Artist-in-Residence: Cheraw State Park

Time in the woods, by a lake, or anywhere out in nature is what restores me the most. Making things with my hands is what gives me energy and joy. Put the two together and I’m one happy adventuring artist! My week as Artist-in-Residence at Cheraw State Park in South Carolina was such a wonderful experience. This was my fourth consecutive residency through the Parks program and as before, each experience is totally unique and always exceeds my hopes and aspirations. I feel so lucky to be invited to these parks each time, and it’s definitely one of the highlights of my year.

Cheraw is a small town near the Great Pee Dee river in northeastern South Carolina. I’ve lived in SC since 2010 had never been to this part of the state, so I was eager to get out and explore. The park sits on 7,000 acres of lake and woodlands, and is home to a huge variety of birds and other creatures.

Each day during my stay, I watched the sun rise at the lake, then went off for several hours of hiking either around the park or within a 30-40 drive. The afternoons were spent back at the cabin, creating needle felted landscapes, jewelry designs, and paintings inspired by what I’d seen earlier that day. Then I’d head back over to the lake for the sunset and a quiet stroll before a little more creative time back at the cabin in the evening. I love this schedule - explore, create, explore some more!

Favorite Things: about Cheraw:

Hiking Trail: The Cheraw State Park Trail

Sunrise Viewing & Birdwatching Spot: The Eureka Lake Boardwalk

Park Wildlife: Fox squirrels, woodpeckers, and deer!

Plant Life: Cypress trees growing in the water and the carnivorous flowers by the beach

Daytrip Destination: Carolina Sandhills Wildlife Refuge (Tate’s Trail)

The new collection created while at the park is now available on my website. I hope you’ll enjoy this short recap video of my art-cation experience!

A huge thank you to the South Carolina Parks program for hosting these residency’s and a special thanks to the Park Rangers at Cheraw for making me feel so welcome.

If you’re interested in hearing about my past residency’s with the South Carolina Parks Department, you can find them here:

2020 Devil’s Fork

2019 Edisto Beach

2018 Poinsett

Mixed Media Collection: July 2021

I can never get enough texture, and ever since I learned rug hooking and punch needle, and how it could compliment my decade of needle felting experience, I’ve been falling in love with the layers, colors, and depth made possible by working with yarn, wool fiber, and fabric, all at once.

These mixed media pieces have been such a joy to make, but dang, they’re slow. I thought needle felting was slow, but it feels like a breeze compared to this! I have only ever had 2 or 3 pieces available at a time in the past, so this summer my goal was to have a substantial collection to offer. 7 pieces may not sound like a lot but it’s weeks and weeks worth of work, plus one of those pieces is 24x36 which is by far my largest mixed media piece to date. I’m so happy to work large!

One other idea I have had floating around in my head was adding embroidery or stitching to these mixed media pieces. That’s the beauty of mixed media - no rules and anything goes! I’m thrilled with how the wild flowers turned out, my very first attempts at hand stitching tiny details with yarn.

Enjoy the new series (now available on the website) and be sure to check out the process video so you can see one of these made from start to finish.

Flat Out Under Pressure Competition

Every year in June the Metropolitan Arts Council hosts the Flat Out Under Pressure competition for local artists. It’s a fun thing the community looks forward to every year. We bring our surfaces to get stamped the morning of the competition, then have 24 hours to complete the work. This year, due to the COVID19 pandemic, the whole thing is virtual. Instead of getting our surfaces officially stamped at the MAC office, we signed and dated the blank piece before starting.

The last 2 years I have summited a needle felted wool landscape, but this year I changed things up just a bit. Since MAC is the whole reason I learned rug hooking last year (thanks to a continuing education grant) I thought it would be cool to show them what I have been doing with my new skills!

This year’s piece includes needle felting, rug hooking, and punch needle techniques. I used over 40 materials and colors, and 8 different tools for the 3 fiber art mediums. It’s SO much fun to combine materials like this! Here’s a look at my progress from yesterday - I took photos every few hours to show how the piece was coming along. It was really slow going at first. I only covered a few inches of my surface in the first few hours, but I kept at it and 12 hours later, I was happy with my finished piece. I did take a few breaks during the day so I think all in all I spent about 10 hours on the 16x16 piece.

The Flat Out Under Pressure exhibition will be virtual this year, and will begin on July 1. The winner of the competition will be announced Monday by noon, and of course all the runner’s up as well (which is also a pretty big deal!). There are quite a few other “winners” and they’ll get a cash prize plus the honor of having their work prominently displayed on one of Greenville’s recycling bins downtown.

My finished piece, plus 2 other test pieces I did prior to try out ideas and see how large I could go for the 24 hour competition, will all be available for purchase soon. I’m so glad I found out I couldn’t finish a 20x20 in the amount of time aloted BEFORE it was the actual competition. That would have been a pretty frustrating thing to learn when it mattered most.

My wrists are sore, but I’m so happy I was able to participate in FOUP2020 this year, even though there will be no big party to announce the winners as before. Even still, this has been a bright spot in my week!

Rug Hooking at the Folk School

Last week I had the pleasure of returning to the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, NC for an intro to rug hooking course. This fascinating fiber art form is something I’ve wanted to learn for years, but I was having a hard time finding anyone locally who could teach me (or who had ever heard of rug hooking, for that matter). The history of traditional rug hooking is interesting, and the craft itself is quite remarkable, but I had a very specific reason for wanting to learn this new medium. I knew somehow, some way, I wanted to incorporate this dimensional texture into my existing needle felting work. Even though I could easily envision how I’d combine the two mediums, I had absolutely no idea where to start, so when I saw there was a rug hooking course coming up at the Folk School, I knew the stars had finally aligned and it was time to find out if this idea was possible.

 The Folk School is located in the misty Appalachian mountains, about as far west as you can go and still be in the state of North Carolina. It’s remote, it’s beautiful, and it has a special community that’s been teaching a variety of traditional handicrafts for nearly 100 years. You can learn blacksmithing, chair caning, felt making, book binding, metal smithing, pottery, glass bead making, photography, wood turning, and weaving, just to name a few. The class sizes are small, typically less than 10 students, and you learn by total immersion. By the end of my week, I had put in 40 hours in the fiber art studio! 

The first hour of class, we learned about the tools, materials, and techniques required for rug hooking, and then we were off to hook our first practice piece – a small coaster, using a simple log cabin pattern. Learning to hook a rug seems simple, but it’s not simple at all. After cutting thin strips of wool, you use a hooked hand tool and pull them through the open weave of a piece of fabric. It sounds so basic, but there’s a lot to it. You have to pull the loops through the fabric just so, and space them out enough, but not too much. You can work with a predetermined pattern, but after my first practice piece, I chose to make up my own or work free form. 

By day two, I was hooking away on my first large piece and finally had the chance to try out my idea of combining rug hooking and needle felting, and I’m thrilled to say – IT WORKED! I hooked a landscape, creating a foreground and mountains with little loops of wool, then I needle felted the sky with roving. I absolutely love how the two wool textures look together. I’m comfortable with landscapes, I make them almost daily (in felt), so this seemed liked a good place to start. 

The third day, I tried a more abstract piece, a longer tapestry wall hanging in a pale color palette, still experimenting with mixing roving with the wool “noodles” I was hooking through the linen background fabric. I also learned various ways to finish the pieces, like binding the edges with yarn.  My loops aren’t perfect, my edges aren’t straight, I ran out of wool so the finished piece is about an inch shorter than I had been planning, by I learned so much by the time this one was finished and I’m in love with the irregular pattern and soft earthy colors. 

 Towards the end of the week, I challenged myself to try hooking precise geometric shapes with curves and points, change colors more often, work with smaller scale fabric strips, and switch directions with my loops. I created two more pieces, both using scrap wool and remnants. I also went bold with my color choices and have no regrets about that! 

After my first 40 hours of rug hooking, all in one week, I’m only just starting to understand how it works. I’m a beginner and will be for quite some time, my work is far from perfect, but I’m so happy to be off on this new adventure in a different medium that compliments what I’m already doing. My fiber art is bound to change in the future, and that’s exciting in so many ways.

Check out this short 5 minute video showing highlights of the week, time-lapse footage of my first few hooking projects, and work from the other students in various classes.

I would like to extend a special thanks to Metropolitan Arts Council (MAC) who made this educational undertaking possible by awarding me a grant to help fund my week at the Folk School plus the investment of the new tools and equipment required to continue to pursue a new dimension in my fiber art. Thank you thank you thank you!

This program is funded in part by the Metropolitan Arts Council which receives support from the City of Greenville, BMW Manufacturing Company, Michelin North America, Inc., SEW Eurodrive and the South Carolina Arts Commission.