new digs and the next six months

It's been a long time since I grabbed the camera to write a blog post. The past month has been busy with a visit to Halifax, settling into our new larger house, and working on various projects. Our new digs are starting to feel like home as we find the right spots for all the things that make our house lived in. My studio is all set up and organized (I even have a closet for storage) with my materials and books.


Three weeks ago, while I was in Halifax visiting friends, I got an email from the Brucebo Foundation telling me I am the 2012 recipient of the Brucebo European Fine Art Travel Scholarship. This is the project I applied for in January - you can read my post from January 26 to find out more about the program and my proposal.

It is such an honour to be chosen and I am thrilled about this dream come true.....Basically, I get to spend a month and a half travelling Sweden and other parts of Scandinavia researching traditional hand-weaving and textiles and then tracking the influence of these traditions on contemporary material culture in both design and art. I am pretty darn excited!!! It's still sinking in and there's lots of planning to do....the last few weeks have been spent finishing up loose ends to make time for figuring out my travel logistics in the coming months. I will leave in early September after I finish my summer contract with Parks Canada.

Oh yes, and I bought a Singer Fashion Mate sewing machine on Kijiji a few weeks back. It's from the early 1960s and made in Italy. I see curtains and summer dresses in my future.

This photo above is of the back wall in my studio with my warping mill - it's where my large Cranbrook loom will go.....all I need to do is get it out of my parents' basement, into town and set up. For the moment, I'm mostly using my studio for preparing warps and winding bobbins for scarves I'm weaving on my little Leclerc which is in another part of the house. It will be wonderful to have my big loom in there and spend time weaving.

Ikat scarves in cotton and silk in Finnish twill. I thought I'd experiment with some Scandinavian patterns while doing much smaller production runs using ikat dyeing in the warp....each little run of scarves will be a little study of a weaving pattern from that part of the world.