I feel like I am getting eaten alive by this thing. This photo was taken a few days ago but the sentiment is still the same: This sweater is a monster! Knitting the sleeves off of this giant mass is a huge annoying undertaking. I have to stand in order to work the entire piece [...]

St. John’s, NL, about 1908 (via The Commons)
Yesterday I had a studio visit with artist Luanne Martineau who has an exhibition coming up at the Musee d’art contemporain du Montreal this month. She was nominated for the Sobey Award last year and is presently just finishing a year of sabbatical from teaching at University of Victoria in [...]

double knit from suzen green on Vimeo.
Holy smokes, people. This has been one long week. Out of my normal five-day school week, only one day has truly gone as planned. Yet, despite fire alarms, no energy, power outages, bad moods and poor timing, I’ve managed to have a productive week with only minimal headaches/jaw pain. [...]

Holy smokes. Would you be surprised if I said I’ve been sitting in the kitchen on the computer for so long that I had no idea it was getting dark outside until now? This is a pretty big jump (or slump) compared to the last ten days that have been filled to the brim with [...]

The temperature dropped just as the sun was coming up this morning and for about an hour all the windows seemed to have paisley patterns etched upon them.
This semester I am in a writing seminar. The challenge is to take on a large-scale writing project, have it workshopped by the group and end up with [...]

I’ve been having a bit of time getting back into work mode. One of the good and bad things about spending almost two weeks in Nova Scotia is that time kind of stops. During my trip, I watched a lot of movies and stayed up late and slept in until almost noon only to get [...]

On Christmas Eve, my boyfriend and myself flew to Nova Scotia to spend the holidays with my family in Nova Scotia. On Christmas Morning, I pulled out what I initially thought was a cake server but turned out to be a gigantic knife from my stocking. It was pretty shocking. Seriously!
Holidays spent in Dartmouth are [...]

I am in craft mode. As soon as my final critique for the semester was done and over with on December 9, I embarked on a bit of my own personal Christmas Craft Marathon. Holy moly, I’ve been making a lot and there seems to be no end in sight! How about a tiny run [...]

Ever hear anyone say that your environment is a reflection of your mental/emotional state? Well, I think this photograph explains a lot. This was taken at 11:30pm last night as I was getting ready to leave the studio for the evening. This place is a bit of a freaking disaster–which is normal for this time [...]

I spent the majority of the weekend in the studio furiously working away. This is what my work environment usually looks like while I’m in the thick of things. Please take note to some essential items that make me a productive gal:

Hot water bottle – I’ve been having some pretty killer lower back pain lately [...]

So, in a bit of a temperamental rage, I did something dramatic that caught many of my studio peers off guard:

I sliced up the hooked mat I’ve been so diligently working on. I didn’t even think twice about it, I just whipped out those scissors and didn’t look back. Why would I do such a [...]

hooking from suzen green on Vimeo.
See, the thing about hooking a mat is that it appeals to my obsessive side. It’s a lot like eating those free baskets of homemade potato chips at the Hotel lounge on Rue de la Montagne off Ste. Catherine: the saltiness and creepy onion taste makes you want to drink [...]

I think the main reason this is taking so long is because I’m making a lot of decisions along the way. Having never hooked a mat before, I’m learning as I go. Like how high to make the pile so I don’t accidentally pull the whole thing out. And how to blend colours to give [...]

Let me tell you about something that I learned today: having too many ideas means that not everything can get executed well. Some sacrifices have got to be made in order to move forward.
What sacrifices have I made? I pulled out of a workshop with a jacquard loom because I couldn’t do that and prepare [...]

There is nothing better than spending a Sunday morning in the dye studio. It felt so good to focus on something quite methodical. Measuring, mixing, figuring out the math. Ahhh….it’s a type of control that any obsessive worry wart thrives on. A kind of control that is so precise that little is left up to [...]

So it has been a somewhat productive evening in the studio tonight. I’ve done a little bit of drawing, knitting, researching and writing. A friend asked me the other day over MSN if I had “pitched a tent” in my studio yet and I laughed it off but holy, moly I’m not far off. I [...]

A few days ago I got a package in the mail from my Mom. In it were mat hooking supplies that I cannot seem to find here in Montreal. She sent up beautiful linen burlap, a hook with a great foam “for arthritic hands” handle, and a beautiful book by Deanne Fitzpatrick. I’ve been doing [...]

I am 1/3 of the way through the yokes for my multi-headed sweater. It’s not quite as time consuming as I was expecting but it does eat up a fair amount of wool. I’ll be ordering more for the body and sleeves closer to Christmas because this thing is going to be gigantic. Once all [...]

The moving house. Or, to the use traditional term, househauling. I am completely transfixed by this iconic image of resettlement. Househauling was a common practice in Newfoundland, especially during the Smallwood era after Confederation in 1949. Tiny communities that were determined to have no future were given incentive to move to larger centres where government [...]

Phew! So, it probably goes without saying that the beginning of a new school year totally wrecks any ambition to have a normal blog updating regime. In four weeks I have done a lot but also felt like I haven’t done a single thing. The biggest challenge for me right now is dividing up my [...]

Hello from the work station! I want to apologize right off the bat for a longer than intended absence from the blog. Since I last updated, I completed my first full week of classes/seminars/studio and caught a nasty little cold bug (don’t worry, no pig flu around these parts!).  So basically I’ve spent the last [...]

This is the pause before my life becomes hectic again. Tomorrow I have my first seminar–Urban Insights: St-Henri–a seminar that looks at the history of St-Henri, a well-known burrough of Montreal that has a rich and seedy history. That’s followed by three more days of classes. Studio on Wednesday, the class that requires first and [...]

More than mildly disappointing, the crochet “sphere” I had hoped to felt kind of turned into a felted water cooler. What have I learned from this experience? Galway Irish Worsted wool shrinks up like a hot damn and the rest definitely needed more work. The white band, made with that super feltable Galway, cinched the [...]