One UnBeelievable Year

Can you bee-lieve (sorry, had to) that the Beehive Craft Collective has been around for a year already? It's flown by in a blur of meetings and workshops and craft fairs and art installations. Not to mention the fact that many of us are full-time makers and/or entrepreneurs in our day-to-day lives. Needlework, Sweet Ice Snow Cones, Bespoke Uprising, Jenna Rose, White Elephant... sometimes it's exhausting to even think about. But that's also the really great part about a collective - the joint support from everyone involved working towards a common goal. I often think about how honoured I am to be a part of a group of such awe-inspiring and talented women.

We're gearing up for some exciting things this year too. We are super excited to be participating in the Craft and the New Economy symposium on March 10th at OCAD University. We'll be doing a pretty informal presentation on how to start a craft collective within your own community, while also providing materials for a crafting circle. We'll have everything you need to join in making paper piecing hexagons, but everyone is encouraged to bring their own projects as well.

Ever since we saw the Quilts! exhibit at the AGH we've all kind of been obsessed with quilting bees and friendship quilts, and this is where our idea stems from. A collective project while discussing forming collectives. We'll be presenting from 6pm-8pm and we hope to see some of you there. It should be an amazing event all around.

We're also working on our submission to be a part of this year's Supercrawl. All we can really say about it at this point is that it will be another large scale textile installation that has the opportunity for community involvement. Does Jenna's sketch give you any ideas? I didn't think so. The Bees are really hoping to be a part of this for a second year, so cross your fingers for us!

And the question that we've been asked most often lately - will we be putting on another Summer Craft Fair?  Honestly, we're still figuring out the logistics of this, as we've lost our beautiful location from last year (very happily to CBC) and it's caused kind of a snag in our plans. If not a full scale craft show, be sure to look out for some smaller trunk shows throughout the year. Either way, we'll be sure to keep you updated on our plans.

Thanks for following us during our first exciting year! We look forward to what 2012 will bring for us all.

Bee's BBQ

When I wrote this, Mel (one of our very own Bee's) was about to have a baby, but right before I posted I found out that little baby Margaret Jane was actually born early this morning! How exciting! A few weeks ago, we thought we'd celebrate by hosting a Beehive BBQ in honor of this little one.

We gathered at Kate's place, and had a lovely time chatting, and enjoying so much amazing food. Kate made a totally delicious rhubarb rosemary spritzer (you can find the recipe on her blog, here).

The rhubarb spritzers were wonderful, but my personal highlight of the meal was Kate's fiancé, Erick, rocking the BBQ. He grilled veggies, Black Walnut Lane sausages, and divine rosemary chicken burgers - amazing! All of the meat came from local farmers, and you could taste the difference. Everything was so yummy!

It was just so nice to sit together in the afternoon sun and, instead of talking about the craft fair and our knitting project, we just got to relax and learn more about each other. We even invited the boys to this event - that's a first!

The BBQ was completely delectable, and so much fun. By the end of the of the evening we broke our own rule and started talking Beehive projects. We can't help it, it's just too exciting!

Perhaps we should just make all of our meetings barbeques?

Photos courtesy of Meg and Kate

Pysanky!

Last Monday evening Hollie was kind enough to welcome us around the harvest table in her lovely home to try our hand at traditional egg decorating. Since I was a kid, Easter has been my favorite holiday. There's very little pressure, it comes with spring AND there's chocolate...what's not to love! With spring - and a late Easter, for those inclined - around the corner, eggs were on our brains and had us thinking of the very impressive craft of pysanky (pih-SAHN-kee). Traditionally, Ukrainian woman would create effortless-looking decorative eggs by drawing resists in beeswax on the surface of eggs and successively dipping them into various dyes, layering intricate pattern over intricate pattern. While some of us remembered childhood attempts at this or similar egg dyeing crafts, none of us really knew what we were doing at all. And let us tell you...it's hard! We were not as instantly expert at this as we thought we would be, but it was a lot of fun!

The endeavor began with a trip to The Ukrainian Store in Dundas. When you go in it's hard not to get distracted by all the fresh locally made specialty foods, after all, they boast the "best perogies in town"...a statement that has since been tested by Beehive members and met with much satisfaction. The owners were extremely friendly, fully stocked in every thing we needed and willing to patiently translate the directions on the bright packages of dye.

The supplies needed were candles, dyes, beeswax and kistkas (KIST-kuh - a simple stylus made from a cone of metal fastened to a small wooden dowel with wire). The Ukrainian store has a variety of sizes of kistkas that produce different thickness of line with the beeswax. They even supply electric ones for the expert hand! Dyes can also be made naturally using plants and vegetables like beets. We gathered onion skins to make a yellow dye using just the same method as for fabric dye.

The Hamilton Public Library was full of beautiful books on the subject, and proved invaluable for inspiration.

We mixed the dyes according to instructions and laid out everything we needed to get started. each of us had a little candle in front of us and our egg to decorate. Some times you can blow out the yoke in your egg ahead of time or - as per tradition - leave it to slowly dry out over a few years.

You start by heating the metal part of your kistka until you can easily scoop out a little beeswax, filling the larger open end. With further heating, the wax should run down into the cone, getting ready flow out onto the egg's surface. I found I had to heat my tool often to keep the wax flowing and TOO often we would heat it too much and a large flow of wax would blob out the end of our tool, muddying our attempts at perfect designs! We had to ditch our pride and realize that straight lines and symmetry come with years of practice.

Where the wax is drawn on a resist was made on the egg so that those areas were left white when we dipped them into our first dyes. After you take it out and pat it dry you can add more wax before dipping the egg in a second color, and so on. Wherever the wax has been put on, the last color dyed will stay resisted until the end. We worked from light colors to dark ones. When we finished, we gently scraped or melted off the wax resists revealing all the bright colors we had captured in our squiggly patterns!

I think we were SUPPOSED to be having a meeting too...but I'm not sure we ever got round to discussing anything.

Some of us have since become addicted to the beautiful end results of this craft, and this week for Knit Night we left our needles and hooks at home and filled a whole table with dyes and candles and set to work on some more eggs. I love our folksy (albeit a bit wonky) attempts!

Photos courtesy of Hollie

Ta Da!

Why, hello there! We are finally here! "We" are the Beehive Craft Collective, and boy, are we ever glad to be able to share our endeavour with everyone. We've been bursting at the seams trying to keep somewhat quiet about this for the past couple of weeks. Get it? Seams? Textile joke...

We formed at the beginning of 2011, and hit the ground running immediately. An exciting and fulfilling and fresh project for a new year. Not just one of us, but multiple ladies have expressed their desire to be a part of something like this for their entire lives. And now we are. So we wasted no time and began to hold meetings and start organizing and planning all the logistics of our very first summer craft fair, to be held in conjuncture with the James Street North Art Crawl this coming August. Lots to do, lots to do.


Note-taking and books on needlepoint and coffee filter poufs and floorplans, oh my!

The process for holding a craft fair at times holds tedious tasks like finding a location, and figuring out how many vendors will fit, and inquiring about insurance and accessibility and determining costs. But we're an enthusiastic and capable bunch of ladies pursuing our combined dream, so it's not really work. It's like we're all floating along on cloud 9 the entire time.

We're totally more excited for creating the decor, and coming up with ideas for gift bags and planning the party that will coincide with the Friday night portion of the show though, to be perfectly honest.


We also get pretty excited about delicious treats and beautiful backdrops. Our next order of business was to move our weekly meetings from an ordinary boardroom to the stunning Mulberry Street Coffeehouse, now a fixture in beautiful Hamilton, Ontario, where we are all currently based out of. An inspiring location for an inspiring project. And we hope to somehow work with Mulberry Street for the fair.

We've still got months of planning ahead of us, to take us from winter to spring to wonderful summer, and we could not be more excited. We'd be so thrilled if you joined us for the ride. We're just so very pleased to make your acquaintance.