Our 2012 Summer Camp Line up is now posted on our summer camps page.
Click on the link below to view summer camp photos:
gallery.me.com/cboowhalen#gallery
Click on the summer camp button to your left to view our 2012 line up of summer camps.
If you are dropping off a registration form to 716 King St. West, please call first to make sure that someone is there as we run a daycare out of this space which means we are often out for a walk with the children. The door at 716 is always locked, you must ring the door bell or pull the rope that hangs out the door to ring the louder cow bell.
If there is no answer at 716 King St. West you can always just put your registration through the mail slot in the door and we will receive it the same day and get back to you with an email receipt.
The Village Garden Day Care
Click on the link below to see photos of the The Village Garden Daycare
gallery.me.com/cboowhalen#100235
We are running a high quality Home Daycare in our Chapel space Mondays-Fridays.
The hours of operation are 7:30 am-4:30 pm with extended hours available.
The fee is $50. per day.
We have children from one - four years of age.
If you would like to find out more about The Village Garden Daycare please feel free to contact Carrie at 613 547 5689.
SUMMER CAMPS
Click on this link to view the Gallerys
gallery.me.com/cboowhalen
Our 17th Annual Summer Camps Line Up will be here soon!
17 Years of excellence in Childrens Programming
Professional Instructors, warm/ creative/ wholesome environment
Absolutely the best quality camps anywhere!
This place is a slice of heaven for children and parents!
Here, young people are free to be themselves and explore their interests in a fantastically inspirational environment
My kids look forward to Y.A.K. Camps all year long
We receive children from all over the world every summer now
I love Carrie and all the amazing opportunities she offers to young people, I hope she never stops
My kids wont go to any other camp, they absolutely love Y.A.K.
Carrie Whalen, an award winning fine arts and fashion design graduate
YAK is only the latest in a series of arts-related businesses Whalen has started over the last decade. Their genesis was in 1987, when Whalen, then an 18-year-old single mother, enrolled at Kingstons St. Lawrence College. Seven years later she emerged with diplomas in fine arts and fashion design and a bevy of awards for her art and design work, including the Liquitex art achievement award, and fourth-place honors at the prestigious Air France International Young Designers competition in Paris. Whalen was chosen by Pierre Cardin and other great fashion legends as the best young design graduate in Canada and tied for fourth internationally at a competition set in the Louvre in 1994. Whalen also won awards in the Shmirnoff Fashion Design Competitions in 1993 & 1994.
But while she had plenty of job placement offers from design firms including one from Bella Freud, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freuds great-granddaughter and head of a top fashion house, Whalen decided that she was not yet a big-city girl. After a stint working at Freuds in London, England, she returned to Canada.
Back home in Kingston, she took business planning courses at St. Lawrence and launched the Canadian Designers Co-op, a fashion incubator, where early-career fashion designers could design, manufacture, promote and sell their work. The co-op was based in Kingston on Lower Princess St.; a $40,000 Community Action Grant was awarded to Whalen from the Ontario government which allowed her to fill the space with industrial fashion design equipment purchased from the defunct St. Lawrence College fashion design program.
The co-op attracted a steady stream of up-and-coming fashion talent from Kingston and elsewhere, but constantly found itself struggling financially. To help make ends meet Whalen organized fundraising events such as fashion shows and an art camp for kids. Whalen dubbed the art camp Art Attack a moniker she reconsidered about three years later.
I found out there was an English TV show with the same name, she says. So I had a little name-the-business contest with the kids in the program and one of them suggested Y.A.K., Young Artists of Kingston. It was perfect.
Today, YAK operates out of the former Portsmouth United Church, which Whalen purchased in 2002. The 150-year-old structure houses the art classes and a growing collection of power and hand tools Whalen uses to build the tables, trays, canvas frames and other project bases that children later transform into works of art. The building also houses a childrens aviary filled with very friendly Cockatiels and Lovebirds, and a few bunnies to boot.
Since its inception, YAK has grown steadily. Today, in addition to one-week-long summer and March break Art Camps, it offers programs in Theatre, Face Painting, Animation, Fashion Design, V.A.D.A.R. Camp (video, audio documentary reporter), Digital Photography, Special F/X Makeup, Craft Camp, Clay Camp, and yes, even Bird Camp. In the off-season Whalen rents out YAKs chapel as a weekend birthday-party venue. It is also made available for nonprofit arts-related events such as musical performance, plays and so on.
YAK is a full-time job, but Whalen is not one to sit still for long.
Seven years ago Whalen started face painting for fun during her summer programs. This interest has turned into a very busy sideline over the last couple years and Carrie has become by far the most sought after professional face painter around. Whalens face and body art is spectacular. Whether she is painting at a large city event like The Kingston Buskers Festival, The Teddy Bear Picnic, The Sheep Dog Trials, or the Lung Associations Festival of Flowers, or private business parties such as her regular gigs for the The Rocking Hoarse Toy Store or The Kingston Public Health Unit, or doing private home parties, Whalen draws a quite a crowd. In the past year Carrie has been hired by several large organizations to teach their volunteers how to face paint.