Labour Day weekend craft festival in Fredericton, NB

Right now, I'm on PEI having a wee little vacation. I head to Fredericton on Thursday for a three day Fine Craft Festival organized by the New Brunswick Craft Council. This will be an outdoor show (luckily, I made sure I would have a tent for me and my scarves), and I'm hoping that the hurricane that is scheduled to hit the east coast this weekend misses Fredericton completely.

The Fine Craft Festival takes place at Officer's Square in downtown Fredericton. On Friday, the show will run from 12 - 7, Saturday from 10 - 6, and Sunday from 11 - 5. If you're in the area, please pop by and say hello!

on the horizon

Running around today trying to get everything in order. To PEI early tomorrow morning for a week's vacation and then directly to Fredericton, NB for a craft show. Getting our apartment tidied up, making sure our cat Luigi has food to eat while my friend Brooke looks after him for a week until Damien returns from PEI next week. Cutting up freshly printed business cards and hang tags that I've been re-designing myself as I become more proficient with Adobe InDesign. Making sure everything I need for events of the next two weeks are packed.


Yesterday I finished my first small run of new "Horizon" scarves, and today I washed and dryed them on the line. I think I will see how they do in Fredericton "un-dyed". I definitely have to fight the urge to saturate the colour by dyeing the scarves in acid dye. This would colour the white silk while leaving the three colours of cotton (already coloured when I weave them) the same colours. But once I try them on, I really like the lightness that the natural white silk gives to the colour palette.

prep

I'm taking off for PEI on Wednesday morning. A week-long vacation and then I'm heading straight to Fredericton, New Brunswick for the NB Craft Council Fine Craft Festival taking place Labour Day weekend. This means that I'm taking all my booth set-up and scarves with me to PEI so I won't have to come back to Halifax before Fredericton. Damien left for PEI yesterday, so I've got a few days on my own here in Halifax to prepare and make sure everything is organized. The only bit of "work" that I'm planning on doing while home on PEI is to stitch my brand new screen printed labels (printed by my lovely studio mate Keeley) to my scarves. Still not sure if I will hand stitch them on (labour intensive) or use my mother's sewing machine......I'm so very happy with them and already thinking about sourcing nice silk ribbon for the next batch.

Thursday loom shot

The last two days, I've completed two samples of a new scarf design. The first one was to get my idea onto the loom, and the second one was to tweak the problem areas of the design. I'm just about the cut the second sample scarf off the loom. I'm really excited about this new design: it's a broken twill weave in cotton and raw silk (warp is two colours of cotton and natural white silk, the weft is a third colour of cotton), and after washing ends up being about 8 inches wide. I'm contemplating not over-dyeing these ones like I usually do, or if I do, making bold colour choices to keep the stripes prominent.

coming back

My piece that was part of the Annual Members Exhibition at the Craft Council of Newfoundland and Labrador's Devon House Gallery in St. John's is on its way back to me. I made it over the course of two weeks in June and then promptly sent it to St. John's to be juried for the exhibit. It will be nice to see it again. Above are two photos of my piece, Bottle Cove, both photographed by Eric Walsh at the gallery. There's photographs of all the works in the show online on the Craft Council of NL's website.

Tuesday morning loom shot

A close up of my Echo scarf warp tie-on. Whenever it's time to put on another warp of the same threading, I simply tie warp string to warp string and then pull the knots through the reed and the heddles. Today I'll strip the loom of the Echo scarf threading that's been on there for over a month, and actually get down to working on a new scarf design that I've had in my head for a while.....

home for a rest

This past week was a quick trip home for a rest. I was able to find rides with friends both ways to PEI. Visiting my parents, spending time with dear pals Mille and Val (who is home from London UK with her partner and brand new beautiful baby Reuben).

I did manage to do a little bit of work while I was home - in a relaxed way of course - and finished my piece for the Out of Purgatory exhibition. I'm happy with how the embroidery worked out for for the crowd scene. I dyed the cotton canvas originally in onion skins, and then stained the bottom of the cloth in a mixture of coffee grinds and PEI red soil. I made the choice to not make it into a bag, but leave it to be hung on a wall to take in the full horizon.

to market to market

Today I realized I had to get to work on this art project for an upcoming exhibition in PEI. The idea is that artists in four provinces (PEI, NS, NB, NL) contribute an unfinished piece and then complete another one of the artists' unfinished artworks. The finished works will be exhibited at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown, Gallery Connexion in Fredericton, and Eastern Edge Gallery in St. John's. Any medium, the pieces are assigned randomly.


I got a small painting by NB artist Derek Davidson of a market scene at the Fredericton farmer's market. Just the first gestural start in acrylic on canvas. I've been humming and hawing over what to do with it for weeks and it's now deadline time. After removing the canvas from the stretcher, drawing on the painting with pencil crayon and pen, cutting out the shapes of two individual figures and the cluster of people....I still couldn't see what I wanted to make from it when I realized it was crunch time this morning.


But I think I'm on the right track now: I'm going to make a market bag out of cotton canvas. I traced the horizon line of a market crowd using the cut outs of the figures from the painting like stencils. I dyed the canvas with onion skins (drying outside on the line right now), and I plan on embroidering the crowd horizontally across the cloth and then sewing it into a shoulder bag of some kind....

birthday baby

Okay, it's almost a week since my last post...too long! Life gets busy: trying to get a bunch of Echo scarves woven so I can take five days next week and go to PEI to visit my parents and a dear friend and partner who are home from London with their brand new baby. And yesterday was Damien's birthday - a whopping 32!! As we both get older, it amazes to think that we've been together since we were both 26 years old - 1/6 of our lives...and yes, I do tend to think in proportions and fractions, I am often measuring time like warp stripes in the sett of a reed.

Damien has gotten in the habit of wearing a headband lately, and I thought he could use a hand-knit, golden yellow, crown-shaped cotton one - it was fun to knit and he wore it to school yesterday for a day of painting crits.

I also made a fantabulous chocolate zuchini cake with cardamom cinnamon icing and raspberries that we'll be eating for days to come....yum.