Hook the Town Red - Speaker and more!

The Northumberland Rug Hookers are hosting a hook-in October 26 and you’re all invited to Hook the Town Red!  

It promises to be a fun day, with vendors, and prizes, and rugs! 

Chris Poole, sharpener extraordinaire, has confirmed he will be there!  

We have some ideas for workshops percolating….watch this space for more info!

....and we have a very interesting speaker for the day!

Hilda Van Netten is a Cobourg-based artist and teacher who will be leading us in a session on the Battle of the Brain! This is a fun class where she will help us to understand the creative vs logical sides of our brains.  Looking forward to it!  You can see some of her work and learn more about Hilda at her website.  

Here is a selection of the many portraits Hilda has done of participants at the Green Wood Coalition Art Hive

She has been very involved with the Green Wood Coalition, an area organization that uses a radically inclusive community model of caring to walk alongside people living with poverty, mental or physical illness, substance dependency, or disability in Northumberland County. By focussing on what’s strong, not what’s wrong, they work for positive change that leaves no one behind.  We will learn more about them and Hilda’s work teaching and doing art at the Community Art Hive over the course of her talk. 

We will have a donation bin set up to collect warm socks and mittens on behalf of Green Wood. If you have items for donation, please bring them along!  Even those reusable hand warmers wb good to include!

Fun with buttons!

 

We did a goofy thing recently….and had a lot of fun with it! We saw a group in Yorkshire who did some interesting « button people » and learned that they wanted to create fairies and angels for Christmas, with buttons. 

We started out with just doing button people….but it grew along the way, with both real and imaginary creatures!

Check these out!

Watch this space for more examples to come!

Trip report: Mississippi Valley Textile Museum

(We have another guest post!  our Laurie came back from a trip to Almonte, and she very kindly agreed to write up a few words and supply a few photos!  Thanks to Laurie for this!)

I had a recent trip to Almonte Ontario just outside of Ottawa on the Mississippi
River. Once the home to many woollen mills now the home to the Mississippi Valley Textile Museum. The museum is located  in an old woollen mill office and entry is by donation. There is a whole floor dedicated to the wool industry that thrived in Almonte thanks to the power of the Mississippi. 

As well as the interactive woollen industry display, the museum has rotating exhibits all dedicated to textile artists. I was fortunate to see the exhibit “Rock, Paper,Scissors by Carole Baillargeon. There were several felted rocks arranged in piles on the floor. They were made out of scraps of material, wool and articles of clothing from who farmed, worked the land and kept the home. Each piece  of material was labeled with a small numbered tag sewn onto the rock and the tag number was referenced on a large list that named the women who had donated the material. 

The exhibit also displayed the artists homemade paper. My favourite pieces were the tools and scissors wrapped in yarn , material or both. Sculptures made out of common articles. So interesting. 

Almonte is a bit of a long trip but the town offers much entertainment for a day trip and the river is a treat in itself. 

(A big thank you to Laurie for this info!  Maybe you are travelling this summer to somewhere with some wonderful textile-y stuff….please consider sending us a paragraph and some photos to include in our blog. If you’re interested in this stuff, odds are your friends in rug hooking are, too!)