Upcoming Class: Sew Your Own Hooded Sweatshirt!

Check out this blog entry I did for the Lill St Textiles department blog! This class is going to be awesome...

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Hi, Lill St Textiles Buddies! It's cold, wet and blustery out there today; and all I want to do is curl up in a cozy sweatshirt and drink tea. And guess what? In just a few weeks I'll be teaching a class all about sewing hooded sweatshirts! It's going to be a super awesome class that covers some basic patterning/construction techniques while also allowing you to get creative with design and structure. Here are a range of design ideas to get your brain working...

Super simple hoods with marsupial pockets! No need to get crazy if you're feeling intimidated by the sewing: a hand-made hoodie is creative enough!
(Also- can we talk about those awesome pants for a second?!)

Check out that neck variation! It looks pretty comfy...

Applique, lapels, and cowls: oh my!
(Joodito Designs.)

OMG Buttons!

(Little House Clothing on Etsy!)

And even though we won't be doing any screen-printing in the class, my nerdy self couldn't let THIS discovery go without sharing it with you all. Clever, clever!

You can still register for this class over at the Lill St website or by calling the front desk at (773)769-4226. Hope to see you all in class!

-Nora Renick Rinehart

www.fiberistanora.com
www.fiberistanora.etsy.com
http://fiberistanora.blogspot.com
http://theburrowstudio.blogspot.com

Snow Farm 2010!

This summer marked my fourth year teaching at Snow Farm Summer Art Program for high-schoolers! And it was awesome as per usual!

(This is a stuffed dino-dude I made for a staff collaboration that was never completed. Which was fine by me because this guy got to hang out in my studio all session!)

My studio assistant of years past was unable to return to camp due to getting a job running costumes on the set of Conan the Barbarian in Bulgaria (seriously). So I called in my good friend Liz to fill the position:

(Shown here holding her "worlds best liz" trophy made by artist Heather Beck.)

Liz is a spectacular fibers artist and textile designer as well as being an absolutely splendid person to teach with! We started the session with dyeing and shibori:

(MX Chemical dyes and Indigo! Check out those sweet Arashi style, Indigo dyed t-shirts there on the end!)

I've taught this class four times now but this summer really made it clear that I have to think of a new assignment for the dyeing/shibori. I've been having students make samples, which is something I love to do, but they seem to have a hard time connecting the tiny pieces of brightly colored cloth with the rest of their projects: they're just not that excited about them. I'm always left with a ton of abandoned samples at the end of the session. I've been working on some ideas for how to make the first few days of dyeing fun. Part of me wants to have them do a whole new assignment that would tie into the screen printing... or maybe just having them jump in and start by dyeing a t-shirt... I'll keep brainstorming for next summer.

After the dyeing we moved onto screen printing!

(Miriam helping Lauren print her print exchange image: lace!)

When I was in college I always wanted to participate in the print making department's print exchanges but they seemed skeptical because I was printing fabric instead of paper. But print exchanges are awesome! So I have my students participate in our own exchange.

(Caleb and Simon printing Caleb's Dali image.)

The assignment is to design an image to fit inside an 8" x 8" space and to print a set of those images onto dyed fabric squares measuring 10" x 10". I try to get the students to think about color, contrast, use of space, images/symbolism, text and directionality. The hope is that making a set will be enough practice with printing and registering that they will be able to print however much they'd like to for their final project.

(Caleb, Lucie and Joni exchanging prints.)

We had a pretty good critique about the images in both my morning and afternoon class. The students, although a bit hesitant at first to talk about eachother's work, had some pretty insightful comments. Critique is something I struggle with at Snow Farm: there is so much work to do and not a lot of time for discussion. As my syllabus evolves it is another thing I'm going to designate time for.

(Many of the prints as they were hung in the end-of-session gallery.)

The third and final project of the session is the flat-patterning and sewing of a three dimensional object or garment. Early in the first week of class we take a field trip to the local (HUGE) Salvation Army so that each student can start thinking about their final project. Then, they learn how to take their garment/object apart, lay it flat to create a pattern and then recreate the garment/object out of their own dyed and printed fabric. In the process, they also learn how to operate a sewing machine and sew a variety of seams and hems.

(Liz with her deconstructed garment.)

This summer we had a couple of dresses, a few skirts, a painterly corset, a pair of dapper vests and an extremely awesome handbag! I'd like to see more students choose to make objects instead of garments but whatareyagonnado.

(Joni was clever enough to pick a simple garment. Which meant that she, unlike some of the rest of us, had ample time to complete her project. Nice work, Joni!)

This is definitely the most challenging project of the session and it's a project that I think needs to either be altered a little or made the main focus of the class. I like doing the print exchange a lot but I realized this year that as that assignment has come into it's own more, the garment construction has lost a little bit of time. Which ends up meaning that many students don't have enough time to finish their projects.... which is a bummer. Next summer I hope to have a set of assignments that fit better into the two week period.

(World's Best Liz demonstrating the Map Project.)

I love fiber art for a lot of reasons but one of the biggest is that it inherently carries with it history, culture and the weight of global economies. For that reason, I try to infuse my classes with discussions about textile history as well as the ramifications of a fashion-based culture that treats cloth as something that comes from H&M and can be disposed of as soon as the season changes. Which is false! Cloth goes through so many process to get from the plant or animal to the clothes we buy for super cheap and there are hundreds of individuals and environmentally detrimental steps in between!

Last year I started a project to initiate conversation along these lines: I bought a huge world map and, at the beginning of class, had each student place a pin into the country that produced the garments they were wearing.

(The morning class "mapping their clothes:" Ronni, Sarah, Rachael, Miriam, Lauren.)

The project helps to remind us that the things we take for granted come from somewhere real. It also acts as a great geography review: I have to admit that even I had to google a couple of the countries/regions that produced our clothes! But seriously... highschoolers should know where Nicaragua is. (They do now: lots of pins in Central America.)

(Not so many pins in the US.. but thanks to American Apparel we got a bunch sticking out of LA.)

I love teaching... but I also really love the all-camp field trip! This summer we went to local glass artist Josh Simpson's studio:


... and then we went to MassMOCA which is one of my favorite art museums ever!

From the Material World: Sculpture to Environment exhibit:

Tobias Putrih, Re-projection: Hoosac, 2010.

Orly Genger, Bog Boss, 2009-2010

Michael Beutler, Lightning Generation, 2010
(Actually... a detail shot of the piece next to the window. I really liked how the textures of the sculpture and the space related to one another.)

Alyson Shotz, The Geometry of Light, 2010

MassMOCA is semi-permanent home to the largest collection of Sol Lewitt wall drawings in the world! They installed it last year in it's own wing of the spacious museum:

It's pretty amazing. If you get a chance: go!

Back at camp... Snow Farm theme nights are some of the best. This year? Pirates!

(Arrrrrgh, mateys!)

(So goooooood.)

(The piratey staff of first session, 2010.)

(Arrrrrrt camp? Pirate camp!)

And as always, the end of the session brought on a flurry of last minute staff screen printing! It's secretly my favorite part of the session: staff members bring clothes to print on and we have a farmhouse printing party all night long! I think we counted around 40 printed garments in one night this year!

(Me, Rumi and an armload of t-shirts.)

I am so lucky to have found such an amazing place to return to every summer and reconnect with smart, funny, supportive artists. I have a lot of friends in my life in the city(ies) but for some reason spending two weeks in the woods with the Snow Farm staff recharges my battery: I leave feeling motivated and excited and capable. Which is sooo important to me seeing as, for some reason, I also always seem to leave Snow Farm in some state of homelessness. This year, having just moved to Chicago and feeling a little nervous about it, Snow Farm was especially reassuring. It felt like home. :0)

Thanks, Snow Farm, for another amazing summer!

Employed! A 24 Hr Project

One week after moving to Chicago, I managed to land myself an art show! Thanks to my cousin's amazing girlfriend, and my new friend, Tory, I was invited to participate in a 24 hr project with opening to follow. Each participating artist was to bring all materials necessary to make work to a warehouse space near Chinatown and all work created during the night would be hung in the Nichole Villeneuve Gallery.

What I managed to miss by not reading the fine print of the waiver was that the artists were also responsible for providing tables and chairs. Oops.. good thing I found that chair lying around or it would have been a really long night. You know.. even longer than it was already.

The space was huge and beautiful. Apparently, this particular warehouse used to be owned by Al Capone. It was handily located right on the river... good for dumping bodies? Rumor has it that the basement and freight elevators are haunted! But we saw no evidence of it during our night there.

There were all sorts of artists: painters, sculptors, installation artists, and me: fibers

One of my goals for moving to Chicago was to get back into the studio in a really serious, conceptual way. For the past few years I feel like I've really only been touching upon projects- starting things without finishing them... not really taking the time to think things/concepts all the way through. I haven't, however, lost my crazy thirst for historical details: my most recent research topic has been FDR, the New Deal and the Great Depression. In keeping with that theme, here was the proposal I submitted to the curators of this show:

FDR’s New Deal programs and the American experiences during the Great Depression seem to me to be particularly enlightening in the context of the contemporary “Great Recession” and the global financial crisis. During the 24hr project, “Employed,” I plan on exploring the relationships between the Great Depression and the Great Recession through fibers techniques such as scrap quilting and embroidery: both techniques popularized by the necessary frugality of the hard times of the 1930’s. By utilizing text and images I hope to create a series of compositions that can act individually or as a series.

My research included everything from listening to FDR's fireside chats from the 1930's to reading Paul Krugman articles comparing the economics of the two time periods. But what I found most compelling were the hundreds of posters designed and printed by the Works Progress Administration between 1932 and 1943.

The WPA was the primary institution responsible for getting people back to work during the great depression. They did so by initiating thousands of community improvement projects across the US. Many of these were infostructure building: road construction, bridge construction, etc. But many of them were cultural. The WPA organized and provided funding for murals, musical concert, theater... anything you can think of. And their posters advertised them.

I especially loved the WPA posters that focused on the idea of the importance of work, itself.

I mean... first of all, way to glorify the working class. It just doesn't happen that often. But also, it's so true that being unemployed in a country that idolizes productivity is the difinitive road to depression. No wonder the Great Depression was so totally soul crushing, right?

Uhm, amazing poster much? Totes.

This next one was my favorite. It seemed to bring together all of my research with my personal situation of being an unemployed and unconfident artist with the title of the show, "Employed," with my research of both the past and the present.

What these posters really drove home to me was that the WPA wasn't only battling an economic depression... it was trying to assuage an emotional depression that was affecting the entire American population. Spirits had been hit so hard that fixing one was impossible without fixing the other. This was one of the main differences between the Great Depression and the Great Recession that I chose to focus my work on: it seems like now, although times are tough, the American population has kept from sliding headfirst into an emotional pit. Consumerism (apparently the best way to guage people's spirits) is still fairly up. Apple is still releasing ridiculously priced sci-fi products and people are racing to get their hands on them. NPR is still featuring stories of individuals who, after being unceremoniously fired from their boring office jobs, took the "opportunity" to change careers- to become self employed or follow dreams they had never thought were possible.

See? Optimism! And Hence: a flourishing indy crafts movement. The contemporary independent crafts movement combines the comfort seeking nostalgia of handmade objects with the anti-establishment mentality of an unpopular war and the rampant excuse for capitalism that Americans feel is their constitutional right. (Okay, clearly my feelings about the crafts movement are many and varied. And I am admittedly a part of it... but for this project it serves as a complicated muse.)

For my work for the "Employed" show I decided to combine fabrics common to the indy craft movement with images and techniques from the Great Depression.

To me, the forthcoming pieces are a sort of hilarious paradox of domestic memorials (handmade objects that hang in the home) with the mass-produced popular fabric styles and the incongruous images from the WPA posters. Were these posters ever meant to hang in the home? Probably not. But now they can be remembered for the place they hold in America's heart. (I mean, everybody knows this history, right? Ha. Hence my point.)

I chose to leave the images empty for a few reasons: first, because I forgot how god-awful long it takes to embroider anything. I had planned to make maybe six of these compositions but I barely finished three. And second, because I really liked the visual competition of the fabric patterns and the images; like the past and the present were battling to be seen.

Ok, so it's clearly not a finished body of work. But I think there's potential here. I would love to continue the project and make a whole hell of a lot of these guys. I would LOVE any feedback that people have on these, too. Please? Criticism welcome? I need to get back into critique mode.. I've been a bit coddled lately. (Mostly by myself.) Bring it on.

So, a final word on the show experience:

Now, I've done 24 hr projects before... and not with the best success or enjoyment. But the difference between the show I did when I first moved to Philly and this one was that in this case we weren't trying to create collaborative work. When you're relying on other people- people you may not even know- to create a piece that will have your name on it... tensions tend to run very high in the middle of the night. Nichole's show allowed the artists to only feel responsible for their own work... which meant that the rest of the artists involved could be respite and community. I feel like I got to know a bunch of people in the area and see into their creative processes a little bit. It was really awesome.

I thinking Chicago's gonna work out, and I'm really excited to get involved with the art scene here. Too bad i'm leaving for a month in.. like 45 min. I guess I'll try to pick up with this project when I get back in July! In the meantime, stay tuned to the blog for Snow Farm 2010! A week with my amazing nephews! And trying to drive fast enough to escape my personal demons! (Wish me luck. Also safety.)