February 2025
Studio views, Landmade 2025!
In this newsletter you’ll find:
Studio Views
Landmade 2025
Look & listen
Studio Views
The view from my stool, fore and aft.
The wonderful scarves of my first weave-a-scarf rigid heddle class at the Art Gallery of Burlington. More dates are coming shortly — there was a LOT of interest, so please keep your eye on their workshop page if you’re interested.
Montrealers! Save the date - I’ll be coming to teach two sessions of Stripe Lab on May 24 + 25 at Irene Textiles. I’m short on details and sign up links right now, mostly because it takes me ages to reply to Yde’s emails. Coming soon!
Save the Date! Landmade 2025
I’m really excited to share that Landmade is coming back this year! This wonderful event brings together Ontario fibre farmers to celebrate and promote local wool and textiles. Like many things, it disappeared for various factors (pandemic being one of them), and I’m sure I’m not the only person in the Toronto area that has dearly missed it. I met some wonderful people through Landmade and connected with my local fibreshed for several important projects; the wool for my first VÄV Magasinet project, for example, was something I got at Landmade in 2020!
In the past, Landmade was an amazing one day market, where knitters, weavers, spinners, and other supporters could meet farmers and purchase wool and wool products directly from the farm. This year’s Landmade is an expanded 2-day event hosted in partnership with my university, Toronto Met: the market will be on Saturday March 15, 2025, and there will be an all-day symposium the day before on Friday March 14, 2025, exploring and showcasing the many innovative things farmers and makers are doing with fibre. Both days are FREE to attend for anyone interested!
As you might see on the poster, I’m leading a workshop on Saturday called Darn it! Weave-a-Patch, where participants will use a small frame loom to create a woven patch for mending or other projects. Details and registration TBA, but it will be a beginner workshop ideal for anyone who hasn’t woven before or someone who just wants to get a feel for Ontario wool. Let me know by replying to this newsletter or leaving a comment if you’d like to sign up.
I am really excited to see Landmade come back. Local wool is something I feel very strongly about on several levels and I’m thrilled to have it back AND with the symposium component so we can learn from some great folks who have been thinking and making with local wool. I’m really looking forward to saying hi to Deborah Livingston-Lowe of Upper Canada Weaving, Brenda and friends from Black Sheep Farm, and Hamilton local Nọnsó Knits!
Landmade will be held at the Image Centre, at 33 Gould St. Toronto, a short five-minute walk from Dundas Station.
Look & Listen
There’s so many interesting exhibitions that have passed my desk in the last while…
I’m really looking forward to seeing What We Inherit, a new exhibition at the Worker’s Art and Heritage Centre in Hamilton, ON. Asking “what legacies of labour do we inherit?” artists Natalie Hunter and Heidi McKenzie look at how their own familial occupations have shaped them.
Heidi McKenzie, a ceramicist, traces her ancestor’s journey from Ireland, India, the Caribbean and finally Canada, through her piece Linenopolis — a name many used for Belfast, Ireland, during the nineteenth century. For this exhibition she has created 59 hand-cut, punched, and uniquely decaled jacquard punch cards that express this heritage and the work of her ancestors who farmed flax.
I won’t be able to see this in person, but I hope some of you might be able to visit Ali Al-Jamri’s The Legend of the Looms at the Blackburn Museum, presented in partnership with the British Textile Biennial and the Arab British Centre. The installation brings together poetry, film, and textiles to bring to life a fictional debate between two weavers. Coincidentally, this is another piece that could be said to explore the legacy of textile work — while unrelated to What We Inherit, both exhibitions seem to be speaking to similar themes.
Further afield, Pakistan’s first textile museum opened in Karachi in December 2024. Profiled in this Guardian article,
“the museum, named the Haveli, features five galleries showcasing different kinds of embroidery Askari has collected from some of the remotest corners of Pakistan, ranging from ceremonial cloths traditionally sent from a groom to a bride before a wedding, to dowry purses and vibrant animal adornments worn by camels.”
And lastly, I’m really disappointed that I wasn’t able to see Eva Birhanu’s exhibition Tresses in the Tide at the Textile Museum of Canada. The TMC had to suddenly close their doors last week because of a shortfall in finances and some urgently needed repairs.
Eva’s exhibition “… represents the intersections of Black identity and natural acts of defiance, weaving together the strength of human and ecological survival against all odds,” by looking to coral reefs, which are particularly vulnerable to environmental changes. It’s a real shame the museum had to close and that Eva didn’t have an opportunity to share her work for long.
After I dig out from this snowstorm, I’ll be making a small donation to support the museum, who has supported me by exhibiting my work in 2019 in Crosscurrents: Canada in the Making (sorry, no images available! This link takes you to a school programs brochure, which is still pretty interesting).
Sorry for all the Instagram links this month!
See you at Landmade!
Amanda
I love your newsletter! It brings such joy. Thank you.