Watch a beginning mixed media artist sit down with a 14-inch square of fabric, and you’ll likely see the same thing every time. April Sproule has. “They want to put 25 different pieces of fabric on it,” she says with a knowing laugh, “because that’s the way they’re used to working. And when you start out like that, you kind of work yourself into a corner.”
After more than 30 years in mixed media textile art, Sproule has learned that restraint is one of the hardest things to teach—and one of the most transformative. Her whole approach as an instructor circles back to a single, deceptively simple idea: before you make something, you have to learn to see it. What goes on the surface, where the eye enters, what it lingers on, what it finds next. That’s not a finishing touch. It’s the foundation. 
This summer, she brings that philosophy to the Estelle Center for Creative Arts for her new five-day immersion retreat, running August 10–14, 2026.

Thirty Years in a Doctor's Bag

Mixed media can feel like an invitation to chaos. The materials alone—inks, resins, papers, dyes, pastes, fabrics—can overwhelm an artist before they’ve made a single mark. Sproule knows this firsthand. Her answer is a philosophy she’s developed over decades: learn a technique, and toss it in the bag.
“I think of it like the old doctor’s bags,” she says. “I learn a technique—like a surface design technique—and I just mentally toss it in that bag. Maybe I’ll pull it out in 10 years because it’s a perfect fit for a piece I’m working on today.”
The flip side is knowing when not to pull things out. “The worst thing is people try to put everything into one piece,” she says. “It’s like Neapolitan ice cream when it melts. The chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla all run together into that yucky putrid pink color. It’s too much. You don’t know what to look at.”
This is why she uses the same inks and paints she’s trusted for years, carves soft rubber blocks instead of traditional linoleum, and would never hand a student a material she couldn’t stand behind. “I would feel horrible if I had students use some application that ended up failing and ruining something they’d spent a lot of time on,” she says. 
What she’s offering retreat participants isn’t just instruction; it’s the compressed value of 30-plus years of trial, error, and refinement.

Failure as Method

Sproule works in series now—typically three or four pieces at a time—and it’s changed everything about how she learns. She described a recent set of black-and-white stitched works, each one an attempt to replicate the looseness and energy of brushwork with a needle and thread. The first was too heavy. The second, after spending two weeks stitching three hours a night with a single strand of embroidery floss, she pinned to the wall, came back to in the morning with fresh eyes, and hated it.
“I just wanted to get my scissors and hack it into little pieces,” she says, laughing. “But I’ll make a third one.”
The series stays intact. Nothing gets thrown out. Each piece is both a failure and a lesson, and together they map the progress of an artist who has been at it long enough to know that getting stuck is part of the process—not a sign to stop.
She shares all of it with her students—the messes, the wrong turns, the materials that sounded promising and weren’t. “I share my failures with them as well as my successes,” she says. “It’s an evolution. And I feel like I’m saving them from wasting their time trying certain things that are probably not going to work.”

What Five Days of Mixed Media Looks Like

The structure of April’s upcoming printed and stitched mixed media immersion retreat reflects everything she believes about how artists actually learn. Participants will carve their own rubber printing blocks and print on fabric and paper using permanent, heat-set inks, then build collaged mixed media textile pieces roughly 14 by 18 inches, combining their printed materials with hand stitching, embroidery, and appliqué. Composition and color run through every day—not as a lecture at the end, but as a live conversation alongside the making.
No experience is required. Sproule has taught complete beginners and advanced artists in the same room and is deliberate about making the experience work for both. Her first retreat at the Estelle Center bore that out—she arrived with a backlog of extra material in case things slowed down and never touched any of it. “They were exhausted by the end,” she says. “And everyone really connected. Everyone kind of bonded with one another.”
Participants will leave with a finished—or nearly finished—mixed media piece, a collection of hand-printed fabrics and papers for future work, and practical knowledge that doesn’t come from watching a tutorial.
“I want to give people the skills and the techniques and the information to create the kind of work that really just makes their heart sing,” she says. “I want them to be able to walk in, look at a piece, and say, oh my gosh, I can’t believe I made that.”
That’s the goal—not technically proficient work made for the admiration of others, but art that satisfies something deeper. As Sproule put it: “You’re not making it for the oohs and ahs of other people. You’re making it to satisfy something deep within you.”
The Printed and Stitched Mixed Media Immersion Five-Day Retreat runs August 10–14, 2026 at the Estelle Center for Creative Arts. Registration is $1,295. A meet-and-greet will take place the evening of Sunday, August 9.