Earth, Wind, & Fiber Show is finally here!
Category: hooking
High on Hooking’s got an Etsy shop!
After about three years of telling myself that I was going to put an Etsy shop together, I finally broke down and did it. Woohoo! (Okay, the last vow was to do it this past winter. I got close; it went up the first day of spring, which is still practically winter in a lot of the country.)
You’ll find the shop at: https://www.etsy.com/shop/HighonHooking. Now, no sniggers. I know it’s still just an itty bitty shop with – at the moment – two listings. But everyone’s got to start somewhere. And not only did I have to figure out all that was involved with the shop and creating listings and taking pics, I had to do some updating of the website here, so that things would match. Okay too, maybe I hadn’t taken care of the Gallery in a while. Maybe some of those items were sold last year. But it’s better now. Not perfect; I’ll work more on completing the website after the Etsy show has a little more…heft.
So, spread the news! You might want to add that I’ll be adding more rugs to the shop on a regular basis. If you have any ideas of how to make it a more inviting shop, give me a yell. I’m happy to get advice, especially if you already have your own Etsy shop. And if you do have a rug hooking ETSY shop, feel free to share the address below in the comments. Later I’ll transfer the info onto the “Cool Resources” page.
To those who celebrate as I do, have a
joyful Easter surrounded by friends and family!
Have we got news at High on Hooking!
I try not to do NEWS-based posts too often, you know, catching up with what’s been happening here at High on Hooking, but sometimes you just have to. Not only is the selling season coming on quickly, but there are a couple of shows right around the corner.
- First up is the Spring Show put on every other year (even) by Albuquerque’s Fiber Arts Council. Many of you watched as I hooked and hooked my little fingers to the bone to have “Memory of Water” ready for the April 7 and 8 (Saturday and Sunday) exhibition. As I’m on one of the committees, I’ll be busy from Friday through the weekend. If you’re a local, please try to make it down and support the fiber artists of the greater Albuquerque area. It’s free; hours are 9-5 both days with an artists’ reception Saturday evening, 5-7.
- And let the selling begin! A couple of weeks ago I received official word that I’d again been juried into Albuquerque’s Recycled Art Fair. This year it’s a little earlier: the weekend of April 14 and 15, 10-4, and it’s at the Open Space Visitors’ Center on Coors. If you remember my experience last year at the end of April, you might also recall the snow, rain, wind, and all-round cold temperatures we had. Not the usual weather here in Albuquerque at that time of year (except for the wind, of course), but not completely out of the ballpark. So, PLEASE PRAY that this year we get the nice weather I moved out here for, that we’ve enjoyed all winter! This is a fun festival: food, music, family activities, and good art – treasures that came from other folks’ trash. Hope we see you there too.
- Just this weekend I received notice that “Memory of Water” had been accepted into
“Memory of Water.” Framed, she’s about 22.5″x18.5″ and plastic bag on monks’ cloth. another show. Woohoo! This one’s also being held at the Open Space Visitors’ Center on Coors here in town, and it’s a fiber arts exhibit with the theme of WATER. It opens April 28 and runs through May 27. For New Mexican fiber buffs, it’s being put on in conjunction with the New Mexico Fiber Crawl happening May 18-20. Call me if you’re interested in this one. By chance it’s right down the street from my house; we can go together.
- As many of you know, for the past two years, I’ve vended at the Albuquerque Rail Yards Market that takes place May – October, from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. I love it there; it’s a people-watchers delight plus you can pick up good food, produce, and well-priced art and listen to different music each weekend. It’s just an all-round fun place to spend a few hours, and booths are more than reasonable at $20/any given Sunday. Unfortunately, last year I didn’t do as well as I had the previous year. Other artists said the same thing. So, this year, I’ve decided to cut my days at the market to once per month. I’ll still get the exposure and have a chance to sell, but I won’t worry that I could’ve been somewhere else.Or force Tom to help me set up and break down for nothing. Dates I’ll be at the Rail Yards are: May 27; June 10; July 8; August 12; September 9; and October 14. Maybe we’ll see you there…
I think that’s it for all the big, official news. Keep checking back to our home page; we add events as they come up. Now for the weekly “What’s on the frame” segment. Actually, this week we’ve got two frames and two rugs! Check out the pics for the scoop.
For your sake, I hope that’s spring’s either arrived in your neck of the woods or is right around the corner. My sympathies yet again for New England and the fourth nor’easter in as many weeks or less. But spring will come; it always does.
What’s the news where you hail from? Plans for when it finally warms up?
Mystery rug unveiled
So, the framer called that the mystery rug was ready to be picked up. Woohoo! And just in time, I might add, to get a couple of photographs of it to submit to Espanola Valley Fiber Arts Center. They’re co-sponsoring “Recall-Recapture-Remember,” a fiber show on memory with Tansey Contemporary in Santa Fe. The show will open at Tansey’s gallery May 18th in conjunction with the New Mexico Fiber Crawl weekend. It’ll run four weeks then move to their Denver gallery for a July opening. Here’s hoping I get in.
I’m happy with the framing. It seems that I go in there with something simple (you know, and elegant AND NOT EXPENSIVE) in mind, but the lady with the German accent, she has great ideas. She gets me to trying new things I never would’ve thought on my own. This time we finally narrowed it down to a black frame with blue running through it. Perfect! I also have to hand it to another customer, an older woman, a painter there that same morning as me; her input was very good too. I especially like that she told me the boldly colored frame was best even though she prefers pastels. To “prove” that bit of info, she swore to me that she wore “fairy wings” for three years. Real freaking wings. Like some kind of New Mexican retiree angel. You can’t make that shit up, but, man, she was a hoot.
The piece is called “Memory of Water.” The initial idea for it came to me one morning when I was walking in the Bosque with Tynan. The ground was parched and cracked as we hadn’t had any precipitation since the last of September’s monsoon rains. I knew I needed to hook something that fell under the theme of “Earth, Wind, and Fiber” for the Albuquerque Fiber Arts Council Garden Show April 7 and 8. Hey, rain, water – or the lack thereof – fit the bill. I decided to kick the environmental thing up a notch and use plastic bags. It’s horrible how our oceans and sea-life are being so messed up given the vast amounts of pollution caused by our prodigious use of plastics. So, I tried to make something beautiful – or at least interesting – out of plastic bags.
If you’ve been following the mystery rug’s hooking, you’ll know that it was easy enough to pull the loops, but not as satisfying as hooking with fibers like wool or t-shirt or bedsheet. Plus, there was the pain-in-the-assedness of the static electricity that reaches a zenith in the winter in an already humidity-free desert. I’m not sure what would’ve happened if I hadn’t had that can of Static Guard. And I’m still finding strips of plastic bags in my living room, never mind the clippings.Not sure I’ll run out and do another plastic rug, but it was a good experiment. And since I finished the rug I’ve purchased not just stainless steel straws and their very important straw cleaners. (I could never really clean my re-usable plastic straws; they were contributing to my recurring sinus infections, I realized.) I’ve also ordered washable produce bags that I can use at Sprouts and other grocery stores. It was really starting to go up my craw sideways that we were using a good 20 bags each week when we shopped. I kept thinking that I’d have to find hooking projects for all those bags. No!!!
Any-so-who, I’m back to working with my usual fibers, specifically t-shirt this week. Feeling a need to do something a little larger than the double mug rugs I recently finished (hooking only), I decided to make a table runner. The sunflowers are a trademark, if you will. I’ve made several similar rugs from them, but smaller. I’m really loving the bigger sunflowers. Hmmm, like the “Big Boucherouite,” I may have to go really BIG with the sunflowers on another rug. We’ll see…
In the meantime, you peeps back east have my sincerest sympathy. All those nor’easters in a row. I’m having flashbacks to 2015 when the snow in New England just wouldn’t stop, and we were trying to get our house ready for sale so we could move out here to New Mexico. Ice dams like we’d never seen. Snow piles alongside the driveway wayyyyy over our heads. The poor crocuses that never really saw light. Yeah, winter in Albuquerque is NOTHING like that. And we like it that way.
How’s your winter been? What’s it done for your rug hooking or any other art you might practice? Let’s all hold our glasses high to toast spring when it (officially) arrives next week.
Special thanks to all those who saved their plastic bags for me, especially you, Mary Ramsey. Without your pinks and turquoises and oranges and purples, the drought would’ve been far worse. 🙂
Early spring down on the farm in Albuquerque
So, the whole country is watching the east coast for a second time this late winter / early spring day. I know what I’m talking about when I say that two nor’easters in one week is a big, old bitch. See, weather like that is one of the MAJOR reasons Tom and I picked up in 2015 and moved to New Mexico. From Massachusetts. Yeah, we’re both native New Englanders, but we got tired of the winters.
Don’t get me wrong, snow’s pretty and fun to play in. I don’t even mind shoveling (now and again; we had a snow blower). BUT that self-same snow is only lovely for a day or so, then it gets all nasty and brownish-gray. Out here in Albuquerque we can drive forty minutes around the Sandia Mountains and visit snow. The dog loves it. Then we get back in our car and head home where this winter it’s been mostly in the 50s and 60s. Hey, that’s not typical, and because we’ve had very little snow in the mountains, we’re back in a drought situation. Which means that there’ll be a BAD fire season. (We won’t be affected by that, but I have friends who most definitely will be.) Don’t even start me on the juniper poison pollen that’s been out since January. It’s something we never even considered when we chose a new home.
Nonetheless, yesterday a few of us from the guild were doing our usual gig demo-ing rug hooking at Albuquerque’s Botanic Garden, part of the BioPark. (We’re there the 1st and 4th Tuesdays each month except June and July when they kick us out for summer kid programs.) There was a good breeze going, and temps were in the low 50s (oddly enough lower than the norm), so it was a slow day in the park. I figure folks are waiting till it hits 70 tomorrow and Friday.
It was a good time to wander outside and look for spring.
AWAG demos at the Rio Grande Heritage Farm, a section of the Botanic Garden. The farm’s a reproduction representing a New Mexican farm circa somewhere between 1925 and 1935. We hang in the farmhouse or out on the porch in rocking chairs when it’s nice. Out back there’s an apple orchard. They’ve got a vineyard too! And then there’s the barn with its requisite farm animals. Fun times, though not with one of the sheep yesterday. 🙁
I thought I’d share some of the signs of early spring at “our” farm. Enjoy!
Meanwhile back at the Salamy homestead, Tynan’s back with “What’s on the frame.”
What’s on your frame today?