 If you enjoy watching Common Ground online, please consider making a tax-deductible donation at lptv.org. Lakeland Public Television presents Common Ground, brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota. Welcome to Common Ground. I'm your host, Scott Knudson. In this episode, we make a few stops along the 2016 Pine De Prairie Fiber Arts Tour. In this episode, we take a look at the 2016 Pine De Prairie Fiber Art Studio Tour in Northern Minnesota. Local fiber artists showcase their talents in beautiful works of art by welcoming strangers into their creative spaces. Some give us a tour in their place of business, while others demonstrate their skills in the comfort of their own homes and studios. We begin the tour in Foston, Minnesota at the Northern Woolen Mills. It's owned and operated by Stephanie Anderson. So, come on in. While she guides the tour of her facility, we learn about the numerous steps in machinery needed to operate a woolen mill. Everything in the guinea sacks that you see come from within 75 miles of the mill. And we only do USA fibers here. What you're seeing is mostly sheep. We do have some bison. As we go through, you're gonna see some elk. And then something that we do that's a little bit different is people can come into our warehouse and pick out the sheep or the color, whatever they want, and we'll custom spin it for you. So we have open over here some of the different colors that we have. So we have some grays and some blacks and some whites. Before, if there's any black hairs in sheep, it was considered of no value. But here, I can't keep the grays and the blacks in stock. So we really like those black sheep that you see out there because it has a lot of interest. They die really well. They're really fun to work with. So we're opposite of what the sheep industry says should be. And I still get farmers that bring stuff in that say I've had this colored stuff sitting in the barn because the shears won't take it or the wool pools won't take it. And we love it. We can't keep it in. We've done ox. We've done kiviot. We do camel hair. We do a lot of rabbit. And if there's any leftover, I get it. So when people come to Pertue pick out the wool that they want, do they pay by the pound, by the ounce, or how? They do pay by the pound. And they pay by the pound on a finished weight. And the finished weight for wool is $23 a pound. So each fiber that comes through here gets opened by hand. You see these little locks. Each lock has to be hand-opened. So these tables are screened tables. And we do it over the screen table. And that way the dirt falls through to the floor. And then from when it's all picked and all opened, it gets put into a laundry bag. Our water is 180 degrees. So it will sit in that water for half an hour. And that will melt the lanolin off. We push water through it. We use PVC pipe. So we push it into the water. And that'll bring the lanolin and the dirt up and down. So that's how we clean it. We use an environmentally friendly soap. And that soap will eat the lanolin within 72 hours. And then it just goes down into the sewer system. So everything is environmentally friendly. We do not do a chemical burn to take off the vegetable matter. What doesn't fall through in this point will eventually come through in some of the machines. You'll notice sometimes when you knit with our stuff, you'll have a little piece of straw or something. And that's because we don't do a chemical burn here. One of the reasons why I don't chemical burn is it's the EPA approval is outrageous. So that tells me that it's hurting our environment. And I don't want to do that. How many employees do you have? We have anywhere between 8 and 10, depending on how the orders are coming in. And those are all full-time and non-included in that. Is this something you did as a hobby and then it's grown into this? Or is this something that you had been involved in previously? No. My background is corporate hotels. I have a friend who had one of the yarn companies. And she was buying, well, in the United States, taking it to Canada, because that's the only place you could get it spun. And then she was bringing it back to the US again. Well, that was twice through customs. So that twice through customs doubled her price, and she couldn't compete anymore. So she asked me to go to Bemidji Willemills, which I did. And I met with Bill at Bemidji Willemills. And he showed me some of his stuff. But an interesting comment he made as we're looking at some of his stuff was people call him every day and ask him to reopen for spinning. And they haven't spun yarn since the 60s. So I said, well, why isn't somebody doing it if that's the case? And he said the textile industry really left that part of the textile industry left in the 1960s. So that's why I decided to do it. I didn't even hand spin before I started. So where did you get the sheep? Did you just put an ad out that you're looking for? I didn't even have to. They were just bringing it in like crazy. I did contact one shearer, which is Byron Johnson. And he's from the Bemidji area. And he really helped me bring in my first. And then word got out that I was here, and people just brought in on their own. They told me when I first started that it would be hard to get good wool in Minnesota. It has not been. It's been great. The quality of wool we're finding is really nice. This machine is a dehair machine. So what this does, it takes the long guard hairs of the bison and separates it from the downy undercoat. So you're left with the downy undercoat and the long hairs through this machine. And this machine works on centrifugal force. So the long hairs are thrown to the outside. And the short downy hairs are passed along on the inside. This is a cotton gin. This cotton gin came from South Carolina. And there's a board in the back with nails sticking out. And this machine goes around in a circle. And it'll take that wool that we were looking at and makes it into, it opens it up further and makes it into even pieces. And then there's a vacuum on the other side of this that will suck this out and drop it evenly into the next machine. You can see how this drops down into the sheet. And then it goes into the card machine. And the card machine is a bunch of wheels that have combs on them, but they pretty much feel like razor blades. And those razor blades will get everything going the same direction. So this machine will do 100 pounds in an hour. So that quilt batting type of material that comes out like this. We put it through what that's called the trumpet. It comes out of the trumpet. It's very open and airy. This machine has combs in the top. They look like hair combs. And there's 75 in the top and 75 in the bottom. So it stretches and pulls and stretches and pulls and makes us a tighter, denser roving. So it goes in here, comes out a quarter of the size on the other side. So then we go to a spinning machine. This spinning machine was made in the United States. So this machine will do very fine, very teeny threads. You can see it goes up and over. There's a stretch here. And then it comes out a thread down here. This machine is finer. We can also adjust the gauge from here. So how fat the roving comes out will help adjust. So the size will start here. So that next machine down is from Spain. And that is the only company still in business. All this equipment came, of course, with no training manuals, no operating manuals, nothing. So we started there contacting that company, but they're in Spain and they didn't speak English and I don't speak Spanish. So we finally got with the lady on the phone YouTube, YouTube. So we figured out that there was a YouTube video for that machine. And so we went on YouTube, the video's in Spanish, but we watched it over and over and over and that's how we learned how to operate that machine. So this is a plying machine and this will put together those strands that you saw that were spinning down there. This is the exact same stuff. So we can put two or three or four or 10 or however many together to get the fatness that they want. This machine is obviously one of our newest machines. It actually has electric eyes in it. So this machine puts everything on cones. Professional companies who make socks or who are weavers or whatever like things on cones because they can just feed off of the cone. The machine next to it is one of our oldest machines, that one's from 1935. And that machine is a skein winder so it wraps it around into a circle and makes it into the skeins like you buy in the store. From the skein winder, we put it in a tube sock and then we put it into the washing machine, give it one last rinse and then we'll hang it up on the racks here. Do you ship worldwide? Since we only do U.S. fibers, I usually only get asked for a U.S. product but yeah, we do ship worldwide. With Stephanie Anderson's tour complete, we hit the road to Debs, Minnesota to visit the home of Marilyn Lee. There we see a house dedicated from the ceiling to the floor and everything in between to the fiber arts. Hello, my name's Marilyn Lee. I live in Debs, Minnesota. This is my home and I'm showing a lot of my work and my quilts and old vintage sewing machines that I do a lot of my work with. We don't really have a conventional home. Everything goes around with the fiber art and sewing machines and we create a lot of things from scraps or recyclables. And I like to decorate my home with fabric as you can see by the ceiling. I've got squares and embroidery and almost like a quilt on the ceiling. I love to create fiber art. There's so many different things that you can do with fabric and thread. I like to create the surroundings around me and nature and it's a therapy for me too. It's just a very relaxing therapy and I like to do it with vintage machines. I get a lot better feel for the work. This is a 1964 Singer. I do a lot of chenille work with that. I use knitting machine yarn. This machine is a 1929 embroidery machine and I do a lot of embroidery such as this coat with that. Then over here, this is a treadle saw machine and I do a lot of embroidery and lace making and different things on that machine. I've been sewing since probably before I could walk almost many, many years. I learned on a treadle saw machine but then I didn't use one until just a couple years ago when I started actually using my treadles again. I've used embroidery machines for many years now. This Singer is an embroidery machine. There is kind of like a hand crank underneath of it that makes the needle move. It's kind of like driving a car. So I can step on a pedal. And I turn the little crank under here and I can draw, I can write my name with it. It takes quite a while to get used to how to work it. It's a little bit of skill involved. It's almost like driving a car, pulling a trailer, only backing up with it. You can do a lot of really intricate work with it. This is my button mosaic. I collected buttons for years and years that I didn't think that I would probably ever use all the buttons on any clothes or anything. So I decided to do a mosaic with them. So this is my button buck. It's made out of buttons, although it's not a button buck in actuality. It's about eight by six and a half feet. It's one of those projects that I start that I wish I had because it takes so much time to do but it turned out really, really well. I really like it a lot. So this is Jane Carlstrom. She's here joining us today in the fiber arch trail. She's doing some wool felting right now. She's making Lake Superior Agate dryer rocks. They help keep the static out of your clothes when you dry your clothes. This is a very first scrap quilt that I made. It was rather a challenge for me because I usually like to work with some sort of an idea or a pattern in mind, but I had so many leftover scraps from other quilts that I made because there's fusible webbing on all the scraps. So I just started ironing it on and it just kind of developed and it was really a freeing for me. It surprised me. So now I'm doing a lot more fabric scrap quilts with just scraps. All of this was just came out as scraps and I just put it together and it was really exciting to make. And the floor in our home is firewood floor. We actually made it from our firewood pile. It's all cut in small slices and we glued them all to the floor in a pattern. Then we put mortar on it in between all the circles and then we put floor poly on it. It just adds so much to the home I think. This is just more sewing and stuff and these girls are creating a scrap quilt right now. They've never done this before so I've got them busy learning how to do that. We're gonna see what develops. Every person that comes through on the fiber art trail gets to put a piece on and we're waiting to see what develops from it. See these are all the scraps from previous quilts. This is probably the only modern machine that I have in the house or one of the only ones. This is my six needle embroidery machine. I do a lot of work with that and I also digitize a lot of my own artwork. This is a blue jay that I digitize. I have two programs that I do my own artwork and digitize it. And my fabric stash, you can see I have quite a bit of fabric. You can't see because it's hidden here and there. And this is the Obama quilt that I made. All the quilting was done on the vintage machines. All the embroidery was done on the vintage machines. I started that quilt January 20th inauguration day, 2008. And I thought that it was an incredible piece of history. So that was why the quilt was made for history. Once again, we're off to our next destination, the home of Carrie Jessam. Inspired by colonial times, Carrie demonstrates weaving a wool blanket on a loom. My name is Carrie Jessam. I live here in Salway, Minnesota. And I am weaving a wool blanket on my four shaft loom. I'm participating this weekend in our pine to prairie fiber arts trail. And here I'm demonstrating a weaving wool blanket. And my blankets tend to be those that were woven like they were in the colonial period. I enjoy weaving those patterns, using those materials, primarily wool, some linen. I've been doing this weaving for about 22 years. I first got interested in weaving. When I joined my husband, I and my children joined him with historical reenacting in the French fur trade era. One of the items that we use in historical reenacting is voyages. It's our wool blankets that were produced in Europe and then traded in this area. And being part of that, I wanted to participate. And one way I could participate was weaving. I actually started out with finger weaving and then went to weaving on the loom, weaving blankets for checkers and reenactors. And things grow and progress from there. I think I'll be doing this for a long time. I really, I love it. I do reference historical books for what worked in that time period, what they used. But again, it doesn't take a lot of looking to realize that they were so gifted and their patterns and their colors that they chose. This is the first time I've done anything like this. I found that people are really interested to come in and see what I've done, see what the loom looks like and how it's operated. I love explaining to them a little bit how the loom is dressed and worked and to feel the difference between the fabric on the loom is so much different than the fabric when it becomes a finished product. So it's been wonderful meeting people, having them come in and so I've just switched colors. This is a striped pattern. I thought the pattern up and then I kind of write out my order of colors. And this is gonna be a striped pattern that when I'm all done will probably measure about nine inches in length. So this is an example of a finished blanket. And now this blanket has been fold in the washing machine which makes it more lofty, it's thicker, a little bit fuzzier. And what happens in folding is you kind of think of it as controlled shrinkage in a way. It's going to make the blanket warmer as well. And again, this is an example of trade blankets that our fur traders may have had or other traders would have had as well. We go from blankets to quilts on the next stop of the tour at Sadie Ray's Quilt Shop in Wilton. The owner, Shelly Baker, introduces us to numerous styles and patterns for quilt making. I'm Shelly Baker. I am the owner of Sadie Ray's Quilt Shop in Wilton. I'm five miles west of Bemidji. And this is my first year of participating in the Pine Trapari Fiber Arts Trail. I own the quilt shop and I have been here at the quilt shop for about five years now. I've been a quilter for about 20 years and I enjoy working with the pieces, putting the quilts together, buying the fabric, making the samples that you see on the walls with us. And I just thoroughly enjoy the hobby of quilting. I find it very peaceful. I find it very relaxing. I truly enjoy the colors, the fabrics, how I coordinate them and put them together. The share time I have with other people, my friends that are also into the quilting world. It's very rewarding to help the people that come through the door and see what they're doing or making for their projects, whether it's for their home or their babies. It's rewarding to be part of that in somebody's life, making a special moment through a quilt. Today has been a wonderful day for us to meet all the people who are out and about, enjoying what I and all the other artists love to do. So it's been a great day for us. We've seen plenty of smiley faces. Quilting is for all ages. Quilting isn't just something that your grandmother does anymore. It's something that is attractive to all ages, young as the 4-H girls to the new mothers. So quilting is something that's great for everybody to experience and have their own handmade treasures. After seeing the beautiful quilt displays, it is time for our final stop of the day on the Pine to Prairie Fiber Art Studio Tour. We head north of Bemidji to Eve's Weaves, where fiber artist Eve Somsky proudly displays her works of art around her home and demonstrates her basket weaving process. I'm Eve Somsky and I'm a fiber artist. And today I'm part of the Pine to Prairie Fiber Arts Trail and I'm inviting people into my home and my studio where I make baskets. I started by taking a community ed class, actually. I've been involved a lot with yarns and threads and I've done a lot of sewing. So I've always been interested in fiber arts and I took this community ed class and that was it. My sewing machine started collecting dust. So I've been basket weaving for a little over 20 years now. I guess I started and was interested because I couldn't make things that were useful, instead of putting things in plastic containers, I could create a basket to hold my yarn project, my crocheting project or my sewing project. I could put all my dog's toys into a basket and they were beautiful things to me. So I enjoyed making them. Although I think basketry started as more of the utilitarian thing where people had to make containers because they weren't, you know, Walmart's to go out and buy containers. So over the years, I think it's become more of an art form and the thing that people collect because they're just fun to look at, nice to look at. Baskets can be woven with many types of materials. Most of my baskets I use rattan reed. I like it first of all, because it's easy to get. And second of all, it really takes color well. I like to use a lot of color in my baskets and I can dye the reed myself with fiber dyes like written dye and some of those. I think a lot of things that are the same about weaving baskets and working with yarns is the materials and the feel of it and the working with your hands. The thing that's a little different about baskets is I'm working with water. My materials have to be soaked so they're pliable or they'll be too brittle and break. And also a lot of my materials can be natural things like birch bark, pine needles, cedar bark, willow, even grasses and things like cattails and sedggrass and sweetgrass can be used in weaving. So I think it's hard to say how different it is. They're very similar, but maybe the materials are slightly different. I've always been somebody who just had to make stuff. But in the fiber arts, there's so many types of fibers you can work with, yarns and fabrics and threads and getting into weaving with natural products. And I think people who are not creating with these types of fibers maybe don't understand kind of the fun behind it and the creativity it presents and the satisfaction of making something you can use or enjoy and that you made yourself. Well, these are some of the baskets that I've made. As you can see, there's quite a variety. I do like to try different shapes and styles and sizes and colors, so I have some different things here. Here's a basket, for example, with a wooden insert and a wooden base. Here's something you could stick your bread or crackers in. I received a grant from the Region 2 Arts Council through the History and Heritage and Arts Fund and I was studying about more sculptural type pieces, more contemporary pieces and these are three of the pieces that I made after I studied with Agal. They're not baskets that are necessarily very useful, but they're still fun to look at and fun to enjoy. So for example, a basket like this one is a container or a vessel. I could put something in here, I could store something, I could carry something in here. So even though this is fun and beautiful to look at, it's also useful. So when I was learning about more sculptural pieces, something like this, fun to look at, a lot of pattern going on, a lot of movement going on, creates great shadows on the wall if you have a light shining to it, but not necessarily a container or a vessel that you would put something in or carry something in. So when I was learning about these, I had a hard time getting away from that. I wanted things to be useful and one of the things that stuck with me from the instructor, she kept walking past and saying that my work was too predictable. I needed to just let it go and weave and so that took a lot of practice for me. I think I started basketry because I liked the idea of being able to use the baskets, but these were fun and I'm becoming more comfortable with just letting it go and letting it be kind of creative looking. The Fiber Arts Trail is many different artists in showing their work and letting everybody in the community know what beautiful fiber work is being done in the area. Well from the artists, it's a chance for us to show what we do, where we do it, how we do it and it's something that we have a passion for so of course we love to share it and I've enjoyed the people have come by my place today. It's great for the artists, it builds their self-confidence that people are interested in what they're doing because lots of times some of the artists I meet and encounter, they don't really think what they're doing is special or unique and they really are and this is a great way to show their appreciation in our community. I think when people in Bemidji and the surrounding towns have an opportunity to come into our homes and our studios to see what we do, I see people being inspired to do things themselves. I see people having an appreciation and understanding what is done or what we can do. I think it's just good for all of us. It also feeds the artists too. We get inspiration from people that are visiting us. I think it's really good for the community to get out and visit with artists and see what is being done in the community and also to teach other people what can be done and maybe instruct and inspire. Inspiration is important. It's fun to see where they work and how they work and how their art is connected with their lives. It's just your passion. Thanks so much for watching. Join us again next week on Common Ground. If you have an idea for a Common Ground piece that pertains to North Central Minnesota, email us at legacy at lptv.org or call us at 218-333-3014. To view any episode of Common Ground online, visit us at lptv.org. Episodes or segments of Common Ground call 218-333-3020. Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people November 4th, 2008. 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