WIP Wednesday #33 @ TN&TN

And the Winners Are...

To celebrate 10,000 hits, a copy of A Needle Pulling Thread is being given to one Canadian, and one non-Canadian.  The contest is now closed.  My random number generator daughter picked #14 and #30.  Lucky for her, that IS one Canadian and one non-Canadian.  

Congratulations to SHEILA IN NOVA SCOTIA and LINDA IN FRANCE.  

Woah - all the way to France!  Cool!  If you didn't win, don't worry.  We have birthday plans coming up too.  If you did win (Sheila and Linda) please email your complete mailing address to Monika at mysweetprairie@gmail.com and it will be sent to you right away.

: )  The Needle & Thread Network : )

Feature Friday: Monika Kinner-Whalen / My Sweet Prairie

Hello!  I'm Monika Kinner-Whalen.  If you ever meet me, you'll need to practice saying that right.  It throws people for a loop when I introduce myself.  It goes like this:  Moe - nee - kah.  (Not Mawnicka).  

Monika Kinner-Whalen, Saskatoon SK

I live in Saskatoon with my family of 5, and I started the My Sweet Prairie blog about 2 years ago.  I'm a full time artist who quilts, embroiders, and is learning to hook.  I've been doing art since childhood.  Quilting started about five years ago.  I discovered fibre art 2 years after that.  I suppose my claim to fame is my prairie thread paintings based on local photographs that I take, as well as my love for 'art-to-mail' postcard.  

'Wish You Were Here # 42 (sold)

It all started when I returned back with great homesickness to the prairies after living near the mountains for a decade.  Out came my camera.  4,ooo photos later, I was given a stack of fibre art and quilting art magazines.  I had never heard those terms before.  I was SO excited because I never enjoyed other art mediums nearly as much as I love thread.  I jumped right in and have been swimming along happily every since.

I work from my own photos and stitch scenes I love... 'Spring Greens' in progress

I was asked to list my top three accomplishments in the past year.  If you read my blog, you know there are about four dozen things I could list.  I'll try though!

#1.  A Prairie Dress.

This baby was a personal dare to myself.  I heard the term 'quilted wearable' and POOF!  There was this vision of my art on a corset style dress.  I managed to pull it off last fall for our quilt show.  This was a GIGANTIC learning curve for me.  It was included in an exhibit with the Saskatchewan Craft Council this winter.  Now it's going to Halifax!  I just got word of it's acceptance into the National Juried Show with the Canadian Quilters' Association.  I am a bundle of jitters!

#2.  I Am Juried

Earlier this month, my work was accepted by a jury for the Saskatchewan Craft Council.  The whole point to that is that I am now credited with the term 'excellence in craft'.  It also gets my foot in the door for some juried members-only opportunities.  I am super-thrilled about this achievement.

#3.  Featured Artist for ANPT

This was pretty significant too!  Last year, the editor for A Needle Pulling Thread magazine asked if I would be one of the featured artists.  After picking myself up off the floor, I said "yes!!".  That feels like a long time ago, but the issue just came out last week!  It is beautiful - they did a terrific job.  It's hot off the press.  You can find it in Indigo, McNally Robinson Booksellers, and local needle arts shops too.  They ARE NOT in the supermarkets or grocery stores. 

Shortly after that article for ANPT was written, I started THIS blog - The Needle & Thread Network!  Case in point - you can't find Canadian content in any supermarkets or grocery store stands!  I wanted to gather us creative Canadians together to have a platform where we can see each others' work and show off our talent.  I came up with the name so that it would be diverse enough to cover all crafts in the field of fibre.  I didn't want all the WIP Wednesday traffic on my blog because this was not a tactic to get more followers.  My agenda was to find all those Canadian needles-in-the-haystack.  ; )  Here you are!  This is awesome.  I hope you are enjoying the Network as much as I am.

machine stitched and hand embroidered (sold)

My future includes more opportunities to teach creative sewing locally.  That's been fun!  I have three art exhibits booked annually, plus one BIG show in Winnipeg next year.  (Stay tuned!!!)  I'm constantly pestered to do video classes or make a book.   Some day!  It's all in my head... but that's as far as I've had time for up to now.  I will continue with my art and my guilds (Saskatoon Quilters' Guild & The Bridge City NeedleArts Guild under the EAC), and my three kids and my husband and my pets and my big messy house... and that is lots!  It a fun ride.  I was a full time social worker / trauma counselor in the 1990's.  My Husband was a 'computer guy'.  Now we are both entrepreneurs.  We're a very close and happy family, doing what we love.  It's all good!

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

! TN&TN Giveaway !

Guess what?  TN&TN has now surpassed 10,000 hits / views!  Congratulations - that's a lot of people checking us out!  To celebrate, we are giving away 2 copies of A Needle Pulling Thread (I happen to have a lot of extra copies...)

This current copy includes patterns and projects by Canadian designers in the areas of quilting, sewing, knitting, crochet, needlepoint, rug hooking, beading, hardanger, embroidery, felting, plus much more (if you can believe it!).  Please identify the country you are living in.  We will select one Canadian winner, and one non-Canadian winner.  All you have to do to enter is leave a comment and tell us where you are from..  The winner will be announced on Monday April 2, 2012.  Good luck!

WIP Wednesday #32 @ TN&TN

Wip Wednsday @ TN&TN #31

Friday Feature: Kit Lang @ Kit Lang Fiber Art

(if you can't see the text of this post, click to view it from the website as our font is white)
Dear Subscribers,

I'm very sorry to be a day late (and maybe a dollar short, ha ha) posting the Friday Feature but here it is, Kit Lang's story...

Hi Needlers!

I’m Kit Lang of the rather predictably named Kit Lang Fiber Art, living in a mercurical and funky neighbourhood in Toronto, Ontario, called Leslieville.

I started out calling myself a quilter, and then became an art quilter, and then became a fiber artist and now, as I combine fiber and quilting with paint and charcoal and encaustic and resin… I don’t know – but it always starts with textile. Which I totally blame on my mother!

I am about to turn 50 and grew up with a mother who was nearly 50 when I arrived, so she was Old School (note the capital letters.) She stayed at home and cooked and baked and sewed. She sewed clothes for all of us kids and herself, and made curtains and cushions and slipcovers and pet beds and tote bags and satin purses and felt hats and rag rugs and placemats; (pause for breath) and she cross-stitched and knitted and crocheted and tatted and embroidered and I knew she’d crossed to the dark side when I was 11 and she became a diploma-ed pattern maker.

And so I grew up with her bits of fabric all around me and was always encouraged to sew all kinds of things – she even taught me some basic pattern making so I could make clothes for my dolls. So I’ve been sewing one thing or another my whole life. But strangely, she didn’t quilt; so I didn’t either.

But my Oma and my Tantes quilted, so quilts were all around me. And because of that, from an early age, I got into the habit of saving my bits of fabric in like coloured bags, and then boxes, and then bins, and then boxes of bins! And by the time I was 46 I had a wall full of bits of fabric in boxes labelled “green”, “pink”, “soft green”, etc. and my Beloved Spouse (“BSP”) said “What are you saving those for?” and I said “I’m going to make a quilt” and BSP said “Well, make one already!” So I did.

And I fell into the rabbit hole.

I didn’t have a pattern or a rotary cutter or any idea of the importance of a ¼ inch seam, and since the quilts I grew up with were tied, I didn’t know that your feed dogs needed to be down when you free motion quilted: so that first quilt was a mess! But I thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world and I knew I had to make more.

So I bought every quilting magazine I could find, and went on the internet and googled “quilts” and found out that there were approximately eleventy billion quilting blogs out there – so I promptly started making and blogging. I don’t know how BSP and my children survived that first year, because in that first year I made 36 quilts. Fifteen of them queen sized. And I was NOT a stay-at-home mom.

But I was consumed with the quilts that I saw in my head and wanted to be GOOD enough to make them; and I knew the only way I could do that was by making them.

In 2009, I accidentally made an art quilt. I say accidentally, because I dreamed that I made one, and the next morning, I got up and followed the instructions from my dream self – and by 12 hours later, I had myself an art quilt.

I was a reluctant art quilter though – I thought art quilters were a rareified breed of elite quilters who were in a kind of semi-secret society that clearly, I had no part in; and I thought they were kind of snobby and I didn’t think I liked them. LOL!

So I went back to my quilting and concentrated on that, but I would occasionally think about other art quilts I’d like to make and finally, in 2010 I did. And then I went though a whole thing where I was trying to “choose” between art quilts and bed quilts and finally figured out that I didn’t have to; and then I went through another thing where I realized that when I finally learned how to make the art quilts I saw in my head, that they wouldn’t strictly be art “quilts” anymore so if I wasn’t an art quilter, what was I? So I started calling myself a textile artist – and here we are at the beginning of this introduction again! Now I don’t really call myself anything – I just make quilts and art and other stuff – and whatever the stuff I make is, there’s always a needle in there somewhere.

In the past year, my biggest accomplishments were things that might seem small to other people. My only goal for 2011 was to learn the skills I needed, to make the art I wanted to make - and I did! Honing the ones I have and learning more will always be part of what propels me forward in my art, but that was truly my biggest accomplishment of 2011. An indication of that growth was that in 2011, I was asked to be a contributing member of a surface design blog that I had been following called And Then We Set It On Fire; and I was also asked to exhibit a quilt I’d made in 2011 at a quilt show in Europe this year.

I’m supposed to finish up by telling you what my biggest dream for myself is, but it’s one I hold gently to my heart, so I’ll share with you my second biggest dream – I want one of my works – whether a quilt or an art piece – to be juried into the International Quilt Festival in 2013. Stay tuned!

And thanks for having me. If you’d like to see more of my work, please come by my blog, Kit Lang Fiber Art.

Kit