Why I’m Trading Catering for Camp

I’ve been feeding people for thirty years.

I’ve made dinner for 300 in a field and breakfast for 12 in a kitchen smaller than your bathroom. I’ve catered weddings where the bride cried over the soup. I’ve had a stranger tell me, on a random Thursday, that it was the first meal anyone had cooked for them in a year.

I love that work. I love what food does to a room. The way a good meal makes people lean in and slow down and say things they wouldn’t have said five minutes earlier.

But somewhere along the way, I realized I was always on the other side of the pass. I was plating, expediting, wiping down counters while everyone else sat at the table. I was making the experience happen, but I wasn’t in it.

The idea that wouldn’t go away

A few years ago, I started noticing something in my own life. I’d stopped making things. Not food -  I make food every day. I mean the other kind of making. The kind where you sit down with materials and time and no deliverables and just… see what happens.

I used to do that. I used to lose entire afternoons to projects that had no purpose other than the making itself. And then, like everyone, I got busy. The sourdough starter didn’t survive the move. The craft supplies went into a box in the closet. The weekends filled up with logistics.

I kept thinking: what if there was a weekend where someone else handled the logistics? Where the food was extraordinary, the crafts were taught by real artists, and the whole point was to sit at a table and make things and eat well and not check your phone?

What if I built the kind of weekend I was desperate to attend?

The phone call

I called my friend at Iola Gardens on Vashon Island. If you haven’t been, it’s the kind of place that makes your shoulders drop the second you arrive. A curated garden, a black-timbered barn, a meadow that disappears into the trees. The kind of place where the fog hangs in the trees until mid-morning and the light goes golden around six.

I said: what if we did a camp? Not for kids. For grown-ups who used to make things and stopped.

She said yes before I finished the sentence.

What this actually is

Mischief & Makers Camp is a weekend creative retreat. Hands-on craft workshops taught by working artists. Chef-prepared seasonal meals at one very long table. Thirty-two guests. No packed itinerary. No luxury resort posturing. Just a weekend on an island you have to take a ferry to reach, where you’ll make things with your hands and eat food that makes you close your eyes.

Our first camp is August 7-9th, 2026 at Iola Gardens on Vashon Island. I’m cooking. Real artists are teaching. There’s a raccoon named Pip who was here before any of us and who strongly endorses the bread.

I’m not on the other side of the pass anymore. I’m at the table.

Come sit with us.

- heidi finley, Chef & Maker-in-Chief