On Valentine's Day, Sunshine Coast Spinners and Weavers Guild members Dorothy and Verna came to my house to teach a group of Sun Haven Waldorf School teachers, parents and children how to use the drop spindle.
Dorothy showed Mandy, the handicrafts teacher, how to warp the school's rigid heddle loom and how to weave with it. A fun day!
Every year I go to the Waldorf School's Winter Festival to enjoy the magic and watch the children have fun. This year I decided to have some fun myself making a gnome garden and dipping a beeswax candle.
Along with the children I chose a wooden slab, a felted gnome and three special treasures. Then I went to a little table and sat on a very, very little chair (happily soon finding a slightly larger chair which was considerably easier to get up and down from!) We shared glue guns and treasures such as moss, sticks, shells, acorns, bark, berries and such. It was SO much fun. I think I see more gnome gardens in my future!
The candle dipping room was magical. The windows were covered and the dark room was lit with white fairy lights and flickering candles. In the center and around the sides were gnomes, fairies, crystals, geodes, shells and all manner of treasures.
Each of us was given a very skinny beeswax candle on the end of a string. We walked slowly and quietly around the room and when we reached the pot of beeswax we carefully dipped our candle in. Around the room once more and by the time we reached the pot again the wax had dried and the candle was ready to dip. When the candle was as thick as our thumb it was wrapped in tissue paper with a little poem slipped inside.
A Candle's but a simple thing,
it starts with just a bit of string.
Yet dipped and dipped with patient hand,
it gathers wax upon the strand until,
complete and snowy white,
it gives at last a lovely light.
On the 15th and 16th our Sunshine Coast Spinners and Weavers Guild held its yearly Christmas sale. Two friends and I did a display of The Dyer's Garden with materials we'd dyed with plant materials we'd grown and gathered in our gardens. The beautiful and diverse colours are a celebration of gifts we receive from plants. On the right is a lavender standard with a Japanese indigo plant which managed to survive the cold weather and the basket beside it is filled with rovings dyed with Japanese indigo.
Mushroom Annie, wearing her lovely sweater knitted with handspun dyed with mushrooms, had a display of her beautiful mushroom dyed wool.
The Guild was excited to have the first display of the Sunshine Coast Fibreshed which was started by Deanna Pilling and then adopted by the Guild as a project. A Fibreshed is a non-profit organization that increases awareness and shares the necessary skills to build and sustain a thriving bio-regional textile and fibre community that works with principles of ecological balance, local economies and regional organic agriculture. Our Fibreshed seeks to build an interactive relationship among the skilled fibre artisans, spinners, dyers, and fibre suppliers along the 100 miles of our coast.
On October 19th five of us from the Sunshine Coast Spinners and Weavers Guild volunteered to demonstrate dyeing with mushrooms at the fifth annual Sunshine Coast Mushroom Festival put on by Shroom. It was a wonderful event celebrating the rich diversity of mushrooms that grow on the Sunshine Coast.
We broke up the mushrooms that volunteers had gathered and put them on to cook.
We had four pots going - Velvet Pax, Lobster, Dyer's Polypore and Pig's Ear.
Soon the pots were simmering.
We kept a close eye on the dyepots. It smelled delicious and around lunchtime we had a number of people stop by hoping that we were cooking up some mushroom soup!
One of our members Ann has an incredible knowledge of our local mushrooms - gathering, eating, dyeing, papermaking. Her beautiful sweater is knitted from handspun wool dyed with mushrooms.
I dyed some local alpaca with Lobster (pink), Dyer's Polypore (yellow) and Velvet Pax (grey). It's very exciting to have a local source of such a beautiful pink.