Category Archives: Community

I Invite You to the Highway 1 Studio Tour

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If you live in Canada, Highway 1 is the TransCanada Highway. It goes from coast to coast. The 90 minute stretch of it between the town I live in and the next city over has a whole row of communities with talented artists. A couple of years ago a group of them got together to arrange a studio tour and the 2010 edition runs September 25 and 26th.

I’ll be posted at the historic train station in Herbert along with my friend Louise Perrin of Skyswept Designs. This means you get at least a triple whammy – my art, Louise’s lovely hand-dyed work and the neat train station. If you’re lucky, you can sit down and have faspa with the sweet volunteer ladies at the station. Faspa is the traditional “tea” for the Mennonite immigrants who settled the area at the turn of the last century and is usually a light helping of cheese, bun, sliced meat and then tea and sweets.

Also in Herbert will be Holly Lightfoot and Hedi Gossweiller. The rest of us will be spread along the length of the highway. Drive over, visit our studios, get your tour passport initialed and be entered to win some fabulous pieces of art.

Studio Tour Prize

I added the little boxed necklace and earring set to the tour prize – the beads are from my latte run and a pretty neutral. The painters, potters, photographers and fibre artists of the tour have all added their own treasures.

Floral Exploration

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I bravely signed up to do the Art Bead Scene’s Blog Carnival. Every month one of the two groups involved commits to blogging about a theme based piece they’ve made.

August’s theme is exploration which is oddly fitting given my spring and summers activities! I went with the less literal interpretation of exploration and focused on pieces that were a little off the beaten track from my standard neatly symmetrical jewelry.

Tiger Lily Charms

I’d gotten comfortable making craft fair and production work and only recently reminded myself that I’d GOTTEN popular by doing interesting and different work and how was I to keep that unless I explored a little?

The little shaped flower beads are made from my own canes but then slightly sculpted into a flower shape and they act as an excellent embellishment. You can see my regular slice beads, the little flat white flowers,  mixed in for accents. At a bead show where I debuted them this summer, one of the teachers bought a few to use with her vintage lucite flowers.

I like how you can get a whole garden on your wrist with these or add a little more in the way of bling and keep the flowers and leaves for interesting detail.

Blue Dangly Flowers

Light and Dark Pink Dangly Floral Charm Bracelet

I’ve had requests for other versions of the flowers so we’ll see what I can figure out. Pansies and orchids, oh my! I guess you could say I’m exploring my flower garden this month.

Completely Different

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At the Oasis Bead Show in June, I bought up a few packets of paper beads made by a self-sufficiency project in Uganda. They’re great – such nice organic colours and very lightweight. My mom, who is often my muse, asked for several long necklaces from them since they’re so lightweight.

I supplemented with a few of my own seed beads and metallic bits and came up with quite a few pieces from only 4 packages of paper beads (what can I say, I didn’t shop until the end of the show and they were low on the colours I wanted!).

Paper Bead Jewelry

I can honestly recommend the beads – the quality was great, the colours were just right and you can’t beat the prices. And that’s without even considering that they all help teach a trade and self-sufficiency to women and children.

Meet CraftyBabyHope

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The third installment of the Smoosher’s Guild’s blogring promo is about Jennifer of CraftyBabyHope. This one starts off with an interesting (to me!) story.

I often ask people who step their crafting up to the next level and begin selling what their motivation is. Some people want to pay for their supplies, some are running out of space for their pieces in their house. Some want to pay for the family vacation. Jennifer is selling her work to pay for her fertility treatments.

CraftyBabyHope doesn’t only have polymer clay work in it. There’s a variety of trinkets, many of them made with wire. Wire was my pre-clay obsession and still figures heavily in a lot of my work.

On the clay side of things, there are a lot of cute or kawaii items in the ArtFire shop including this sweet little charm bracelet:

My daughter’s favourite piece was this little Scottie:

Turtles and Rainbows

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I admit to liking odd titles and weird phrases. This, despite knowing that you have a much better chance of being understood with clear words and simple, descriptive sentences. So I called my classes this weekend Clay Rainbows and Turtle Rocks.

Class Table

It actually WAS descriptive for the classes. The first was the colour version of my basic caning class from last time. We revisited cane construction but using block colouring and Skinner blends. People made everything from flowers to butterfly wings.

Student Canes

My second class, geared to middle schoolers (the people my daughters age! yikes!), was to make ‘Turtle Rocks’. Basically it was to make pet rocks but I wanted a name that was going to catch eye. The actual items for the project class were very loosely inspired by Jon Anderson’s amazing Fimo creatures.

Turtle Rocks!

I walked the kids through how to make a few quick canes, how to wrap and construct the turtle and then I turned them loose on the clay and pasta machines. We ended up with a herd of turtles and critters.

I always comment that I’m a reclusive, introverted cave dweller but classes and shows are fun for me. Probably because I get to pick the time and the audience is generally people enthusiastic about what I’m enthusiastic about. It was a great group but now, I’m exhausted and looking forward to next weekend’s project: the Bead Show.