’s going to go.

3 weeks out.

About three weeks before the class I start to look for materials. For larger classes, like the ones I do with the libraries, I might even start a little earlier to get materials on the way. I try to order things from other small businesses as much as possible. I rarely source materials locally, even though I would like to because it’s challenging to find enough of a thing to make up 43 class kits from a local shop. They just aren’t going to carry 43 skeins of the same color of yellow DMC floss. Some tools like popsicle sticks or glue sticks, that I use over and over in classes I buy in bulk if I can to keep the costs down. While some classes are pretty predictable (my library classes almost always fill up) others are a big guessing game. Many many people wait until the last minute to register for classes, so at 3 weeks out, I really have no idea how many people I will have in a class.

2 weeks out.

I make up materials kits. You’ve seen me mention the number 43 a bunch of times. For this class, I had 40 spots available, broken up into 2 class groups. I also make a kit for me that is identical to the student kits so we are all working with the same thing (42). I make one more so that I can make a class sample that is the exact materials that are in their kits (43). My prototype sample is almost always made with whatever I have scraps of in the studio so it’s a great alternate example, but it doesn’t always match exactly what they will be working with. I also make handouts and pattern pieces at this same time.

For the library classes, I drop off kits so the library staff can distribute them.

Today I am teaching a different class in person. I made up those kits just a few days before class because I wanted to not make too many and have leftovers. I have a better idea of how many students will be in a class a few days before it happens. For those classes I always make the number in the class plus three extra. One for me to work along with them and two more for people who show up and think they were registered even though they weren’t (it happens more than you might think). I had a woman spill her entire coffee all over her materials and the table once. I had an extra kit so she could start over.

The day before

I usually make up the class sample the day before class happens. I do this last minute because it means the class is super fresh in my mind. As I make the sample, I keep notes on a scrap of paper so I don’t forget key steps or do things out of order. This is kind of the point when I write the lesson plan. I often translate those sketched notes into a list of numbered steps with keywords for me to remember what to do next. If I’m teaching on Zoom that note usually sits on my laptop keyboard where I can see it but it’s just off camera. Sometimes with complex projects I put times on it so I make sure we stay on pace to finish on time, ie at one hour in to class we should be to this point.

I taught it, but then I taught it again

So after I taught this class, another group reached out to me and said we saw this class on your social media and we think this would be a great fit for this other event we are doing. Cool! So I talked to them a little bit and they wanted basically this same project but as a 25 minute class formatted as pre-recorded video. That’s a big change from the 2 hour class that I had planned earlier. I decided that I could do it by changing the skills focus of the class a little bit but keeping the same project.

The new goals were something like this:

  • demonstrate covering boards with decorative paper (not a step-by-step)
  • discuss how to curate papers/colors to make a cohesive design
  • demonstrate creating a mixed media illustration with bullet points vs working together

In order to cut the class down from 2 hours to 25 minutes, I changed all of the detailed step-by-step instructions into demonstrations with bullet points, more like a tutorial. I added a section about curating your recycled materials to make something that looked more intentional than crafty. For the original class, I curated the materials in their kits so we didn’t need to talk about that. But for this one they would be sourcing their own materials, so that felt like an important thing to talk about. The focus shifted more to the design of the project and away from the hands-on-skill building.

I already have a whole video setup and workflow to record a class so I sat down one afternoon and recorded it. I had my samples from teaching the class previously, so I had a lot of things to show for inspiration. My first draft of the video was way too long, so I had to cut a lot and speed up some of the sections where I was doing demos. I’m not used to teaching in such a short form, so this was a little more work, but I think I would get better if I did more like this.

Want to make an owl? This class is happening as part of a free Eco-Creative Summit in a couple of weeks, so if you are excited about this project you can sign up!