Patchwork Underground

I was so excited when my good friend and craft compadre, Lara, agreed to do an interview with me this week!

So who is Lara?  Well, when you look up “Earth Mama” in the dictionary Lara’s picture is there.  She is a fierce felter and fairy-maker who keeps a ridiculously cute house and raises these adorable twins of hers on magical home-cooked meals and awesome camping trips.  E-mailing questions back and forth, Lara confessed to me that she’s been “floating on a sea of inspiration” lately, and it definitely shows in her blog, A Mountain Hearth and at her Etsy Shop.

Ok, without further ado - the Interview!

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Q: What do you create?

Lara: I create handcrafts inspired by nature, from mostly natural materials and some found objects. With wool I make needle felted wall hangings, wet felted pouches and containers around rocks as forms, needle felted animals, whimsical creatures, and seasons dolls for nature tables. With shells, stones, and gemstone chips I create necklaces. With acorn caps, silk flowers, wool, pipe cleaners, and wooden beads I create tiny seasonal fairy dolls. I make magic glittery wands out of dried teasel stalks. I also love creating fairy houses with my children in the woods, our yard, and at the beach. I have busy hands, and I’m always creating something.

Q: When and how did you decide to pursue your craft as a business?
Lara: I seem to be the most inspired when I am creating things for other people or a specific purpose (I can tend to be rather utilitarian in things I make for myself), but over the past year I have been making a lot of things for the sake of making them as an outpouring of creative energy. It started to seem logical to try selling some of my work to help recoup costs of crafting materials. I began selling my fairy dolls at my daughter’s Waldorf school store, and people were really loving them. Then I sold some felted mermaids to another parent at the school, and it felt really good to have someone like my handcrafts so much that she wanted to compensate me for them. My future goal is to create a modern homestead and have some home based business ventures going to help support our family, and selling my crafts began to weave into this vision. I was inspired by Patchwork Underground’s Saturday Market booth and Etsy store, as well as the Etsy stores of the handwork teachers at the Waldorf school. It’s a wonderful on-line community of crafters. So, once I got my craft room set up in our farmhouse this winter, I opened my own Etsy store, and I’m really enjoying it!

Q: How did you come up with your business name?

Lara: The outdoors and home are the two most important realms in which I live my life, and my crafting really has a lot to do with both. The mountains are very important to me, and they really signify the places I always want to be. Home is also a huge part of my identity with my work of raising children and homemaking approached as a social art. I always strive to create a home around me that is reflective of who I am and the things that are important to my family. To me, the hearth really represents home, nurturing, warmth, and creating. I hold this ideal of a hearth in the mountains, but also like the idea of incorporating the mountains into one’s own hearth wherever that may be. I also noticed that the word “heart” is contained in “hearth.” It’s all about taking what I love and what inspires me, and channeling that into what I am creating.

Q: What does your “average” work day look like?

Lara: My “average” work day (and I write this with a laugh), begins with getting the kids all ready and into Eugene for school. Then I return to a very quiet peaceful house. A couple mornings a week we have a wonderful carpool, and that eliminates the whole drive into town and back. Then I get all the pressing and important chores done, and if they don’t take up the whole time, which they sometimes do, I sit down in my craft room to work on projects. Ideally I have a few hours to be creative. I also work in the evening sometimes when I don’t fall asleep right after the kids do. I tend to have more energy and inspiration in the morning, so that’s when I try to make time for crafting.

Q: What inspires you most?

Lara: Nature. The organic shapes and properties of stones, trees, branches, and streams seem to create their own art. Sometimes I’ll see a rock or a piece of wood and have an idea for something to make out of it, or I’ll just take it home to display all on it’s own. Aesthetically, the things I really like to look at are outside, so I try to aim for that in my crafting projects. I also find a lot of beauty and joy in the Waldorf style crafts made out of wools, wood, silks, and natural dyes, and I have been very inspired by everything I have seen at the Eugene Waldorf School. I really enjoy the seasonal focus and themes, and the seasons tables and fairy creatures incorporated in the classrooms. One of the kindergarten classrooms had a seasons table that left quite an impression on me. The top was draped in beautiful silks with a seasonal scene of wool characters and natural objects, and it was set up on top of some log rounds with interesting curvy shapes
creating a cave underneath large enough to stick your head in, and in the cave were rocks, more draped silks, and little gnomes. It really woke up my fun inner child of crafting. I started learning and teaching myself how to make a lot of toys for my children after that.

Q: What’s your favorite tool, technique or project?

Lara: I love needle felting wool. There is something very soothing about it, and the colors and textures seem to flow really well for me. I like the soft lines and features that can be achieved. It feels like a very versatile medium too. I can start out with a bunch of wool feeling like I could go any which way with it. I like that.

Q: What’s your earliest crafty memory?

Lara: My family was camping out at Lake Ozette on the Olympic Peninsula where I grew up, and my brother and I found this little cave in the roots of a hemlock tree where the lake had undercut the bank in higher water. The bank had a vein of this wonderful gray clay, and we made these little sculptures with balls of clay with tiny hemlock cones sticking out of the top. We lined them up on one of the roots with our mud pancakes and pretended to have a little shop. I was always making things indoors and outdoors.

Q: What the biggest challenge (if any) you’ve had to overcome in pursuing your craft?

Lara: Balancing parenting with crafting time. Raising kids takes a lot of energy, and sometimes I’m too worn out at the end of the day for working on my creative projects. There are always a multitude of things that need doing around the house, so I have to really work on time management and setting aside crafting time as a priority. Sometimes this means I have to just let the laundry, dishes, and cooking sit and try to forget about them while I focus on my creative endeavors for a little block of time. I also feel like I get a lot of inspiration from my children and how they experience nature and find a sense of magic in the world around them.

Q: If you had time, what new medium would you want to learn?

Lara: I would love to work with clay and make pottery bowls and dishes someday. There are some potters whose work I really admire, like Michael Wendt in Lewiston, Idaho. He uses Mt. Saint Helen’s ash in his glazes and local Idaho clay in his work. He glazes patterns on his pieces of local natural features swirled in with the colors. There’s something very grounding and earthy about pottery that I really like. The obstacles at this point are the time for learning the skill and access to equipment. I would want to be able to work on it at home, and that would require investments in a wheel and a kiln, although, building our own outdoor kiln could be a fun project someday…

Thanks, Lara!!!

Today’s spotlight is on awesome Oregonian beader and fiber artist, Bobbi Kirk (a.k.a Beadbabe).

I have been a fan of Bobbi’s work for ages and I was so excited when Bobbi graciously agreed to answer a few questions about her art and her creative process to share with ya’ll.  I invite you to check out more of Bobbi’s work at her etsy shop, her flikr site,  her website and read more about her creative adventures at her blog, Beading at the Beach.   I think you’ll agree that she is one seriously prolific crafter!

<Pause and Drum Roll>

….And now, without further ado, let’s get to the interview!!

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So, what do you create?
I make bead embroidered jewelry and bead and fiber wall pieces mostly, with occasional side trips into 3-D baskets and vessels.

I was doing beadwork nights and weekends while working as a graphic artist during the day, and when I got laid off, I just started doing the beadwork (and later bead and fiber) full time. I eventually had about 9 galleries carrying my work, which meant I could focus on making the work and leave selling it to them.

In the early days (early 90’s) I used business cards with the name, KirkWorks,  but sold my work in the galleries under my own name, Bobbi Kirk. My etsy shop has the same name as my blog, Beading at the Beach (I live at the central coast of Oregon) and I go by my online name of beadbabe49, since beads have been my major focus for almost 20 years.

I work from a small studio in my home (formerly known as the guest room) and I usually get up fairly early and check my emails while having my coffee there. Then I usually take about an hour to check on updated blogs and my etsy shop.

After that I’m ready to start working on any unfinished pieces from the day before or start working on a new piece. I have lunch around noon and then I either take a walk outside if it’s not too cold or wet or I go to our rec center and walk there…I try to do from 1-5 miles each day.
Then I do whatever household chores I have (grocery shopping, etc.) which gets me home around 3. I go back to the studio for a couple of hours and do some more work on my morning pieces. Or if the weather permits, I take the tray I work on out to the sun porch and bead or sew out there. And if I’m feeling restless, I’ll bag up whatever I’m working on and drive out to one of our ocean side parks and work in my van while enjoying the sun and the sound of the waves.

Then it’s time to fix dinner and spend some time with my husband before going back to the studio to check update my blog and decide what I have to finish and what I can save for the next day. This is also the time I do my research, if I need to, for any special series I’m working on, like my Basho Series I finished last year, which you can see at my flickr site.

For me it was learning that I’m not able to sell my own work. I simply don’t have the gift of being able to talk about my work in a way that makes people interested in buying it. I have friends who make their living at art and craft fairs and saturday markets and I admire them tremendously, but it’s not a skill I have.

What inspires you most?
Water…in all it’s various forms…from a tiny creek to the ocean, it all draws me. I love it’s fluidity, it’s many colors and especially how it breaks sunlight up into millions of tiny points of light. Sitting or walking next to water encourages a meditative state in me that allows me to be in that still, quiet center that I create from. And although I’m not always portraying water in my work, I do try to put some of it’s qualities, the flow and peace of it, into each piece I make.

Right now I’d have to say my favorite technique is a combination of improvisational bead embroidery and fabric manipulation using hand sewing. I feel I’m a part of the art cloth movement, a sort of sub-category of the slow cloth movement I first heard about on Elaine Lipson’s blog, Red Thread Studio, which honors the process of art/craft making as much as the finished product.

I have a photo of me at 4-years old sewing doll clothes with my 25-year old cousin helping me out…and I can actually remember that day.

Learning the difference between perfectionism and excellence. Striving for personal excellence is a goal I embrace…striving for perfection has kept me from enjoying the process of  making art/craft for many years, and from learning the many lessons of “mistakes”. As I’ve gotten older I’ve often seen that what I initially considered a flaw in a piece is what actually gives it soul and presence.

I’d love to have the time to learn how to sculpt my own original faces in polymer clay.

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Thanks for sitting in the hot seat, Bobbi!!  =)

All of the artists I feature in my “Spotlight On:” series are personal crafts inspirations to me. Seems to me that no crafter can really work in isolation because we’re all drawing off that single creative principal. The first artist I want to feature in my “Spotlight On:” series is Taryn and Jeff’s business, Mystic Orb Talismans.

For the last two years I’ve been vending at the Saturday Market and Holiday Market cooperative in Eugene, OR. These folks appeared one day out of nowhere with a completely magical booth filled with jewelery and other needful things. They are both very down-to-earth people and totally passionate about what they do. Check out the pics below to see what I mean….these pieces really speak for themselves.

Mystic Orb Talismans - Necklace with Abalone

Mystic Orb Talismans - Tayrn Wearing the Abalone Necklace

Celtic Knot Inlay Necklace also by Mystic Orb

Wonderland Box! Massive Scrimshaw.

Another Angle of the Wonderland Box

More scrimshaw. This necklace is built around a metal screw-cap container.

Oooo. I'm a vegetarian but antler never looked this good.

Adorable pic of Tayrn wearing another one of their necklaces. Love the carving on this one.

Peace pipe!

(Note: This show-and-tell could go on for ages. I spend years in their booth picking everything up and trying it on. It was a struggle to restrain myself from uploading everything onto this post.)

About technique: The little line-drawings are done using an ancient technique called scrimshaw. Jeff scratches the image into bone (or sometimes stone) and then fills the carving in with ink. These images are TINY - he uses a needle-sized tool and a magnifying glass to do it. I never even knew what scrimshaw was before I met him. I guess it’s a sailor thing. (FYI, I strongly suspect these folks were a pirate duo in a past life.)

Jeff also does fantastic wood-carvings and inlays with whatever kinds of rocks he can get his hands on. Lately he’s been using picture jasper in his work which just really gives me the willies! I LOVE picture jasper and the organic shapes in the stone really compliment his earthy designs.

If you want to read more about Taryn and Jeff (and maybe check out pictures of their little goats or their on-going home renovation project!) visit their website, http://www.mysticorbtalismans.com or check out their Etsy shop at http://mysticorbtalismans.etsy.com. They’re new to Etsy and they’re already 70+ listings strong! These folks are truely epic crafters….