Help with bringing in the willow crop before Spring begins!
It is always an exciting race.. planning dates that hopefully fall between the rains and snow, and before the sap begins to flow.
And yet, every year willow harvest events prove to be on of the best times to be in the garden. Many hands are needed, from cutting rods to the pick-up and sorting, but this is not the time to bring young children along (for safety reasons). Age friendly for 12 and up.
Three dates are scheduled for Means of Production, please take a ticket to aid in our planning and so we can reach out if weather forces us to change our plans.
As we gather through our screens and attend to the official requirements of reviewing 2022 financial documents, approving the 2023 budget and vote in our 2023 board of directors.
Expect stories of 2022 and dreams and plans for 2023!
Voting members of EartHand are all skill holders who received funds from EartHand in 2022, as well as volunteers in positions of authority, but we welcome and hope for many of our community participants to join us for the conversation!
Packages are emailed to voting members 10 days prior to the meeting, packages and zoom links will be sent out Saturday the 4th to community members who register here.
The Mourning QuiltWinter Virtual SocialsWillow and the Wilds Weaving RetreatBlue Nettle
We have some exciting offerings beginning in February that continue to support sharing skills, connecting to plants and meaning-making with our hands; all coming from a place as always of how we can be makers without first being consumers.
More programs will be listed in the months ahead, and we hope you can join us for both virtual gatherings and in-person sessions in 2023. Meanwhile, spaces are limited in our programs so register soon to avoid disappointment!
Virtual Maker Gatherings: Informal sharing sessions hosted by Sharon Kallis
free /sliding scale, click the date for more information and to register
This course is about both the practical and the intangible.
We will learn (or practice) the skills of paper piece quilting while creating a safe enough space to explore grief and mourning.
Using a specific mapping tool called a Voronoi diagram, participants each create a unique constellation of points on a grid that correspond to points of tenderness, grief, or memory…
Mar 8, April 12, May 10, June 14, July 12, Aug 9, Sept 13, Oct 11
Join the online community focused on growing and processing flax to linen.
These sessions will provide the opportunity to create a provincial support network that builds collective knowledge of flax as a textile crop while fostering a network between growers and spinners around the province. Read more and register here
Willow and the Wilds: Weekend Basketry Retreat
April 28, 29, 30
Friday 6-8.30pm, Saturday and Sunday 10.30am-4pm
Co-lead by Catherine Langevin and Sharon Kallis
A weekend intensive exploration of basketry and materials.
Participants can expect to end the weekend with a new finished woven form and a wealth of experience in learning about local plants for basketry and new – or newly remembered – techniques embedded in their fingertips. Read more and register here
Blue Nettle
6 Saturdays, May 6, June 10, July 15, August 5, September 9, October 14
Join Anna Heywood-Jones and Sharon Kallis for a collaborative learning exchange that will explore the steps of processing nettle stalks into spun line or cordage and growing Japanese indigo for pigment extraction. In later sessions, we will work with various indigo vat types and create handwoven textile swatches or sculptural forms with our blue nettle fibres. Read more and register here
The short days of December find us online, in person, and hunkering down for quiet reflective time.
Join us
December 5th- online 7-8.30 pm
The FibreShed Field-School: reflections and opportunities
Melanie and Christa share their experience with the Fibreshed Field School, its effect on the education of Emily Carr students who participated, and the influence this alternative learning experience had on their own practices. Read more and get your free ticket
December 6th- online 7-8.30pm
Spinners Social Circle
Join Sharon Kallis and Jaymie Johnson online during this season of waxing darkness to spin together, share fibre notes, and provide community accountability to get through our fibre reserves in time to knit, knot, crochet, or weave something before the winter’s end. Read more and get your free ticket
Wednesdays December 7th and 14th 5.30-7pm
and Fridays December 9th and 16th 12.30-3pm – in person at the Roundhouse C.C.
Small Conversations: Spinning Fibres
Join Ada Dragomir in the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre lobby where she will be demonstrating Drop Spindling—an ancient technique for spinning wool (and other fibres) into yarn or thread. Find out more here
December 20th- online 7-8.30pm
Spinners Social Circle
Join Sharon Kallis and Jaymie Johnson online during this season of waxing darkness to spin together, share fibre notes, and provide community accountability to get through our fibre reserves in time to knit, knot, crochet, or weave something before the winter’s end. Read more and get your free ticket.
Willow harvest time is near!
Have you been wanting to get involved in the gardens but the time hasn’t worked out ?
It’s not too late to give a hand! in the next few weeks the willow will be ready to be harvested in both gardens. If this is something you would like to help us with, please email earthand(at)gmail.com with willow harvest in the title, and we will get in touch when we have some dates scheduled for December and January.
We are thrilled to announce that as a part of our celebration of ‘MOP’ turning 20 this year, we have a video by Martin Borden on the big screen – the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen – playing until early spring 2023.
The screen is located on the East-facing side of the Independent Building at Intersection of Broadway & Kingsway in Vancouver. The screening schedule can be found here, click on any day or time to view the schedule of when EartHand Gleaners- means of production- will be showing.
The film is approx. 34 minutes long, silent, and shows the 12 months of plant cycles and stewardship unfolding from August 2021 to July 2022.
Thank you to Vancouver Park Board: Decolonization, Arts and Culture and the generous community donations that made this film possible!
Other opportunities to see MOP onscreen include the two seasonal walkabouts with Oliver Kellhammer offered in the Spring and Fall of 2022, both are on our YouTube channel for home viewing and can be found here:
Join Jaymie Johnson and Sharon Kallis for these virtual gatherings that allow us to to carve time for ourselves to process fibres, spin for future projects, and keep spinning those threads of conversations we started in the summer.
Not a spinner? that’s ok too- bring your other handwork that is good to do in the companionship of others.
3 Tuesday nights- 7.8.30 pm ( PT) please get a free ticket for each evening you can join us, zoom links will be sent out the morning of the virtual gathering.
You might notice the technical offerings are strongly focused on materials processing and spinning – jump on those programs quick, as they won’t be back until late in 2023! Winter programs will focus on weaving, knitting, mending and other ways for working with the threads that come from this Autumns’ sessions.
Land Lessons: Weathering Systems Almanac
Monthly virtual drop-in gathering with Jaymie Johnson and Sharon Kallis
weaving detail of work by Gentle Geographies (Cait Hurley), created during the Ancestral Threads Cloth Cohort in 2021-22
While during the Spring and Summer we are outdoors with priority given to weaving fences and tending the land, Autumn and Winter are for nestling in and enjoying the bounty of that work with materials a plenty.
We believe strongly in busy hands while we converse and learn together; sharing ideas, building skill capacity and community connections. We hope you can join us!
When we gather, we look to this poem by Mickey ScottBey Jones based on an original text by Beth Stranos to inform how we come together:
Together we will create brave space. Because there is no such thing as a “safe space” — We exist in the real world. We all carry scars and we have all caused wounds. In this space We seek to turn down the volume of the outside world, We amplify voices that fight to be heard elsewhere, We call each other to more truth and love. We have the right to start somewhere and continue to grow. We have the responsibility to examine what we think we know. We will not be perfect. This space will not be perfect. It will not always be what we wish it to be. But It will be our brave space together, and We will work on it side by side.
Mickey ScottBey Jones ( and Beth Stranos)
As always, so much gratitude for those that come and join in the conversations, and help shape the directions for how we come together again. In this way, the gatherings and conversations for which we meet up are never dull or repetitious, but provide new ways of sinking deeper into areas of collective and personal research, while still holding room for new folks to enter.
We always come back to Ray Oldenburg’s concept of the Third Place – not home, not office, but a place to gather with others – and in the winter when we don’t have a physical space to meet, we are thrilled to create virtual rooms for our conversations to continue.
many hands showing cordage made while walking at the Means of Production garden
“A thread is now a line of conversation via email or other electronic means, but thread must have been even more compelling a metaphor when most people witnessed or did the women’s work that is spinning. It is a mesmerizing art, the spindle revolving below the strong thread that the fingers twist out of the mass of fiber held on an arm or a distaff. The gesture turns the cloudy mass of flax or wool into lines with which the world can be tied together. Likewise the spinning wheel turns, cyclical time revolving to draw out the linear time of a thread. The verb to spin first meant just this act of making, then evolved to mean anything turning rapidly, and then it came to mean telling a tale.”
excerpt from Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby ( 2013, Penguin)
Pulp Fiction in Vancouver, is giving us a hardcover book discount of 30% if we pre-order at least 15 books. If you live in Vancouver, and would like in on this deal – regardless of whether you plan to join the reading group or not – please follow the instructions below:
Send an e-transfer for $30.00 to Sharon at earthandgleaners(at)gmail.com to secure your book. Please make the security answer “Worn”.
Send an email to earthandgleaners(at)gmail.com with your information. Please include:
Name
Phone number
Confirmation that you’ve sent an e-transfer for $30
Once you’ve paid and emailed your contact details, EartHand will follow-up with pick-up details.
Important Notes:
Order deadline: extended to September 10th at noon
Expected delivery date: late September
Book collection: Tuesday Sept 27 is the tentative pick-up date at Trillium, there will be options to pick-up on different days as necessary
EartHand will send reimbursement cheques if we don’t reach the minimum order of 15 books
We will be accepting up to 25 orders
If you’d like to be among the first notified of new programming, including this reading group, please sign-up for our newsletter here.
Last year we found this weaving intensive was a great way to draw the summer to a close, so are repeating it with 3 nights offered to come out and weave with others. Bring your unfinished projects to continue work or start something new. There will be a variety of plant materials currently being gathered from our gardens for use, and bring any favourite materials you are enjoying to share experiences with others.
New weavers need to register for the Monday night for basic instructions, anyone with basic experience is welcome to show up, refreshers will of course be offered!
Rebecca carding wool with keen community membersnext in line-waiting for shearing on Barnston island
It feels so good to gather in person again!
We have some outdoor open studio sessions planned, as well as community events that you will find us at over the summer months, as we share skills and methods for processing both nettle, flax for linen and wool fleece for spun lines that will be dyed and woven as a part of our artists in residence 2022 projects.
Bring your own picnic and projects, meet other fibre enthusiasts and enjoy an evening in the park surrounded by wools, linens and dye plants in progress to becoming cloth.
Spinners’ Walks: Join us for a morning walk in the gardens for spinning, ropemaking, and observations as we slow down while we move amongst the plants, seeds, birds, bees and insects. August 14 at Means of Production and August 21st at Trillium park.
This year we are busy trying to keep up on the fast growing plants in both our gardens, and finding times to meet in person- often in our smaller research groups that have come together for our Braiding Threads research project. As well, our artists in residence Anna and Meagan are meeting up with Sharon in the gardens or at our outdoor studio at Trillium Park now with regularity and exciting projects are afoot.
A part of our busy-ness behind the scenes involves David Gowman making two looms for outdoor community spaces! As a part of Meagan’s residency time, she has aided us to site a Salish style loom in the lupin and nettle garden. The top beam is from a cottonwood tree that had volunteered on site and that needed to be removed- we are happy to put this offering of wood to use back in the garden, and dye pots will be be created throughout the summer from the results of seasonal garden stewardship.
The loom will be installed in such a way as to allow the weaving and horizontal bars it is stretched on to come off and go in storage between weaving session, and sometimes be warped up in such a way to encourage community passers by to add along.
David installing the loom
The second loom is now situated in the Hastings Folk Garden on East Hastings Street, and artist and community weaver Cait Hurley of Gentle Geographies, alongside Daniela Guerrero-Rodriguez and Hives for Humanity will be connecting with us to activate that loom. The threads that Cait and Daniela are weaving in this community are a part of the larger Braiding Threads research project investigating growing governance and community care with cloth/clothing as the medium for opening up new connections and conversations.
The loom was warped for the first time by Jen Hiebert and Sharon Kallis as a part of the National Indigenous Peoples Day Celebrations in the Hastings Folk garden on summer solstice. Cait, and community members from Hives for Humanity hosted a beautiful event for the first community weaving. If you wish to visit this loom, the garden is located at 117 East Hastings and is open to the public on Wednesdays from 1 to 3 pm.
And, garden work continues! If you wish to join us in the gardens, we meet regularly at Means of Production on Wed evenings and on Tuesday evenings you will find us at work at Trillium park. Reach out at earthandgleaners(at)gmail.com if you would like to get involved and join us.
“MOP” on a summer eveningTrillium park in the lupin and nettle patch
EartHand Gleaners Society 