The members of the Sunshine Coast Spinners and Weavers Guild are thinking locally these days.
The display, Fibres Plus, of designer garments and yarns at the Seaside Centre last Friday and Saturday was not so much a craft fair sale, but a gorgeous exhibition of fibre arts. And many of the fibres used in the display were gathered on the Sunshine Coast.
“They’re hand-spun, hand-woven and mostly hand-dyed,” said Guild president Ann Harmer.
She wore a scarf patterned with dyes from mushrooms that she finds near her home, and she directed attention towards an entire table using natural dyes found in the wild or in gardens to produce wool in a rainbow of colours. There were bright blues from indigo grown on the Coast, rich browns from onion skins, soft yellows from marigolds and mossy greens from marjoram.
Weaver Deanna Pilling explained to visitors how the Fibreshed project had been set up (www.sunshinecoastfibreshed.ca). It’s a non-profit organization that hopes to build and sustain a thriving bio-regional textile and fibre community.
“It’s like the 100-mile diet,” she said, showing the wool gathered from a local sheep called Olivia that offered up its shearings to make skeins of yarn that were then turned into two shawls on display.
Fibreshed tries to work with available materials, using what’s grown here. The goal is to have all the skilled fibre artisans from Langdale to Lund show how we can clothe ourselves locally using our own regional agriculture for our fibres and gathering our own dye plants, thus strengthening the local economy.
Spinner Shirley Hall understands that. She was using her spinning wheel to turn dog hair into yarn; apparently it sheds water very well just like a wet dog on a rainy day. Yvonne Stowell of the Fibreworks Gallery and Studio in Madeira Park demonstrated how she worked with wool taken from alpacas living on Thormanby Island.
Ursula Bentz added felting to the mix of weaving and dyeing; she also showed some stylish, contemporary designs in vests and apparel — true fabric art.
The Fibres Plus show invited a jeweller, Darla Van Horne, and a woodworker, Albert Edge, to join the group. Though they use different crafting materials than the weavers, the colours and natural nature of Van Horne’s iron and gold alloy work and Edge’s wooden boxes seemed to fit with the show.
More about the Guild can be found at www.scswg.org
