Search results (tags) for: "weaving"

High End Etsy: Fiber Arts

2008-10-09T16:05:00-05:00

What does one gain from raising one's own alpacas? Bonnie Samuel aka bonniesamueldesign.etsy.com knows the value of homegrown fiber, the material she works with to create unique knit and woven pieces. "My knowledge of the nature and structure of natural fibers — from the impact of animal husbandry on quality production to the end product — gives me a unique understanding of certain fibers in design." But it's not just the intimate knowledge of raising animals — she has also trained in how to sort and grade her annual clip. "Working with natural fibers brings the beauty of nature's palette and textures to your work."

Bonnie approached Etsy's blog, the Storque, with her story and with those of other high-end fiber artists on Etsy. These artisans steep their fibers in their deep skill and knowledge, and their high-end items' price points reflect that. We invited them to explain what's behind the drape of a sumptuously woven shawl or the details of a painstakingly crocheted art necklace.

[Jesse James & John Brown, two of Bonnie's alpacas]

Etsy offers a grand opportunity to both emerging and established fiber artisans. Since its inception, Etsy has evolved through layers of quality each in turn attracting buyers at the emerging level.

Truly talented fiber artists – weavers, dyers, textile designers, skilled knitters, art quilters and those reviving traditional fiber crafts in new dimensions – are now establishing shops on Etsy. The traditional “art” market is out of reach for many artists because of costs to enter the market of galleries, agents and promotion, while Etsy, however, offers wide internet exposure for little cost. Indeed, this trend may be changing the way art is marketed and sold as Etsy increasingly becomes the place to find and purchase unique and finely crafted, high quality art pieces in many mediums.

We’ve chosen just a few fiber artisans of the many talented on Etsy to showcase here...

Hedda Vatter aka HeddaVatter, who lives in Rapina, Estonia, creates wearable beauty in crochet.

As a romantic, I love crocheting and lace. I learned to crochet in school when I was eight years old. My favorite materials are high quality cotton crochet thread, linen and worsted for the woolen lace.

I am inspired by Irish lace in all of its richness and beauty. I try to bring the elements of the old lace into modern day using the lace for accessories and jewelry. I also add beads to Irish lace which makes it even more gorgeous. I have added felt, Irish lace and mond stones to my jewelry – the result is an interesting contrast. Red mélange crocheted necklace (pictured above) is inspired by Irish lace. The cotton thread is hand dyed, making the necklace unique.

As I was studying in art school, textile was my favourite subject. After graduating, I studied three years of calligraphy and two years of decorating. I acquired my higher education in library science. Most of my life I have worked as an artist. The last three years I have worked as a self-employed entrepreneur/artist. I have sold my work in Finland, Sweden, Italy, Germany and in France. And of course, I have made handcrafts for myself, my three children and for my home.

Scarfguy on Etsy is Fred Ullom, who is an accomplished weaver from Ohio.

As a career mathematician and computer scientist, my initial interest in weaving was as a science. It is, after all, an exercise in applied binary mathematics. When you look closely, all cloth is "pixelated". Beginning as a diversion from the stress of a high-tech career, I soon discovered that creating something tangible with my hands was much more rewarding than the abstraction of creating lines of programming code. There is no greater enjoyment than to take an idea and turn it into something real: a piece of cloth, a scarf, a garment that stands on its own, and provides warmth, softness, and pleasure for its owner. Unlike most fiber "artists", who are artists first, my greatest struggle has been to allow my creativity to flourish. I retired early from the high-tech world and now weave full-time (although at a leisurely pace). I don't often take inspiration from my surrounding as many do.

[Scarfguy at the loom]

My structures are usually just mathematical "play" with twill progressions. My color combinations are usually spontaneously sparked by fondling through my yarn inventory. I have a passion for exotic natural fibers. I'm always searching for the finest Merino wools, cashmere, silk, yak, and the elusive arctic muskox (qiviut).

Artmixter is Marion Barnett’s shop on Etsy, which features imaginative fabric art.

I am Marion Barnett, a Scottish artist living and working in Norfolk, England. In creating my art quilts and other fiber works, I work predominantly with lutradur, a non woven polyester fabric that is versatile and easy to use. I even wrote a book about it, 'Lovely Lutradur', with Dijanne Cevaal. I have a passion for layers and texture; as lutradur is semi transparent, it is an ideal medium for such work. Most of my work has pattern and texture combined over several layers of cloth, with some areas of cloth cut back to show clearly what is lying underneath. Colour, too, is an essential part of my art; I dye or paint much of my own cloth, cottons, silks and lutradur, and use a wide range of paints to get the effects I want. It’s very rewarding when people are drawn to touch the work; textiles are a very tactile medium, and I encourages people to pat and stroke the cloth and the finished works.

Rebecca Burgess' fiber art and skills fulfill a mission. Her Etsy shop is ecologicalartist.

My work, my passion, lives within the relationship between restoration ecology and sustainable art materials. I seek to create art whose strength lies within its process: a process that is restorative for the native plants that I harvest for dyes, for the women ranchers I buy my wool from, and is, most importantly, restorative for me as the composer and creator. I use local natural resources in a manner that supports the thriving and regenerative cycles of those resources. The end product is equally important for me, in its quality, attention to detail, and how well it functions.

[ecologicalartist at work with some natural dying]

I envision a growing world of artisans and interested folks, making beautiful art from naturally dyed yarns and batts, and wearing naturally dyed organic clothes. As this happens, our culture will become both aesthetically and ecologically richer. While I enjoy the larger vision, I personally am restored by the feel of soft angora moving through my hands and onto the spinning wheel, or counting my warp threads in preparation for my loom. The value of having one more happy and restored person on the planet is an immeasurable gift in itself.

designbynihan is the Etsy shop of Nihan Altuntas, a very creative designer and handknitter from Istanbul, Turkey.

I’m Nihan Altuntas, a 27 year old Turkish woman, whose passion is creating and designing. I’ve been crafting since I was old enough to pick up a crayon. My favorite childhood toys were boxes, yarns, pieces of cloth and all kinds of paints… I should add that I’m thankful for the support of my family. When I converted my jeans into bags or painted my canvas shoes, they never said a word!

I majored in cinema studies with a minor in marketing. During college, I got back to knitting to relax and to express myself. I never liked pattern books or reproducing brand sweaters. I would design authentic knitwear by improvising with needles, sometimes not even knowing what the result would be. The appreciation and approval for all of that hard work is the basis of my motivation to improve myself in this field.

I’m inspired by almost everything, even a simple button. I can suddenly decide to knit a sweater suitable for that button. My favorite material is cashmere, but the most important thing is to be able to discover the perfect match of the yarn and the pattern.

“Design by Nihan’s” success on Etsy is a combination of my talent, marketing and business knowledge and my personality too. I try to bring customer preferences and original patterns together. All “Design by Nihan” customers have an opportunity to choose the color and material, since all of the products are always knitted according to the customers' measurements. Each item is totally unique to its owner.

Dottie Scher, aka ccdzs, whose excellent crochet skill reflects her heritage.

My mother was an old fashioned Southern Lady who taught me the age old art of handcrafts as we were growing up. I started knitting when I was five and needlepoint, embroidery, tatting, pottery, sewing soon followed. When I was 15 I found a book of crochet motifs and I was hooked, literally. I love the way the work flows and how quickly something can come together in my hands. This is an art that has been passed down through the generations of my family.

I work "during the day" as a Child Protective Services In Home Services/Foster Care Supervisor. My days are long and quite hectic. When I get home, after homework, supper, baths and smaller people's bedtime, I can sit down with a hook and thread and just shut out everything else. Crochet is my refuge, my special place where everything is simply the hook, the yarn or thread, the colors, the texture.

When I'm designing my own patterns, it's all about texture and counting stitches. The doilies are designed with their appearance from a distance in mind. So much of the design is not apparent unless you look at it from across a room or down a hallway. I love the symmetry and the geometrical design. I have been heavily influenced by Patricia Kristoffersen, a renowned crochet artist. Many of my framed pieces are based on her designs. But I also feel I learn from anyone's designs and thus can bring my own ideas to bear, such as my two nautical sunbursts.

Constance Rose aka constancerosedesigns

I have been a textile artist since the early 1970s. Prior to becoming a weaver, I was a custom clothing designer, silk painter, papermaker, beaded jewelry designer, knitter, crocheter and handspinner. I've had a lifelong interest in fabric and thread/yarn, so I've explored any number of ways to create them and work with them. I started college as an art major, then veered into and graduated in psychology. Making art, although my first love, was always something "else" to do; that is, until I retired, recently, from the work world as we know it to focus on my art. Although I've taken an art class here and there over the years, essentially I am self taught, propelling myself toward whatever felt like the next technique for me to learn.

I've always been inspired by nature, as well as art of other times and places — including the florescence of Art Nouveau and Victoriana, the stylized and repetitive geometrics of Art Deco and ancient Egyptian designs, Native American and ethnic tribal patterns, and the Arts & Crafts and Craftsman styles in functional and decorative arts and architecture. My recent work creating woven shibori has been a way for me to pull together all of these design genre.

My work today is about TEXTURE — the tactility of cloth and fiber surfaces, what textiles feel like in your hands, as well as visual texture, the orchestration of patterns and colors that your eyes see. My work is also about PATTERN — line, shape, form, and directionality inherent in the woven cloth or imprinted or dyed onto the fabric. And it is about COLOR — how color lays on or becomes part of the cloth, how colors interact together, the patterns that areas of color create on a piece. My textiles explore the fusion of these components on handwoven fiber structures. Most recently I have begun creating Art Cloth — non-wearable fabric, wall and space hangings — combining loom-controlled and handstitched shibori, and surface design techniques on handwoven fabrics.

Thanks to bonniesamueldesign for putting this post together! If you want to find more great fiber work, check out items tagged EtsyFAST team. You might also want to read more Storque posts tagged "Fiber".

Etsy World Tour: Unraveling the Traveler in Guatemala

2008-05-28T11:01:00-05:00

As part of our Etsy World Tour series, momerath shares her experiences traveling with her family in Guatemala. In a tiny town, she has a lesson with a local weaver, and she learns about differences in craft, economics and in mindsets.

This is a story about a lesson, and the lessons it taught me, which were not the ones I expected. It's a story about weaving, though no real weaving takes place. And at the end, I'm going to assert it's not about anything at all.

I met Francesca in 2005 in San Juan La Laguna, a Guatemalan village we'd chosen because the guidebook passed it over. I had arrived with my husband and our two-year-old by boat from across Lake Atitlan, fingers crossed that a little hotel we'd heard mentioned truly existed. It did, and it cost $4 a night. San Juan was a town of steep cobblestoned streets, wood smoke, traditional dress, teenagers on cell phones, and a pristine new library. Few vehicles rode through town, other than the occasional taxi truck. Women and children stopped to touch our daughter's gold-blond hair.

After a few days in the village, I asked our hotel owner about the possibility of getting a lesson on a backstrap loom. The backstrap is ubiquitous in Guatemala. I admire craft, and I wanted to see what the work felt like. He put me in contact with Francesca, a weaver. Single and in her 40s, Francesca lived with her mother and extended family in a mud-brick home up the hill. An hour's lesson? I asked. Certainly, she said. We arranged to meet the next day.

When I called at Francesca's house the next morning, she came out to meet me and said we would walk into the village to buy yarn. I confess I was a bit surprised, until I reflected: Was I thinking she had spare supplies just sitting around for people to play with?

After I'd paid for my colors – black, peach, purple, orange – we returned to her home, a mud-brick house with dirt floors and a courtyard sink. She led me to the courtyard, where we sat on stools against a wall. The wind fluttered a dirty tarp curtain hung across a corner, and I saw it concealed a metal bucket: the toilet.

The yarn was more like embroidery floss. And the first step, she said, was rolling it into balls. We spent nearly two hours rolling it, two strands together.

As we rolled, we talked as best we could with my clunky Spanish. It was delightful. We talked about our families, our homes, hairstyles, more. We asked each other questions about our local school systems. She voiced her opinions on Guatemalan politics. Her sister-in-law had a brother in Arizona. Her teenage nephew was a soccer-playing guitar player; my teenage sister was a soccer-playing drummer. I heard myself tell her we didn't live in New York City because the cost of living was too high. She nodded sympathetically.

I told her that I knit (I didn't know the verb, but I knew "yarn" and "needles" and got the idea across). She asked me, “Do you knit for a living?” My internal reaction: “What a silly question! Imagine someone trying to make a living off of knitting.” Immediately I tasted the irony in my mouth.

After two hours of rolling yarn, Francesca got out a big board with posts sticking out of it. I was puzzled: I thought we were going to use a backstrap loom. But no, this wasn't a loom; it was a whole other step before we could use the loom. I didn't quite understand what it was for, and I was beginning to think about my husband reading books to our toddler in the library, wondering when I'd return. Francesca showed me how to wind the yarn in and out among the posts. It required just enough concentration (for me) to make conversation impossible; if I even let my mind wander, I'd lose the pattern. It required keeping both arms up to guide the yarn, and rocking forward and back just enough to start a good, solid backache. I was wiggling on my hard wooden stool on the uneven ground. Man, man, man, what a lot of work.

Then Francesca told me: “That's all we will do today. Tomorrow you can come back and we will start with the loom.”

I was leaving town the next day. I wondered, did we misunderstand each other? I had only wanted an hour's lesson. She told me that in the last lesson she'd taught, a pair of German women had worked there every afternoon for five days to make one scarf. And her loom wouldn't be free to start my project till she finished that afternoon's weaving.

I told her I could not come back. Hoping to compromise, I asked if I could see her loom, maybe watch her work. She brought it out. Half finished was a turquoise cloth with an impossibly tight weave. The combs and spacers Francesca used were just sticks and other bits of wood, but with them she was weaving an intricate pattern of chevrons.

She put the belt around my hips and showed me the motions. After some minutes I finally understood what we were doing, pulling up one level of strings, then the other, but I couldn't push the strings close enough together, couldn't remember which stick to pull on next. We took a few photos of me wearing the loom. And I asked if I could purchase one of her weavings, one I'd admired the other day, a shawl with purple and orange stripes. My bedroom, I told her, was purple and orange.

She asked 25 quetzales for the lesson, and 40 quetzales for the shawl. One quetzal was about 13 cents. She wanted about $5 for a shawl she said was five days' work. I gave her 50 quetzales for it but wished immediately (and still wish) I'd given her much more.

And then I left. Dizzy, exhilarated, and humbled, I lay in bed and wrote for an hour, trying to figure out what I felt.

I'm still trying, I guess.

I had imagined that after my lesson I would brim with respect for the women sitting in courtyards day after day, every day, creating beauty through patient, slow, backaching work. But as with most travel, even what you think you know reveals itself as unexpected, as unfamiliar, as much more than you thought it would be.

Francesca took me through the work as it is, not as I imagined it to be. I had imagined we'd jump right into the picturesque part, the backstrap loom. I thought she'd have some practice piece around — on what? a spare loom? — that she could demonstrate on and then I could try a little, hour's up, thanks a lot. But weaving isn't like that. And neither was our lesson: Francesca spent time with me as part of her life, not as an exhibit in a living history museum.

Craft, to me, was leisure. Craft, to her, was work. I was humbled to recognize I hadn't considered the difference.

Her poverty and my privilege, her skill and my lack of skill – binaries unraveled in the web of conversation, bringing me this reminder: Nothing is ever as simple as we think it is.

It's a gift, to have your assumptions unraveled.

But that's just one thread in this telling. It's not “about” what it taught me. It's not: "Look, I had this moving experience on vacation and I grew from it as a person." It was not a complex world speaking to a simpler world, or a fleshed-out person speaking to a picture. It wasn't a tidy, closed package of a story. It wasn't a story at all. It wasn't “about” me; it wasn't “about” anything. It just was.

As Americans, we often behave as if we assume things are created for us and should cater to us. It's exhilarating, actually, to realize how busily and beautifully the world spins along without us.

We'd love to hear more about crafting traditions around the world; send your thoughts to the Storque's pitch box and make sure to include the words "Etsy World Tour"!

Etsy World Tour: Fes, Where Craft is a Way of Life

2008-03-28T11:22:00-05:00

This piece from ciaralovesyou is the first in a series of articles we're going to publish about handmade traditions around the world: The Etsy World Tour. It will be our featured series after next month's upcycling series.

When I pledged to Buy Handmade, I assumed that I'd be making my purchases at Etsy and the occasional local craft fair. But then I visited Fes in Morocco, where DIY is a way of life.

Over half of the population of Fes works in handicrafts (that’s 473,000 artisans!)* in mediums varying from fabric and leather to copper, clay and thread. Walking through the narrow, walled streets of the medina, which at times are just wide enough for one donkey to pass another, I passed shop after tiny shop, each displaying a different variation of local, handmade goods.

My first stop was a local textile studio, which produces thousands of woven shawls, tablecloths, curtains and more, all produced on looms driven by foot pedals and strung by hand. Like most of the people who work as crafters in Fes, the studio is a family-run business that's become successful the old fashioned way: producing gorgeous products with long hours of hard work.

Next it was on to the tannery. Leather making is one of the biggest industries in Fes, and it's all still done by hand. The leather is treated in lye, and then hand-dyed in all the colors of the rainbow. From where I stood, this looked like physically exhausting (and incredibly stinky) work. But the end results are fantastic: brightly colored shoes, bags, and belts.

Next stop: a gallery of handmade copper, silver and bronze plates. These dishes were so intricately designed that I thought they must have been machine-pressed. But the store owner showed us how they're produced: by making small dents in the metal with a hammer and chisel — some so small that they looked like needles. This particular shop is well-known throughout the world, as evidenced by the awards and plaques on the wall showing visitors like Ronald Reagan and a letter from Hillary Clinton testifying to the quality of the platter she took home. I was dying to take home one of my own, but due to the amount of time and painstaking labor it takes to produce one plate — often up to three weeks — these platters ($200 - $1,000) were WAY out of my price range.

Some of my favorite meals in Morocco were served in tagines, cone-shaped ceramic baking dishes that expertly combine the sweet and savory flavors of the country's cuisine. I stopped by the city's largest pottery factory just in time to see this man throwing a tagine.

Tagines are just one of the factory's specialties, which range from dishes and bowls to mugs, vases, coasters and tiles for walls and fountains. After they're thrown on a pottery wheel, the pieces are fired in this underground oven.

Then they're glazed in traditional Moroccan colors and designs, fired once more, and voila!

Seeing an entire community support itself with craft was an inspiration — it can be done! The town of Fes is proof of the value of unique handmade work, and validates the DIY philosophy.

Further Resources:
Etsy Sellers in Morocco
Video of the Fes tannery
*according to the Moroccan Tourist Bureau: http://www.visitmorocco.org

A big thanks to ciaralovesyou for submitting this piece to the Storque. We want to hear about handmade traditions from all over the world: submit your ideas so you too can be part of our Etsy World Tour Series!