Scenes From the New Art & Craft Social

June 21, 2019

We held our first meeting of the newly returned Art & Craft Social on Wednesday evening at the nə́c̓aʔmat ct Strathcona Branch library. It was a fantastic event with a great turn out. I think everyone enjoyed working together, sharing projects, and taking in the creative energy of the room.

The final photo is of the new sashiko stitching project I started at the Social. I’m making a hand-stitched runner for the upcycled side-table I redid last year.

If you’re interested in attending a future Art & Craft Social event, please sign up for our newsletter. We’ll have another event scheduled in September.

Work In Progress: A New Sashiko Stitching Project

June 12, 2019

I restarted this sashiko stitching project at the end of May after stalling out on it for a few months. I originally purchased a suiting fabric to make a piece but hating working with the stretchy fabric that seemed to resist my needle. I decided to switch to a new material and picked up a piece of linen/cotton blend fabric in indigo from Dressew to start again.

It was the right thing to do because the suiting was totally the wrong type of fabric to work with for stitching. I’ve been much more enthusiastic about working on this after switching materials.

I used a stencil to trace out the design of curved repeating lines. It actually inspired me to create a similar design as a paper cut piece (which I’ll share in another post). I worked on this a little bit over a week long vacation to Salt Spring Island last week and was happy to get about halfway to completion.

The finished piece is part of a trade with my friend, Barb. She will be transforming it into a throw pillow.

Settling Into A New Studio Space

April 10, 20194 Comments

One of the goals I’d hoped to accomplish last year but instead got pushed to this year because of the flood, was to look for a studio space outside of my home. Doing it has always felt like an unattainable pipe dream in this city of unaffordable rent, but I’d really outgrown my tiny second bedroom. I felt the space was putting hard limits on growing as an artist and stifling my ability to create larger work.

I looked at a few different space options in January and February of this year, and have ended up in a shared studio in the BC Artscape run Sun Wah building in Chinatown. My new studio is more than double the 80 sqft of the second bedroom I’d been working out of for years. I finally have room for a paper file to store work and supplies, and also a second work table. It feels amazing to have this new expanded work area, with more surface areas to place things (instead of on my bed), and room for storage.

I had my first open studio last weekend, and many friends and acquaintances dropped by for a visit to see the space. They all seemed as excited as I am about the whole thing. I can’t wait to see how this will help me grow as an artist.

1 Second A Day of Patterns

March 11, 2019

In February I continued doing 1 Second A Day Videos as a creative side project. This time I decided to focus on the theme of collecting patterns. This was really fun to do because it forced me to pay more attention to my surroundings, especially in places I walk all the time. It was also fairly challenging because some days there just weren’t any interesting patterns to find.

I love the end result of the collected patterns, and decided to continue with the same theme for my videos in March.

Reading Habit For Life

March 8, 2019

Lately I’ve been often asked how I manage to read so many books, usually because I share my recent reads on Instagram Stories. I guess people have noticed I share a new book almost every week.

I’ve always been an enthusiastic reader of books, but when I first moved to Vancouver almost fifteen years ago I lost the habit. I couldn’t afford to buy books very often, and I stopped making the time to read. I think the internet took over at this point and that’s where my free time would go.

I don’t remember exactly what brought me back to enthusiastic reading again, but I’ve been tracking the number of books I read using Good Reads since 2012. I read 58 books that year, and since then the number of books I read over the course of 365 days has increased to 71 as of 2018. I usually aim for 60 books and easily surpass that number.

My secret weapon to reading lots of books over all these years has been to borrow them from the library. I can request books using their app, which sometimes gets out of hand these days because there’s no longer a limit on the number you can request each year. The limit used to be 50, and I’d always blow through that and hope a kind librarian would grant me a few more to get me to the end of the year. These days I have between 12 to 20 books on hold at any given time.

I love the library, and probably go in there at least once a week to drop off and/or pick up books. Library books give you a built in deadline to read and finish a book before the date it is due. I think if I didn’t have that, and access to an all-you-can-read amount of books, I would not be able to read as much as I do.

So there are my hot tips if “reading more books” is on your list of goals this year. Use Good Reads to track the number of books you read, and use the VPL app to request books at the drop of a hat. Now stop looking at the internet and go read a book.

A Beautiful Side Table Reborn

January 14, 2019

I thrifted this side table all the way back in June 2012 from an interesting furniture store no longer in business on The Drive. I was walking past the shop and the table was sitting outside with a note on it asking who would be the one to make it beautiful again. At a $15 price tag, I decided it was going to be me.

Flash forward six and a half(ish) years to October 2018 when I finally took an orbital sander to this piece. It was my last project during the Tools for Women Residency at MakerLabs in the fall. I did the bulk of the sanding over a few hours one afternoon, removing a yellowed varnish, and smoothing out all the nicks and scratches. I have no Before photo to prove it, but this little table was in rough shape when I bought it.

My work with the orbital sander (and three progressively finer grain sand paper) brought out the beauty of the natural wood. I did the fine details of the concentric circles on the door and the lines on the legs by hand. Hand-sanding is my least favourite thing to do, so I procrastinated this part of the project for another month and a half.

I was determined to finish this off before the end of the year, so over Christmas I finished sanding and moved on to staining it with a natural varnish to emphasize the beauty of the wood.

It looks incredible now, and I’m proud of the work I put into it.

I regret that it took me so long to tackle this project, but it was my introduction to an orbital sander through MakerLabs that was the key to finally getting it done.

An Updated Container of Good Things

January 7, 2019

In 2018 I started the habit of noting good things down on paper that happened throughout the year and collecting them in a special container. This project is inspired by Elizabeth Gilbert’s Happiness Jar, and it was a much-needed project of looking at the good in what was a difficult year.

I opened the container on New Year’s Eve and read through all of the notes. I was pleasantly surprised to see how many I’d collected because there were a few periods of time I’d forgotten to keep up with the habit (especially the two months we were away). There were many notes about good meals with friends, which was not a surprise at all.

I decided to give the Container of Good Things an update this year. It’s a repurposed tin from Muji that I’d covered in washi tape. I peeled it all off, covered the tin with white paper, and then added brand new washi tape in layers. It had always bothered me that the print on the tin showed through the tape and made the colours dull. The new tin in a pleasing blast of colour and pattern, and I love looking at it all the time. It helps keep it top of mind.

I also prepped a new batch of origami paper to use for the notes, and of course they are also covered in pattern and colour.

2018: Year End Review In Twelve Photos

January 2, 2019

It’s my annual year end review of some of the things I made over the course of the previous twelve months. It started off as a difficult year because of the flood, and I only recently realized I spend almost seven months without a dedicated studio. I worked on a lot of small projects, struggled with feelings of failure, and of never getting enough done. I’m working on all of those things, because I do enough, I have enough, and I am enough.

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

Fingers-crossed for a super productive, and fulfilling 2019!

30 Days of Handmade Comes to An End

November 28, 2018

As I wrap up a month of sharing handmade items from my personal collection on Instagram, I thought I’d share a few more of these on my blog. It’s been challenging to keep up with this every day, and also take good photos of the pieces I’ve shared without going into an elaborate photo shoot.

Jasna Sokolovic O’Connell

Some of the things I realized as I did this is: I have a lot of ceramics and not just functional pieces like mugs, I have many unusual pieces of art in my collection, and there are many pieces I have had for ten years or more and I still love them (as it should be).

Melanie Elery

Aaron Moran

Cynthia Lyman (or Wyman?)

Julie Moon

The Eastside Culture Crawl happened a week or so ago and I acquired the beautiful painting below from Pilar Mehlis, and two tiny ceramics from Kayo Benson. So the collection continues to grow. It was love at first sight with the painting.

Pilar Mehlis

Sarah Pike

Sandeep Johal

Bullfinch Barbary

The enamel necklace above is one of the pieces I’ve had for more than ten years. I continue to wear this regularly and treasure it because the necklace is a very special piece. The series has been a great way to reflect upon the things I have, and a strong reminder to buy things I love with the intention of possessing them in the long term.

Artists To Visit During Culture Crawl 2018

November 12, 2018

The annual Eastside Culture Crawl kicks off this week, and I am looking forward to visiting my fellow artists in their studios. If you’re planning to attend here is a short list of recommended people to visit.