 I 'favourited' this embroidered brooch/pendant on Etsy. It was too amazing not to, the workmanship is out-of-control.
I heart embroidery. Janna
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 Check out this amazing memorial style bracelet that Sasha wove out of human hair.
  I went to Portabello West today and got few goodies, two of which I am munching on now. For those of you who know me well, you know that I always buy yummy things in twos, reason being I can never make a choice between the two. Today it was between Cocoa Nymph Classic Caramels and their Sea Nymph chocolate bar which is dark chocolate with sea salt and english toffee. Both are amazing! Purchase number two (tisk tisk) was a neck piece by Loop Neckwear, I just loved the nautical-ness of the one I chose and couldn't resist adding it to my spring wardrobe. Purchase number three (triple tisk) was some Mineral make-up by Affera.
For those of you who do not know about Portabello West, it is a monthly (last Sunday of the month) Fashion and Art market that takes place in the Rocky Mountain Station, off 1st Ave near Main (behind the Home Depot). They feature local vendors and you can always count on a delicious lunch from the french crepe people outside. Janna mmmmm...caramels  My classmate Mandy Kozie has been creating puppets since day one of the textiles program. Mandy has a puppetful website, Kozie Puppet, but this puppet (above) is the true Kozie puppet; a self portrait. She, of course, has her own puppet to hold as well. A puppet with a puppet, ha.
   I had WAY too much fun presenting my knitting machine project this week. This was my second attempt at using my Singer LK100, and I went all out with the 1970's references and all.
This knit shirt & skirt set are made with luxuriously soft super-wash merino wool which I hand-dyed with acid dyes. The pillows were a previous weaving project.  These are the most beautiful and elegant wedding photos I've ever seen. I love the simplicity of the bride's dress and the modesty of her hair style. She looks so graceful.
Photos by White Album Weddings.   I was just cruising Heather Dahl of Dahl Haus' blog for pics to add to this posting and found that she has blogged about me today. How funny is that. Well, the truth is that I really admire Heather and feel excited, as an emerging artist, to see that there is hope for us intrepid female artist/entrepreneurs. It's serendipitous that today she is reflecting on being an emerging artist and I am feeling excited about the future. Heather has worked hard as an artist (and mother) perfecting her craft and recently received a feature in House and Home magazine. We visited briefly a couple of weeks ago when her sister Heidi, my old roommate, was back in town for a day (and 9 months pregnant at that). It gave me goosebumps hearing Heather's story about being chosen for the magazine and having House and Home photographers in her studio. Congrats Heather!
 Montreal based artist, Louise Lemieux Berube is greatly intrigued and influenced by other artists. From dancers and photographers to writers and film makers, she incorporates their works into her own pieces by acquiring permission to use their images to work with or by collaboratively creating images with performers and photographers and sometimes by playing their music in her installations.
Louise was influenced and fascinated by other artists for quite some time before it became tangible as textile art, and later found her preferred medium in hand-woven jacquard weaving. She may have been particularly drawn to this medium since she was already interested in photography and digital art; both of which lend themselves to jacquard designing. Her first pieces were woven images depicting dancers, where she explored light and movement. She later did a piece, 'Dernier dejeuner sur l'herbe', which represents the works of over a dozen artists including herself. Her art addresses the coexistence of human experiences and explores the relationship between art and humans in everyday life. Louise confesses that she is 'majorly preoccupied' with the idea of 'the necessity for nature, men and women, structure and artistic endeavour to coexist harmoniously.' She brings this fascination to life in a series called 'co-existence' (above) whereby she, in each piece, almagamates the experiences of many people, as if to unify them, creating one codependent existence into the permanence of woven threads. www.lemieux-berube.com  I spent the entire day yesterday trying to get my small gauge knitting machine working. As I troubleshot via my manual I realized that there are removable brushes in my carriage. I went to remove them and realized one was mangled beyond repair; broken plastic parts and matted bristles. It resembled my hair on most mornings. I was so frustrated that I gave up on that machine all together. After a fabulous date with my husband, out for Korean dinner (Hanwoori) and then to Alice in Wonderland 3D, we trekked over to N.Van to retrieve my 'good' knitting machine (Singer LK100). YAY!! Now I am a happy knitter with a lot of catching up to do. I've successfully finished the back of three spring tanks and the fronts for two. All was well until I tried to feed my large gauge knitting machine lace fingering merino yarn. After about an hour and a half of frogging I finally discovered that it just needed more tension ie. more weights.   I constructed this garment on a dress form using silk/rayon fabric (with a little of lycra for stretch) which I dyed with mineral vat dyes. The golden fabric shows a repeat pattern of a hand-drawn lotus-like ogee that I made into a silk screen and utilized to manipulate the fabric with a devore technique. I finished with delicate silk french knot details across the neckline.
  Ana and I wove these at the Surrey Art Gallery where my professor Ruth Scheuing has an exhibition, Silk Roads, on until April 4th.
other posts about this topic...  I hand-wove this dress using traditional Turkish rug weaving techniques with hand-spun and dyed merino/angora yarn. I implemented my newly acquired shape building and pulled warp techniques and was able to weave the entire dress in one piece (adding darts) on the loom without having to cut any shapes out after.  My inspiration came from this Vancouver sky photo I took and played around with in Photoshop. I choose to create a dress as an exploration of the boundaries of what inspires us to dress the way we do. Since cloud formations and the changing colours and shapes in the sky drive me to be creative in other mediums, I wondered if it would be SO crazy to create a sky garment.
See 360 degree photos here and process photos here  This is the design I created for my first Jacquard weaving. It is derived from a 17th century sketch of a man's interpretation of the 'topsy turvy' nature of the world if it were run by women. The scene is occurring in a spinning room where women would congregate on a daily basis (originally for the purpose of conserving light sources like candles and wood for fires).
I drew the spindle and distaff image seen in the background and used it in a repeat network to reference the spinning room as well as the act of spinning and it's relationship to the sexual imagination of a man (which, according to my reference image, involves a lot of spanking and aggressive making out to the point of knocking large objects over.) With this type of weaving I design my image and scan it into Photoshop to do some tweaking as well as assign different weave structures for different shades of grey (a process which can take several hours to get just right) and then program it into a computer which tells the loom which heddles to lift. When I weave this image I will only need to press on one treadle with my foot, and as I through the shuttle the image will slowly appear. I think that the figures in this image look a little cut-and-paste but am hopeful that they will translate more effectively in the form of cloth. |
About me:
I'm a west coast Canadian gal who after completing a BFA in Fibres at Concordia University in Montreal moved to the New York metropolitan area where I am pursuing my art practice while learning the ropes of motherhood.
June 2021
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