Fall is a New Start
It's early August, which means summer is mostly over even though it doesn't feel like it yet. A few more weeks and then people start coming back from wherever they went.
We've been thinking about fall a lot, partly because we're planning the season and partly because September has always been a strange month. It seems that for a lot of us, September is a return to the ordinary.
Summer break is over. Work is ramping up. We're going back to routines. The old friends we reconnected with and the new friendships we formed during our summer adventures are fading because we're just too busy. There's nothing on our calendars to bring us together reliably.
It doesn't make sense. Childhood is full of routines. We go to school every day by the same route, we hang out with the same friends—we do this over and over again for years. Yet we never feel stuck. We always know we're growing and becoming, building things with our friends, and we know what each year amounts to.
Once school is over, things change. We're stuck in our routines, but the magic is gone. What changed? We forgot the formula. It's not the routine that matters. In childhood—whether it's school, or organized sports, or the neighborhood hangout spot—it's the community, and the focus on personal or collective accomplishment, that make the difference.
In our adult lives, those things wind up separated. Our friends are no longer at our jobs or even in our cities. Our achievements are rarely celebrated, even by ourselves. All that's left is routine. So when September rolls around, we no longer feel the sense of anticipation and excitement that used to accompany this month. That’s why we're building the fall season around bringing magic back into our routines.
The theme this fall is Enchanted Forest. If you know the Drawing Room team, you know we love fairies and folklore, but this season we're focused on small magic. We're focused on the enchanted forests in our lives, the ones we pass by everyday.
We all probably grew up with some version of the same place. A creek behind the house, a patch of woods at the end of the street, an empty lot nobody was using. These ordinary spaces that you returned to each day, each year, were your own kind of enchanted forest. Small enough that you couldn't get lost, but once you were inside it, everything else got quiet. You went there with the same few people over and over, building something together, developing a shared history, your lore. Names for things. A story about whatever was living at the far end that none of you were supposed to go near. Rules only the group knew. This season at Drawing Room, we're building our own extraordinary ordinary space.
We've been designing the fall season around that feeling of being totally immersed. Foliage everywhere, big leaves overhead, damp moss underfoot. Velvet and wool and anything with a nap to it. Deep greens and light that comes through a canopy.
The programming leans into that feeling. Foraging and gathering, a lot of texture and textile work, some storytelling and mystery. Things that feel closer to real handmade objects with stories behind them. This season, we’re not just foraging for natural things, but mixing the natural with the magical.
The Cohort Program opens with an orientation night where we paint ceramic name tags and write intentions for the season. Over the eight weeks after that, you pick your own workshops: Claydate mirrors, needle felting, love letters on handmade paper, worn-out clothes turned into things you'd actually wear again. It ends with a Showcase Night in November where we bring everything into one room.
Enrollment is open now and closes in early September, if you're looking for something to start.
