My mom and sisters and I are all fans of the Kawartha Turtle Trauma Centre, a great charity that works to support Ontario’s native turtles. Many native turtle species are on the ‘at risk’ list, and KTTC work to educate the public, conserve wetlands, and make Ontario a safer place for turtles.
I’m generally not a big fan of charities, but this one’s a good one, in my opinion.
Anyhow, they had a fund raiser planned called ‘The Art of the Turtle,’ and asked artists to create turtle ornaments and donate them to sell at their event. We decided to each make an ornament for this great cause.
As you can see, the kittens were extremely helpful as I was working, holding the fabric so that it didn’t slip. I
I didn’t have a lot of time to get to this project, so worked on it while I was home for Thanksgiving back in October.
I’d wanted to do something sparkly to catch the light, but was more drawn to embroidery, and knew I could make something that glowed with colour. I research some Metis and Northern European embroidery and beadwork, and got to work.
Embroidering is a nice way to spend the time, particularly if you’ve got a happy cat – or a whole clutch of happy kittens – in your lap (as long as they don’t get too interested in your embroidery floss).
Since I’m working on a dark felt, and didn’t have a good way to draw on it, I sketched out the basic pattern in white thread.
I embroidered the outline in chain stitch, one of my least-favourtite stitches to do, but one that fills space with colour pretty fast.
Then I began to fill in the sections of the shell; at first, I was doing backstitch, but switched back to chain stitch because it wasn’t showing the colours very well.
The shell, nearly complete.
I try to keep the back neat and tidy, but usually it just looks like a mess, especially if I know it will be hidden.I cut out pieces for the head, legs, and tail from more of the green felt.The kittens were helping me decide which way the turtle’s front legs should go.I don’t love using glue guns for this kind of thing, but it was the easiest way to keep the layers together so that I could sew without them slipping.Nearly finished!The final project!
I’ve been having a busy and stressful couple of weeks, so I’m not sure if this counts as art, but I feel like it does, so it’s going to have to do.
I’m not an expert at preserving, but it’s something we’ve been doing since I was a kid, when we would spend hot mornings at the U Pick farms, and long afternoons putting up jars of strawberry and raspberry jam.
When I moved to Toronto, I left most of my canning tools at my Mom’s house ((along with my favourite baking dishes!)), because I moved in a hurry and wasn’t sure how long I’d be staying. So last year I didn’t do any canning at all, and very little baking.
My summers are generally very busy, since I run Summer festivals and events for a living, but I almost always find time to do some preserving when the produce is cheap and plentiful. The trick is really to have all of the things you need ready to go, so that when you see a bushel of red peppers going super-cheap, you can take is home and be canning Roasted Red Pepper-Tomato Ketchup that evening.
After stewing the ingredients together, you fill mason jars with the hot fruit mixture.
So last weekend I noticed that flats of mangoes were pretty cheap, and I finally got around to buying one of those Bernardin home canning starter kits, which includes the giant pot, funnel, and jar tongs (as well as some other random stuff, like a DVD on canning.). You don’t need to buy one of these, but it is a handy way to get everything you need in one shot. It even comes with four one-cup mason jars, though that won’t get you very far.
Like a lot of older skills, people think it’s super-complicated to make preserves (or bake), but the main activities are washing – the ingredients, the tools, your hands – and peeling/cutting up the ingredients. Then you stew them up in a pot, add a few preservative ingredients like sugar and vinegar, et voila! You have jam, or ketchup, or chutney!
Yes, after that you move on to the canning process, which is usually another half an hour, and is super-anti-climactic if you think canning is complicated, but generally it means pouring your preserves into sterile jars, covering them with sterile lids, and then submerging them in boiling water for 20 minutes or so. ((This is a rough description, by no means a recipe – always check a canning site like Bernardin for proper directions! They’ve also got tonnes of really good recipes for all kinds of preserves.))
Placing the jars in the hot water bath to sterilize and seal them.
I’ve made this mango chutney a few times; it’s a recipe I cobbled together a few years ago when I made an impulse buy of a carton of over-ripe mangoes for $3. You can find it over on my personal website; don’t mess with the spices, unless you’re adding a little extra coriander, which is my favourite bit. Everytime I get a bite of chutney with a coriander seed, it’s like heaven.
The best part of the whole process is really that bit at the end, when you’re pulling the jars out of the boiling-water bath, and setting them somewhere to settle for the night. Not only do you get the pleasure of seeing those lovely jars all lined up with delicious food that you made, but there’s that pleasing “Thwok!” as the lids suction down, sealing the jars.
I really like this recipe; it tastes amazing on fried foods like latkes, samosas, or a grilled cheese sandwich (seriously, try it!). And it feels good to finally have the tools to preserve things in my own house again!
This batch made 9 one-cup jars of delicious mango chutney!
So I’m really, really late posting. I’d been learning a song for the past two weeks, and was finally getting to a point where I was pretty happy with it, when I sat to record. Listening back, I was kind-of overwhelmed by how much I hate the ukulele accompaniment; whether it’s the arrangement, or my playing, or whatever, I re-recorded it over and over, and never felt any better about it. I kept procrastinating, hoping I’d find a way to make it work, but in the end I just had to admit defeat.
So instead of a new song I’m posting an old piece of embroidery.
It’s something I made for Cassie, when she was travelling south to take a class in Desert Ecology. Since she was going to the desert, I thought I’d make her a piece of embroidery that she could attach to her hat, kind-of in the style of the French Foreign Legion.
I’d wanted to make it a lot more elaborate than I had time to do – I run Summer events, so as the weather warms my free time dries up. I remember that I was still working on the chain of flowers as we drove Cassie to meet up with her class in Southern Ontario, and I finished it off just in time.
The finished/unfinished nature of this particular project is kind-of obvious – the placement of all of the elements is random, because the white space between them was was supposed to be busy with flowers and images and colours.
This was a while ago, before sugar skulls appeared on everything, so I’m not sure if that makes it more or less culturally appropriative, but I was trying to represent that she’d be in the desert in both the southern U.S. and northern Mexico, which is why I included it (Also, I find them fascinating and pretty). The cactus is the universally-recognizable symbol for North American desert (even if it’s not found in all of them, Looney Tunes taught me that deserts have Saguaro cactus.), and of course, a howling wolf.
I’m most proud of the wolf; it’s probably the best-drawn and executed of anything on this piece. I feel a bit sheepish about having embroidered a howling wolf on something, but let’s just pretend I was embroidering it ironically, okay?
I’d really enjoyed creating a linoprint last year when I was working at Harbourfront Centre, and had been thinking of buying some supplies and trying it out again in a slightly less rushed situation. While I was home a month or two ago, my mom and sisters and I went to an auction, where I was lucky enough to snag a box full of linocutting supplies – carving tools and breyers, some (very old) ink and lino.
This past weekend I finally made it an art supply store, and picked up some fresh ink and some of the newer, rubbery lino. I sketched out an octopus and transferred it to the lino. Unfortunately, I find that this rubbery lino is a difficult medium – it’s not so bad if you’re using it to carve lines, but if you’re carving away a lot of material, it becomes quite annoying. I probably just need to work with it more, and learn how to work with the medium instead of struggling against it.
In the end, this turned out much better than I thought it was going to, but I’m still annoyed but a few things – the octopus’ highest tentacle didn’t turn out right, even in the sketch, and a lot of the lines aren’t very clean. I also don’t quite have the printing technique down, so I’m not getting a very clean print.
I may do some more work on the linocut, to see if I can clean it up and make it something that i’m happier with, and I may add some elements to the final prints with a pen or some other inks. We’ll see.
This was one of my first weaving projects. I made it for my Mother for Christmas one year.
I bought a lot of yarn at an auction and used it in several scarves. This is a wool blend and quite fine. The woman that had previously owned the yarn used it in a knitting machine. She got her yarn from the old woollen mill in town. I also bought (by mistake) her knitting machine. I just didn’t want to learn another craft so I haven’t used it.
When I moved to Toronto, I had the vague plan to draw a postcard every week to send to my mom and sisters back home. I’ve lived here a year, and so far I think I’ve sent three. This is a drawing of a sugar skull or Calavera. In Mexico, they’re used as part of the Catholic celebration of the Day of the Dead. They’ve kind-of become a popular decorative design, and I’ve been seeing them pop up on things like purses and t-shirts.
I’m not necessarily the best at drawing – you can see a lot of pencil lines, and the inked lines are a bit inconsistent. I’m fairly happy with it anyway; it was a lot of fun to draw.
I dyed the unspun wool with Kool-Aid, and then I spun it in rainbow order. Then I knit the scarf. I thought I would make a hat to match and knit it from the pattern in this Pattons knitting book. The pattern is actually a Fair Isle pattern, but I just knit it all from my rainbow wool.
This is the same pattern (with the Fair Isle pattern). This hand spun wool was dyed with Black Walnuts, Onion Skins and Goldenrod.
My sister bought me a kit for Christmas one year to make these fiddlehead mittens from Tanis Fibre Arts. They have a knitted lining and are super warm. This was my first attempt at fair isle knitting or knitting with several colours. I love the result, but found the pattern for the lining to be a challenge because it was too big. I re-knit the one mitt’s lining several times, but didn’t redo the other, so it’s a bit bunched in the end. I wear them anyway, I love knitting!
My mom and sisters and I are all fans of the Kawartha Turtle Trauma Centre, a great charity that works to support Ontario’s native turtles. Many native turtle species are on the ‘at risk’ list, and KTTC work to educate the public, conserve wetlands, and make Ontario a safer place for turtles.
