Sharon Kallis

A large part of how I find myself relating to my environment involves discovering the properties of the materials that grow in a specific area.

I like the concept of enabling myself as a maker to work with what happens to be growing in a place at a specific time, and learning the subtleties of seasons by how various material properties shift seasonally.  Working with community has increased my knowledge base as well, so many people know methods from elders or other countries in how to do things manually, no tech- a lot of this knowledge is undervalued and being lost  but seems a very important way of knowing the place we live in. Working/experimenting with materials also continues to be one of the best ways I have come across to connect with new people. The following is some information I have gleaned from experimentation, working with others, reading books and then having time for practical application. Sharing what I figure out with others is an important part of re-finding skills. Some of this is easy to sort out from photos, other things perhaps not. If you want more information please contact me and I will be happy to share with you what I can.

Natural Dyes from Autumn garden-bed clean up

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, or sometimes just enough to incite passion and curiosity… After a workshop at MOP with Emily and Penny, I felt enabled to go off and try some stuff on my own. the big thing with natural dyes: don’t use your cooking pots, spoons etc, as some things may be posionous! mark your dye pots, stoage jars and spoons so they don’t get used inadvertantly.

bags of colour collected from beds being pulled at the end of season as gardeners get ready for bulb planting. Thanks to Vancouver Park Board gardeners for allowing us to follow behind them.

cooking 10 pounds of begonia! about 3 hours of simmering, with a approx. a tablespoon of Alum as a mordant added at the beginning.

Pre-mordant bath: my dye experiment materials were pre- mordanted in a alum bath for a bit, about 1tbsp in warm water. Dye ration is approx: 1 lb dye material to 1lb dye mater.

strain dye bath after a few hours of simmering, I used old beehive screens. strained dye was put in glass or plastic containers with dye materials from the pre-mordant bath and left for several days, in the sun is best… the key is experiment and see what happens!

results!  pink and reds are begonias, and the blue is perilla nankinensis laciniata done by Emily Smith. notice in the photo how well both blackberry skiens and ivy hold dye! Very exciting possibilities here….

Cedar Bark from city park maintainance clippings

Once more, my urban park provides… when timing is right, one can find the local groundskeeper doing routine cutting on cedar, and strip the bark off  for use- of course, the white wood is so lovely you will want to use that to.

“New Canoe” in CRAB Park, bound partially with the cedar bark we stripped, it changed colour from light, soft pink to  deep amber as exposed to the air

Split English Ivy: twining baskets and more

Splitting English ivy is very easy,  but needs to be done when vine is fresh, or after soaking for approx. 24 hours. split the end of the vine, begin pulling ends apart with both hands, when the vine becomes thicker on one side, pull down harder on that side to pull the fibre back to centre ( photos to come of this soon, I promise!)

children can have lots of fun with this with  assistance.-**note: English ivy is one of those materials that some people have a sensitivity to, so gloves are recommended be sure to wash your hands afterwards.

ivy bundles that are split can be wrapped around the hand and tied to store for later use, soak for a day before weaving.

Starting a basket base from the “spider” starting method

we stuffed baskets with some moss, soil and planted them as outside planters

leave the warp “spider legs” long, tie them and turn it  into a  hanging planter…

notice in this photo, the warp was unsplit, the warp split ivy- bark left on allows for two-tones weaving….

Cedar and Ivy shoes

Working with Todd Devries, I am slowly working on a pair of cedar warp, ivy weft shoes using the twining technique for the sides, and a flatbasket weave for the base- eventually I plan on having a sole on these for outdoor street wear.

Scotchbroom basketry

Invasive Scotchbroom, what to do with it? I had some good success with coil basketry techniques. Drying needs to be carefully done, I worked with fresh materials, and if left in a stack, things will mould quickly, so recommend  drying on a rod horizontally so air can move around individual pieces. We used chopsticks as an awl to make space for the vine to stitch the works together, a pointy sticks works great, but is harder to find when dropped…

Blackberry vines stripped to “vegetable leather”

Before splitting, thorns were scraped off with a knife, or by rubbing on a fence post.

Note: the blackberry is best harvested earlier in the season- I found it too woody by mid August.

Crack the inner pith every few inches, then begin peeling the outer skin off to create a nice long strong “vegetable leather strip”

I used the strips  as ties to bind an ephemeral  sculpture when I did not want “human made” materials going on site.

Strips can be made and used fresh, but if time or season is an issue, rolls can be pre-made, and soaked in water overnight before use.

note: this will change colour from green to brown.

Hazel wood: Coppicing (sustainable harvesting) and weaving

Oliver Kellhammer, the artist who started the Means of Production garden came back to town to teach a workshop on harvesting the hazel wood by a method called coppicing.  Generally, every 6-8 years a crop can be harvested by cutting at the base the majority of branches, leaving a few main leaders. The Hazel grows quickly, and when harvested regularly grows strong, straight rods great for weaving. As with most harvesting for weaving, winter/early spring before sap is flowing is best.

One of the things that’s great about Hazel is that the wood fiber can be softened/separated from itself and become incredibly flexible.

pictured here: Alicia cutting branches and walking up the branch to soften and make pliable.

over a few weekends we wove the branches into the common’s gate at Means of Production. This was the first harvest of hazel, and as such our wood was a bit nobly and not as easy to split as future harvests will be.

David carved a three sided cherry wood cleave for splitting the hazel

By tapping the cleave into the end of the Hazel, in theory we should be able to split the hazel wood into long strips, this was only partially successful in part due to our inexperience, but also as this was the first harvest and our wood was not as smooth/knot free as future harvests will be.

Crocheting English Ivy

Ivy is an incredibly invasive species on the west coast of Canada, but is incredibly strong and pliable as a vine to work with. The Ivy Project found me working with various community and ecologists re-purposing the vine in a variety of ways: crocheting turned out to be my favourite.

casting on to the fence at our work site, we used the open spikes as our needles, and worked from left to right and right to left to crochet “yardage” to work with and also for the bio-netting erosion control experiment.

Not actually being a knitter or knowing how to crochet, when I first set about to figure this out as something teachable to the public, I remembered corking or french knitting/ spool knitting from my childhood. I built large plywood frames of varying sizes to work with. These worked beautifully as an technique intro and to make  tube forms.

Morning Glory/Bind weed Crochet

After working on the fence post, I began looking at other possible instant needles in my environment: the pitchforks at the MOP garden served well for working with the morning glory that was choking off the willow.

Harvesting the vine is really time consuming, trying to harvest and work in one day is too much, I advise harvesting day one, role in balls, and soak briefly or store in a fridge for a few days until ready to work.

Jay Dee modeling a rope neck piece made with morning glory.

Grass Rope Making

Start with a cm diameter clump of long grass, hold it at the 3/4 point of length, pinched between finger and thumb( short length on top), and turn the top upwards, away from you.

Still pinching, bring the lower piece up behind the now twisted part, and move your thumb and finger to this new meeting point and hold tightly.

Now twist that new top piece away from you, and bring the bottom back up behind, and repeat.

Feed in new grass as needed- this is why when starting your grass is not bent evenly in half- so new additions are variant and weak “links” don’t occur.

Rope making is very rewarding, and easy once you get the hang of it- the trick is to keep the twist tight for strength.

The grass dried a lovely golden colour. We wove the grass rope we made into a mat custom fit to cover a creosote soaked log and make it useful as a bench. ( autumn shade retreat at MOP)

Morning Glory Vine Rope:

Another rope making method is for two people to work in tandem, one holding the centre point while one twists.

The morning glory vine shrank a lot as it dried and was not as successful as a finished rope, also inclined to mildew if twisted too tight (to counteract shrinkage) I would recommend experimenting with materials that are not extremely lush-IE: moisture content not so high.

Stinging Nettle:

Stinging Nettle grows in areas referred to as “disturbed land” and places of past human settlement as it grows in areas with high nitrogen and phosphate content in the earth ( midden piles). This information led me on a goose chase of attempting to grow enough nettle to make a tent, then of course the process of processing the nettle to make the tent. Having long thought of fairy tales and the heroine’s journey in such tales in the making of my work, I suddenly found myself caught in my own nightmarish version as the nettle learning curve just seemed to get steeper with each step. Here is the short version of my various trials and errors on what was undoubtedly the toughest and perhaps strangest project I ever took on…the meager nettle plants as of August- a cold wet spring washed out most seeds, and finicky transplants that did not settle in their new home led to travels in search of nettle to harvest.

Nettle was located, harvested, and first processing step involved a 24 hr  submerged bath in one part glycerin, 3 parts water to preserve stems and soften the “stinging hairs”.  A pricey process, knowledge shared after the fact was that local native people using nettle would wait until after the first frost and harvest then- much cheaper, easier, and would avoid my next fiasco….

Upside down hanging bundles in the studio. What’s wrong with this picture?

1. bundles too big, too tight: interior of bundles began to mold

2. bundles hanging upside down ( what was I thinking?) so the top, young growth was at the bottom- if the bundles were reversed, they might have been able to “drain” remaining moisture and glycerin from the cut  hollow stem.

My friend Bill spent a day helping sort out bundles in a park, we salvaged about 50% of the harvest- what a waste!

Each nettle deemed worth saving was split open with a thumbnail, and the strip was rubbed down with olive oil- my general cure all…

Back in the studio with processing future crops, a knife, rock and olive oil were used to pound , scrape and open each hollow nettle shaft.

Did I mention how ridiculously time consuming this was?

The rock as tool was the greatest technical advance in this project at this point in time….. Pictured here, another friend Andrew helping out. Amazing I still have any friends that come visit really.

With materials processed, it was “simply” a matter of lining up the stocks and feeding them through my sewing machine. Sewing panels into the size required for a small two person tent. Sewing lines every 5-6 inches, the areas between what was sewn  kept catching on my table edge and ripping holes, that I would have to try and go back to repair.

Massive zigzag stitching to keep it all together. Some day I really should approach Bernina for funding, as most things I do are such a test to the average household machine.

Trial run before the doors are made and installed.

Interior detail:

It just about broke me, but somehow surviving the absurdity of it was worth while, though the installation itself is not yet finished. One of the irony’s in this project was that I broke about 120 needles in the sewing ( my  machine’s alignment went out, and I kept bulldozing through in my pigheaded way, thinking it was just the nettle causing the problem) I now have needle shards embedded in the tent, and occasionally am pricked by a needle lost in the surface. A fitting return to the sting of the nettle…..

In future, the SRO for disturbed Land tent ( Single Resident Occupancy) will be documented in the areas were Vancouver’s Homeless population find shelter- under bridges, in parks as well as on such locations as the new  development projects like the Olympic village and other locations that have been previously home to low/working class or transient populations but are now developed for Vancouver’s wealthier citizenry.

Experiments with Flag Iris

Yellow Flag iris, though a beautiful marsh flower, is actually an escaped garden variety iris, and takes over wild areas not participating in the ecology but monopolizing in the Pacific North West. This makes it a great candidate for some potential exploration. First we worked on weaving simple multi-strand braid style (warp free)weaves, while the iris was fresh, it stayed workable for about a week after harvest, stored outside in a shady place.

the iris shrunk as it dried ( as all plant mater does), so the weave became very open, and lost most of its strength- though I still really like the look of it. I experimented with drying out stocks and then soaking them to rehydrate enough for weaving, but had no real success, stocks had become too brittle and weak for much use. I did experiment with twisting the dried and soaked stems by rolling them on my thigh into a twist, and these became quite interesting for weaving purposes, and had a limited amount of strength with the twist.

Discovering coil basketry using invasive vines

Vidalba, an invasive in the Mediterranean relative to a Clematis proved to be a worthy, if time consuming workable vine.

The external shell of the vine needed to be peeled off, and the vine could be temperamental as to snapping at the leaf nodes… I was harvesting In October,  and did not get to spend enough time to discover why some vines snapped and others were fine, I think perhaps the amount of sun is likely.

first experiment, a finger crocheted nest

Sometimes the absurdity of what I find myself doing needs to be documented… needless to say, most of my time making the piece was stripping the vine. I would work on prepping the vine at night, store in rolls and soak for 20-40 minutes before using. I found if the vine, once stripped was stored indoors where there was an occasional fire going, or sat in the sun, the vines would not become supple enough for reworking and stayed brittle.

Initial stitchery was sloppy, until I figured out a method of binding the new coil to the previous coil, always stitching to the same furthermost side. A pointy stick served as an awl, the only tool required.

As my vine got short, the end was woven back and forth along the seam of previous stitches, and a new line started the same way.

Like building a coil pot with clay, the shape is dictated by the placement of  each coil row, slight turns in or out altering the shape as it progresses. When the basket form measured  3 ft high I left it outdoors for a few days and nights so it could settle, and I could where the shape would need reinforcement against future droop…. before it became the roof of the barraca de vinya sculpture.