Up North

It's been a fun month traveling to different places spreading our love of fiber arts. I got to enjoy a wonderful time with my husband at the Wisconsin Art Educators Conference in Lacrosse, WI. I had never been to Lacrosse, which is on the Mississippi River, so I enjoyed the beautiful fall drive there. I think that Wisconsin always picks the most perfect time of the year for their conference, when the leaves are at their peak of color. It was spectacular. We saw bluffs and rolling fields and forests ablaze. Such a feast for the eyes. 

When we were there, we discovered Grandad's Bluff, which was pretty unique. A natural limestone bluff that had been preserved since its' limestone was quarried in the early 1900's, it's a stunning 600 feet above Lacrosse. Equally stunning was the fact that I had a donut burger there the first night. Yes. It was delicious. 

The town was cute, with lots of bars and eateries. The little ice cream and candy store was adorable and the ice cream was homemade and wonderful. A fun place to explore during the conference! 

We had a fabulous time making candy corn at the demo table at our booth. We had some darn creative folks who even added faces to their candy corn! Jonathan was a delight, reminding me just how much I enjoy working with him. He's a pretty great felter and a superb fiber sales man. In fact, he's even got a sense of humor. When someone was adoring a blended sparkly batt in soft pastel colors, they commented that it looked like unicorns. To this he answered that it was unicorn fiber indeed, as we curry comb our flock and then make the batts from that fiber. Gotta love it! 

I had two back to back filled classes in which we made little "leapfrogs" with needle felting and wet felted flowers. Everyone had a fabulous time. We actually for the first time sold out of fibers! I felt like Macy's on Black Friday... I had people waiting, arms weighed down with fiber in our checkout lines! What a great feeling. 

So thank you fabulous Wisconsin Art teachers! Do keep felting, and share your creations with us. It's so inspiring! We look forward to seeing you next year in Fort Atkinson, WI! 

Trekking East

To another place AND another time zone this weekend! Well it wasn't far from home, but our neighbors Indiana, for their art educator's conference. Held in a suburb of Indianapolis, at a high school (great idea by the way!), we had the treat of sharing fiber with a bunch of excited Hoosier folks. 

After a three and a half hour drive, it makes you feel pretty good when you start unloading your things and teachers walk by and literally start cheering that Esther's Place is here. I mean clapping, hootin' and hollerin', and everything! What a welcome wagon. 

The day started out with my class first thing, which I really liked. We made leapfrogs and trumpet flowers to demonstrate wet and needle felting techniques. What an awesome feeling when you keep watching people trickle in and you run out of seats. I had standing room only and I think almost 30 teachers in the class. I was very pleased to have three male teachers attend. I strive to minimize the genderization that sometimes subconsciously occurs with fiber art, and having confident male teachers helps that cause out! 

The class was great but my favorite part of class is when we do introductions. I really like to get a group of people to learn about each other and find common ground that gets them sharing. In this instance, they share their name, where they teach and what ages, and I ask them to share their passion. Art teachers are artists first, and their insatiable desire to create sometimes gets pushed aside for the practical. Hearing about their passion, whether it was blacksmithing, stained glass, mixed media, etc, was inspiring. We really needed a session or social media platform just to share pictures and ideas and interact about what we do, and learn from one another (hint, hint!).  

The booth was hopping, of course, and thanks to my dear friend Amber, lots of folks were making super cute candy corns! I know there will be lots of creativity going on, because lots of fibers went home with new felters. I did enjoy seeing one gal, Kendra, who shared with us the picture of her felt rooster she created. She won a grand champion for it at the fair! How exciting to see what can happen in a year. 

The show was a great success and I now have lots of things I want to offer for art educators- resources, lesson plans, video tutorials, that I will be working on in the weeks to come. In the meantime, check out how to make the leapfrog and flowers here! 

Well, a trip isn't complete without a little fun, so we did enjoy some local sushi and I visited my favorite Indy attraction, Saddleup Saloon and Dancehall,  where I enjoyed my pastime of line-dancing with some boot-scootin' fun. I love dancing, have danced my whole life in some form or another, and dance at Saddleup near us.  It's been a great trip! 

Summer of the Sunflowers

I think sunflowers have to be the best happiness booster there is. Can you even look at one and try to not to smile? Impossible. They are the essence of carefree joy. Sunshine soaking into your outstretched arms. Endless skies and puffy blue clouds. Adventures and discoveries. There are a thousand good thoughts in each of their seeds and they show us to always keep our faces lifted to the sun. 

This summer, I had some sunflowers surprise me in the garden! They came up, presumably from seeds drop last year, and very early in Spring, I could see them pushing upward, each day gaining inches. They are now well over 7 feet tall and have given some glorious blooms. 

Our homeschool co-op planted a little plot of sunflowers that is growing nicely and that has started to bloom as well. I hope the kids will get to come out and see the miracle of growth and the fact that the little seed indeed has a giant plant inside! And to get to experience the same joy I have when I see those perky yellow blooms start to open up. 

I am working on an order of sunflowers for an interior designer. I played around with three designs and we settled on the ones with a long cording as the stem, which gives one the ability to use it as a tie-back for drapes, to tie on a purse, or more! They are all colors and shaped with a little fabric stiffener. 

We taught this as a class to the ladies in our felting group at the Elburn Library and they loved it. Planning on scheduling a class here at Esther's Place  in the next few weeks! And I got an order to make a wreath with sunflowers, too. 

So I'd say that this is the summer of sunflowers. What else can perk up your spirit and bring joy to the down trodden? An everlasting sunflower can! 

Memories Come Alive

This summer, I've been quite busy working on some really touching projects. I'd like to share these with you over the next few blog posts, so you can catch a glimpse of how my creativity works! 

I was approached by a customer, who also happens to be a local art teacher, about a commissioned piece for her mom. We started talking about what she was dreaming up, and I asked her to describe what she had in mind. She told me about a place that was nestled in the hills of northeastern Iowa, a place pure and wild and serene. A place where the honeysuckle grew on fence lines and sheep grazed the grassy hills. Where a bubbling creek ran alongside a gravel road, where the happy peals of laughter of children running barefoot through the woods rang out against the clear blue skies. A place where home was good cooking, served around a table of love, in a farmhouse built from the ground up. 

She gave me a batt of wool raised from that very farm, undoubtedly housed in an attic for a good many years, waiting for the right project to come along. It was tied in twine, and wrapped in brown craft paper. As I opened it up, and unrolled the lofty vanilla colored wool, I pondered what stories that fleece held. It was now up to me to let the wool tell its story. 

I asked if she had any pictures of the farmstead. She did not; however, she had a watercolor she did based only on her mother's recollections, as there were no known photographs. 

I had an idea of what I wanted to create, so I started in on the background. This was not hard- a few hills, a clear blue skies, a road. I used her wool as the base, and then started adding merino wool on the surface. I used silk hankies as clouds, which turned out to be a stunning choice. Yarns, Lincoln wool locks and wool neps were used in the road and grasses at the base of the piece. I designed and wet felted it in one evening. 

The next thing, which intimidated me, was the house. I chose to needle felt it on so I could get the detail of every little window pane, nook and cranny. Feeling quite jubilant so far, I took it to the sewing machine to thread paint some depth into the landscape. 

So there it sat for a few weeks while I mulled over the honeysuckle. I wanted to truly make one feel as though they were walking along a road, when all of a sudden the scent of honeysuckles struck them and took their memories back to another place, and another time. 

Then it came to me! I needed to make it dimensional and all of a sudden, in a flurry, it started to come together. Flowers and leaves were felted using prefelts and some thread painting and the fence posts were wet felted. I sewed them on after meticulous placement, then sewed in a spacer to the back to give depth. Yes! This was precisely what my mind had imagined. What a joyous moment when concept gives way to conception that leads to creativity and completion. 

The last finishing touch was the wire for the fence. I rooted through my stash for a antique looking fine gauge wire, and plyed it on my spindle to achieve the  correct scale. That got wrapped and added, and now my fence line had some worn wire fences for the honeysuckle to trail along. 

As I work on projects, I get many curious customers who get a sneak peak of the process. This leads to great idea cultivation, many good suggestions and sometimes, downright brilliance. Such was my conversation with Jodi, who stopped in for some fibers and stayed to hear about my piece. She was drawn to the honeysuckles right away and exclaimed that her company, Natural Refinery,  makes a honeysuckle perfume that smells just like passing by wild honeysuckles on a warm Spring day. She said how much it reminds people of their scents of childhood and takes their memories back. All this was without even telling her about how my customer had earlier mentioned scenting the piece with honeysuckle! She kindly offered to bring some out so I could include it with the piece as a gift. 

I remember listening to John Denver's "Country Roads" while working on the piece and thinking how important it is that we take time to send out roots deep into the place we call home. Everyone deserves a place that makes them flourish while surrounded by love, joy and security. In the harsh world we live in, sometimes we have to search and wander until we find that home. Sometimes its just a place in our hearts, or in our dreams. It might even be our heavenly home in the skies of glory. 

I'm so happy to be able to transform memories into art. It's a delicate and precious calling that I feel blessed to be a part of. As the stories are told to new generations, I hope this special place will captivate their hearts as well. 

Lovely Lilacs

In my childhood, I have some pretty vivid memories of lilacs. These memories are actually pretty humorous, looking back, but as a kid, they kind of made me cringe. You see, I was raised with a mom who never minded going out and getting what it was she had in mind to get. Every Spring, she was on a lilac pursuit. 

I think farm wives have always had a love affair with lilacs. They would take a cutting and plant it as soon as they arrived, setting down roots in their new home and giving their new surroundings the scent of familiarity. Old farmsteads always had a lilac bush, if not a lilac hedge. For such dainty beautiful flowers, the bushes were really quite large, woody and in the way. You'd have to keep it pruned or the lilacs would continue on their conquer of the world, one farmstead at a time. The beauty of the lilacs was that even long after the farm buildings had gone, the lilacs were still there. 

So my mom knew some abandoned farmsteads where the traditional purple lilacs grew and even one where the white lilacs grew. We'd pick a few bouquets every spring. I would quietly wonder when we'd get arrested and she and my brother would frolic around, picking armfuls of the sweet blossoms. 

One year, there was one of our usual haunts that was getting torn down for a housing development. My mom marched right in there and told them about the story of the lilac bush, and how it was the last bit of living history of the farmstead they were destroying, and that they were changing the face of rural America. All her years of protesting had served her well I guess, but if she could have tied herself to that lilac bush, I think she would have. She loves her causes, God bless her! 

I could have died. I shrunk into shadows as best I could for a thirteen year old and hoped when I opened my eyes, this embarrassment was over! The construction crew told her she should have on a hard hat to be here, but pick all you want lady, 'cuz the bush is coming down tomorrow. 

That was the death of yet another lilac and another legacy, and as those blooms fell to the ground, so did the the hopes and dreams of the farmstead. That farmstead would never again bloom brilliant in spring, or welcome the sounds of a barnyard, or grow food to feed our souls. But it did teach me something important that day, something that has stuck with me in the fifteen years that have passed since then. 

Stand up for what you believe in and have a voice. Tell the story if they cannot tell it themselves. It might be just a lilac, but in this world today, there are far more beautiful things that deserve to be treasured and are instead torn down and destroyed. Things that need us to tell their story. Those lilacs taught me that, and every Spring when they bloom, they remind me again. Whenever I see a lilac, I stick my head into it's heady blossoms to drink of their fragrant beauty. There's nothing like it in the world!