Beginner weaving workshop at RAW

Ladybug in your ear...

new things are happening at the studio in June. The studio will now be open for life drawing classes with live models wearing everything, nothing and other things. Making drawing, painting, photography and sculpture experiences that honour the mystic feminine. Check in on our calendar for June happenings.

New workshop at Raw

Beginner Weaving with Janna:

This is a foundational weaving workshop. If you have never woven before this is the workshop for you!

Students will learn how to warp up, and weave a scarf using a number of techniques for variation in patterns, from plain weave to basket weave and twill, as well as learn and experiment with different ways of achieving a variety of textures.

Workshops are limited to a total of 4 students...so get your spot!

$75.00 Cost includes yarn for warp. Students are required to bring yarn for weft- anything you want ....bring at least 150 grams. There will be yarn available for purchase at the studio.

This is a one day workshop (6 1/2 hours- with a half hour lunch break)

to register go to www.textilesclass.com

for more about Janna go to www.jannamaria.com

More on the Felted Eggs...

Officially, Denise is a pathologist. But I'm beginning to suspect that she's studying to be a Waldorf Kindergarten teacher on the side.
I told her that I thought her felted eggs were great and she came back with even more good tips from her experience. I've added the links.

Part of the trick I think is getting it wet and
medium hot and just compressing the wool for a few minutes (pre-felting maybe?) before you try to really felt. We did it at Luke's school and all the 4 year olds needed help and all the 5 year olds were slow, but self sufficient. I think it was the size of their hands. But somewhere between the 5 and the 10 minute mark it just - zap- felts all at once and is tight with no extra wool.

Extensions - with a bigger egg (Michaels arts and crafts store used to sell wooden ostrich and goose size eggs) you can make a fanciful, lots of color egg and put a sewn felt or needle felted dragon inside. Oh my yes.

Another cool thing is you can use the same technique to make flowers. For instance, crocuses have that shape or tulips. Varying colors appropriately and separately felting the stem then just sewing them together. There's a lady in BC called Suzanne Down who does the crocus version and uses it as a fairy house.Luke is offering to share candy! and so I must go.
~D

By the way -- Suzanne Down is going to be one of the featured presenters at the upcoming Healthy Families Conference at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, April 18 & 19
~R.

Happy Easter!

We tried to make little egg/chick combos like these down at RAW and we couldn't get them to work! So Denise provided us with the goods here, and a link to some instructions to boot --
Denise says:

Hi all! These are terribly fun to make and perfectly safe for little hands. In fact, they make little hands really clean. You need to find a water proof egg shape - you can use a wooden egg, a stone or even a plastic egg. It's simple wet felting, it works EVERY time, and you can get directions and pictures from Fiona Duthie . I made them with my son, it takes about 10 minutes an egg. But it would be awesome fun to make them secretly by yourself, have them hang around and then have the chicks appear as an easter surprise. Happy Felting! Denise.

Birthday Present Felted Fruit

Georgia's birthday was on the 21st of March (!) but I wanted to share with you her favourite gift -- the felted food and kitchen accessories sent to her by her Aunt Denise & family in Ottawa (Denise provides me with many fabulous posts, see previous)
I'm inspired to make a bunch of these goodies for other kids I know for birthdays. And I think it's a kid-friendly project, too --
I haven't tried, yet, but I'm sure 4 yr old Georgia would be capable of cutting out the pieces of old felted sweater for me, if not helping with the stitching.
Denise is a genius of gifts for kids; she sends treasure boxes of little, bite-size, fascinating open-ended accessories & activities that engage Georgia for hours. I'm taking notes.
This felted fruit & pizza came with a tablecloth, bandana-apron with pretty ribbon, and a little 'menu' titled 'Georgia's Garden Grill', with prices listed for a bunch of cute stuff and some photos of G and her cousins from last summer in Nova Scotia. There was also a jar of loose-leaf 'tea' (dried roses) and some game ideas.

Georgia's Version: Daisy Basket

Here's how Georgia's Version of the Daisy Basket worked out.
We cut the base out of an old Kandinsky art calendar
(Russian abstract expressionist painter); then used the deep navy chunky yarn I had lying around; and we finished it off by sewing a strip of black paper around the outside of the top edge.
Georgia likes to do everything 'together', a very intensive format where she and I break up all the steps into small bits, and she does all the small bits that she can do, and I assist. And sometimes, if the project isn't going fast enough for her, then she'll ask me (or I'll offer) to do a bunch quickly. In this case, she insisted on doing all the weaving while I held & turned the basket base & adjusted the tension. She did a few stitches on the top edge but generally found the needle too hard to push through the needle holes I had pre-made, so was happy to let me finish it off quickly so she could enjoy the results.

Weaving for Preschoolers...

This is another little post courtesy of my sister-in-law, Denise, in Ottawa. She's jazzed about weaving --- as are we, down at the studio, and more on that later... in the meantime, I'm going to try this project with my 4yr old Georgia and I'll let you know how it goes.
Denise writes:
I took a weaving class and fell in love. It's so peaceful to weave. I used a rigid heddle loom (which I'm wanting to buy, though maybe I'll rent one first). So of course I came home all excited for Luke to try weaving with our cute little INKLE loom and of course it was a disaster. The yarn kept coming off our loom and we just didn't have any fun at all.
But wait! That can't be the end of our story.
We had a much happier time weaving onto a plastic fruit basket. And, silly me, as we put the fruit basket onto the Easter Nature Table, we found the baskets he had already woven. At Parsifal Waldorf School (last year) his class decorated a simple paper daisy by weaving yarn in and out around the petals and thus turned the flat daisy into a bowl. A handle makes it a basket.
His favorite type of weaving is a circle song: "The thread follows the needle, in and out the needle goes. The thread follows the needle, this is the way we mend our clothes." While they are singing, the kids move in and out through a circle of friends.

~R.

Spring Bunnies at the Fair

We were at the Strathcona Spring Fair on Saturday afternoon, meeting cool folks & families who live 'round East Van. Strathcona is my favourite neighbourhood in Vancouver; it has such magic that when I walk around, the creative buzz makes my ears ring! This is the prime real estate for the remarkable Eastside Culture Crawl, a free art event in late November during which many of the artists open their studios for tours and shopping -- I highly recommend it.
(Our studio at 1875 Powell is just outside the official eastern boundary of the Crawl at Commercial; but if you head over to see the amazing folks in the live-work ARC building anyway, we're just a hop from them, beside Dockers Diner.)
The Spring Fair is like a mega block party and is organized (in part?) by Milisa Gardy of Honey Bee Photography; I'm sure she must be associated with a small army of other volunteers. The weather was lovely, Suzanne brought two of her angora rabbits and her 'cart of wares' and Henna and I did demos of spinning and needlefelting.
If you're in the neighbourhood, I would highly recommend coming out for the Harvest Festival that Milisa et al. is going to be putting on in the fall, and shop the Crawl for Christmas
~R.

Slippers, Slippers...

This is 13yr old Sage working on her slippers.... no,
they're not the first pair she's made, don't worry.
Suzanne did slippers as a class project with her grade 7's at the Vancouver Waldorf School in the fall; they rolled out a flat sheet of felt to the soft-felted stage; then cut out a simple sole and vamp/heel shape, sewed them up, and finished the slippers to to hard-felted stage right on their feet, using a big wooden washtub.
Suzanne herself makes slippers right on a wooden foot last (collected from antique shops over the years). There's also a Scandinavian method described really well in Pat Sparks' book Scandinavian Style Feltmaking.
We're a little bit obsessed with felted slippers down here... so far no one
has topped Suzanne's Gypsy Slippers (the green ones with the elf-point toes) --- she won an award for them at last fall's One of a Kind Show in Vancouver.
If you want to make some too, then sign up for Felting on Sunday afternoons or Monday nights with Suzanne -- you gotta start somewhere!

Teaching a Preschooler to Sew...

I've tried to teach my 4yrold to sew before and it hasn't been successful -- took too long to get anywhere, not interesting projects, and couldn't get the thread to go in-out-in-out in a (relatively) coherent line. Thus, I could relate to Denise's story about the kindergarten kids getting rather muddled when confronted with needle and thread (from yesterday's post).
However, I was hanging out with one of the many awesome preschool moms I know, and she had this cool book called 'The Creative Family', by a woman named Amanda Blake Soule (in case you haven't heard of her already....). Wow.
Which is how I was re-introduced to SEWING CARDS! I'm not going to post a link because there are so many, just google 'sewing cards' -- or better yet, work with your little one to make your own....
I used a shape she likes (heart, out of cardstock), punched a few holes, threaded a big straight needle, and gave her some stuffing for the inside to make it puffy (novelty value). She was GRACEFUL with the needle, and loved it, and I was amazed.

Handwork 'Can's' and 'Can't's' with little kids...

This is from a story from my sister-in-law Denise, in Ottawa.
I love her dry snapshot of (non) age-appropriate handwork!
I am often guilty of overestimating my own 4yro's comprehension, and so I'm grateful for Suzanne's help and insight from the Waldorf handwork pedagogy. Our craft sessions are more fun and satisfying.
Hooray for Sunday morning Playshops at the RAW Studio with Suzanne!

I don't know what school Luke goes to, only that it's somewhere in Ottawa....
Yesterday I was tasked with having a table of 6 kindergarten kids cut up pieces of fabric so we could sew a vest together. A. They wanted to cut little teeny tiny pieces. B. There was no pattern of a vest. C. The teacher thought the kids could sew with real needles and thread. Um, frankly, no. In fact, no to all of those. We made a paper mock up of a vest. We had a big talk about big and small pieces and they taped pieces of fabric to the paper vest. So, the teacher thought we could staple them on to be more secure. And, again, um, no, we're not having a paper vest! Luke and I took everything home, cut two vests out of old fleecy things that were stained with paint or mystery substances and fabric glued (yay, latex liqui-stitch) everything on. They look awesome and it took minutes! In fact we made two! The kids are putting on a "Elves and the Shoemaker" play. I am very very pleased with our vests and with our having found a reasonable (read quick and easy!) way to make them that did not require band-aids. Although I am allergic to latex, so I got hives. But otherwise a smashing success!

Teen Spring Break Fashion Projects

Here's 12yr old Summer wearing a hat that she designed and made down at the RAW Studio last week --
This was her process:
She felted the crown over a ball to get a basic dome shape, and she didn't like it much. So I encouraged her to think about what hat shape she DOES like and we looked at some options online -- she got really excited about a hat she remembered seeing in a movie, so we looked it up on YouTube.
So we took her head measurement and drafted a brim -- she really got excited about drafting and altering a paper pattern to fit herself! And she sewed it up and then indigo-dyed it in our vat.
Her enthusiasm encouraged Henna and I to put together a few Fashion Mini Projects for Teens for spring break:



Spring Break Fashion Mini Projects for Teens

1/Main St Wristies $30
wet felt with wool
2/Frances Skinny Scarf $30
wet felt wool with silk
3/Skull, Rose, etc Art Patches $25
sew different stitches to look clean & neat
4/Lisa Slouch Sox $25
adjust patterns to fit you
5/Alabama Corset T $40
make a simple garment to fit you

Wed 18th 1-4pm &/or Fri 20th 1-4pm
Open Studio with Instructors, Do one project or several.
Pre-Registration required, group sizes small
Deadline: March 16th
Reserve your spot:
therawstudio@gmail.com
1875 Powell St Vancouver www.therawstudio.com

New Moon Gathering at RAW

Hello Lovelies,
We're having another of our little Gatherings down at the studio next Wednesday night --
it's the New Moon again already. Some light libations, mellow folk, art & objects of desire are what we have on offerWhy don't you join us for a bit? We've been very busy making carpets and thinking up new things to make, we'd love to show them off...

Wednesday Night February 25, 7-10pm
the RAW Studio, 1875 Powell St

Til then,
Suzanne

Seeking Members & Associates:

We are inviting expressions of interest from individuals who would like to be part of our Studio community. We have three levels of Membership:

We are seeking people who:

- Appreciate and practice the diversity of textile arts & craft
- Want the benefits & opportunities that come with working in a co-operative studio setting
- Seek access to affordable, equipped studio space for personal use or professional production; exhibition and sales
- Understand the benefits & responsibilities of being part of and contributing to a co-operative studio community
- Are interested in sharing knowledge and skills through teaching and collaboration
- Are ready to commit a fee of $50 and variable monthly studio fees, depending on participation
- Can contribute to co-op activities such as promotion, business development & maintenance

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For further information or to become involved, please contact us