BROADCAST OF THE WEEK

still breathing

We have officially become bad bloggers and we have no one else to blame but ourselves and one giganto manuscript that is so close to being finished we can almost start to breath normally again. We unchained ourselves from the computers on Friday night to attend a wonderful feast at the newly minted Popcraft Studio in Northcote. We'll be talking about that and other craft delights this morning on The Grapevine on RRR with the lovely Dylan and Kulja.

Unfolding: New Indian Textiles is another great reason to abandon work! Writer and curator Maggie Baxter has had the enviable task of exploring the textile traditions and contemporary style of India, with and extensive exhibition hosted by RMIT Gallery to coincide with her new book on the subject. Surface embellishment, colour, block printing, beading certainly make our pulse race and as we are on the precipice of booking plane tickets as our reward for a year of slog this may just be the inspiration we need in choosing our destination.

We cannot believe that this year marks the 21st anniversary of the Fresh exhibition at Craft. It has been such a pleasure to be involved with this show over the years. Both of us have served on the selection panel at different times and we've watched with interest as some of our favourites from these best of the best graduates shows have gone on to have extraordinary careers in professional craft. Still such an important exhibition on the craft calendar.

We urge you all to make a trip south side to see the new group show Fertile Ground at the Australian Tapestry Workshop . Their Artist in Residence program has grown from strength to strength and last year was a stellar line up. You can see the fruits of their collaborative labour, explore the workshop, and pick up some delicious tapestry yarn while your at it. their 2015 calendar is just as exciting. We are looking forward to hearing one of our craft favourites  Phil Ferguson aka ChiliPhilly discuss his residency on the 7th of April.

For those of you looking for a road trip we highly recommend heading north (if you are based in Melbourne) to Ararat Regional Gallery for an embroidery group show (yes embroidery!) This is a kind of craft blockbuster that is well worth getting in the car for.  Slipstitch features recent work from Mae Finlayson, David Green, Lucas Grogan, Alice Kettle, Tim Moore, Silke Raetze, Demelza Sherwood, Matt Siwerski, Jane Theau, Sera Waters, Elyse Watkins and Ilka White. It's rare to get a discipline specific textiles show so this is a must see. 

If we have time we'll also talk up Easter and school holiday craft. We'll be doing a lot of making over the next two weeks in preparation for our book photo shoot - wish us luck! 

Well be on air around 10.15 1027 on your dial or streaming at RRR.

BROADCAST OF THE WEEK

Feels like forever since we last graced the airwaves with our dulcet tones (snort). We are raring to go this morning as we catch up with our good friends at RRR. Listen in to The Grapevine with Dylan and Kulja  around 10:15. We'll be talking up seminars, markets, Christmas, books. Basically we'll be talking so fast we run the risk of sounding like we've had too many pharmaceuticals with our double espressos. We'll be giving a big plug to a writing seminar hosted by Craft this Thursday because I'm actually leading the charge, helping makers find their authentic writing voices. I'll be cutting through all the crazy art speak and noncing about with the english language and giving it to them straight. We'd love it if you came along (Beck will be the heckler in the back row). There is nothing nicer than meeting hml readers! You can book a ticket here

Sophie Moran is one of the many great makers at Markit this year

We'll be chatting a bit about the upcoming makers markets, Markit on the 23 of November and The Big Design Market 5-7 December. We've got some tips on how to avoid market fatigue and talk about some of the highlights for us at these blockbuster events.

If you can't handmake all your gifts be sure to buy local and handmade

We'll be tellling you what is on our Santa list this year. Top of my list is this stunning tinsel inspired necklace by jeweller Felicity Large now on show at Bini Gallery. Just one of the many great places you can buy beautiful, unique, local handmade objects that will beat a book voucher any day.

a new book by Beci Orpin is always reason to celebrate

If you do get a book voucher we highly recommend the new crafty tome by uber designer Beci Orpin. Make and Do is an explosion of ideas and inspiration, cleverly capturing Beci's warmth and generosity as well as her unique superstar style.

Kate Wischusen. 

If we have time we'll also let you know some of the great shows on around town. We love this time of year because there is so much on, a highlight being the graduate shows. Some of our favourite emerging makers are in this years RMIT School of Art Honours opening on the 18th at First Site Gallery.  Listen in people! Stay in the loop! RAMONA

OPEN STUDIOS THIS WEEKEND - VALERIE RESTARICK, SLOW CLAY,CONE 11, JILL SYMES

WHEELS KEEP ON TURNING

This weekend is the Annual Open Day of Australian Ceramics and it is a real treat to peak behind the curtain and into the ovens of some of the best makers around town. Our local is definitely the very talented Valerie Restarick at North Carlton ceramics who  has collaborated with Nectar Efkarpidis to create some super cool adobe house shapes. Others we'll be popping into see are:

Our friends at Slow Clay are open Sunday in Collingwood

Cone 11 at the lovely Abbotsford Convent

Amazing Jill Symes opens her Sandringham Studio

These events are all part of Craft Cubed Festival which is rocking on statewide. Luckily the Ceramics Open Day is a nationwide event so you can check in here to see who is flinging their wide doors open to you. Lovely weekend for a drive we think! RAMONA

SHOW (OFFS) OF THE WEEK - BECK AND RAMONA MEET SOPHIE MOORHOUSE MORRIS

IN THE MUD

Beck's beautiful plate and jug set with her planter in the background

It seems like an age ago that we did our porcelain workshop with Sophie Moorhouse Morris. We are having one of those years I'm afraid where we are jamming 10 years experience into one. This is punctuated (as is so often the case with us) with amazing workshops with talented makers. It's is literally the only time we get to see each other semi socially for a start. We literally have to book a class to have a cuppa! That's our excuse anyway.

My blue spoons 

This class has to be among our favourite of the past two years. We had a wonderful teacher in Sophie, who was not only instructive but encouraging. Clay and I are not sympatico so I really struggled to get nice shapes to work with. Beck on the other hand took to it like a duck to water. Sophie somehow managed to steer us all to good results in the end. The other classmates were also fantastic people to spend time with (we even spotted some familiar faces from other workshops - seems like we aren't the only addicts!)

I broke so many pieces beck let me glaze a couple of hers! isn't that spoon cool?

Porcelain is notoriously tricky and you need to be patient and gentle with it. You need to learn what the limitations are and when things break or crack you have to move on. We were working to a fairly small scale with old school pinch pots and slab construction so it wasn't too tricky for beginners. We loved how everyone's work was distinctively theirs and for the most part (if you don't count my pile of rubble from over zealous cleaning) things stayed in tact.

Beck used her graphic skills to bring a little edge to her organic forms

We actually can't wait to make more porcelain pieces. Sophie gave us the confidence to just go for it. This is the real benefit of taking workshops. They don't make you an expert, not by any means, but they open a door. Demystifying a process is really the best way to start. It's just clay and a kiln is a really hot oven, if we start from there then we can just keep learning, keep refining. We now admire the beautiful ceramic pieces we've collected over the years even more.

My slab planter

I'm more comfortable with a paint brush or a pen in my hand so it was great to just make a simple slab pot as it gave me four 'canvases' to paint on. It got us talking about the mark making aspects of ceramics. The level of technical skill has always been our focus but the different surface treatment made the role of artist as ceramicist much clearer. If you'd like to see our wonderful classmates work you can go here. We encourage you all to take a class or two over the winter - it will keep your spirit warm at least! RAMONA

CRAFT OF THE WEEK - CARD MAKING

greetings and salutations

OK so the above photo is what my dining table looks like a lot of the time. There isn't some pristine pinterest worthy studio where the ladies of HML make stuff. For both of us it takes place somewhere between making dinners for multi-generational fussy eaters, the hum of the dishwasher/dryer/washing machine and cats and dogs vying for attention by walking across keyboards. We wont be ready for the Design Files photo shoots any time soon, but we get a lot done!

With lives full of friends and family it's handy that just some of the craft supply tsunami has included a collection of stamps, ink pads, punches and paints. I have so many people with birthdays in April/May and many people to send thank you notes too that I dedicated an afternoon last week to hand making some cards for them. The trick with these traditional scrap booking supplies is to customise their look by adding paint, gilding or glitter details. Including the recipients name is a nice way of showing them a little extra love too.

You can often find bargain bins full of end of line stamps at craft stores and it is a good idea to buy an alphabet set. You can always make your own too, which we of course love most of all. If we had a spare weekend that's what we'd do for sure. RAMONA 

FAIR OF THE WEEK - LOST TRADES

skill set rewind

My clan are obsessed with the day trip. There is nothing we love more than rising really early and having breakfast in a little town somewhere. We are so lucky to live somewhere that has dozens of great places within one or two hours drive. So if you fancy the mountains or the sea it is never beyond reach on a Sunday morning.

A couple of weekends ago we visited Kyneton's inaugural festival Lost Trades Fair. Regular readers will know I went gaga a little while ago for this particular book so this fair was right up my alley. Everything from fletchers, blacksmiths, rush chair makers to luthiers set up stalls on the grounds of the Kyneton Museum and demonstrated their crafts to attentive crowds. 35 in all, meant that there really was something for everyone. I came away wanting to do a knife making course!

I think I may have driven some of them a little nuts with my incessant questions but how else does one learn about the process of drying rushes or turning a biscuit tin into a banjo? It was a roaring success and is scheduled to return in 2015. We promise to tell you about it in advance so you can go. RAMONA

WORKSHOP OF THE WEEKEND - VIC PEMBERTON SHIBORI

Dyeing to meet you

Well the weekend workshopping continues unabated here at HML. After our successful outing with rope craft we dived headfirst into a vat of indigo out Pascoe Vale way, picking up some serious shibori skills along the way at Bind and Fold's Victoria Pemberton first Shibori workshop. We've all been following each other on Instagram -the home of all good creatives ;) - but hadn't met in the real world, so this was a great way of covering multiple bases at once.

As it turns out Gemma Patford our rope wrangler from the weekend before has recently collaborated on a series of indigo dyed rope vessels with Victoria, which have now graced the pages of virtually all the local interior mags. Well done ladies, way to work a collab! 

Victoria started out working with procion dyes but was quickly seduced by natural/eco dying methodology and outcome and is now a bit of a natural 'vat specialist' having spent the past 12 months or so daily reading, researching and testing out the many vagaries of vat dying. For our workshop she'd made up four different strenth vats for us to sample with as well as bringing back an old vat from 'the dead' right before our eyes which was pretty impressive. Especially as it was the one that turned out to be everyones favourite.

We worked through a range of traditional shibori processes like arashi and itajime as well as had time to play around with dip dying and more random bound resist methods. It was great to have so much space and time to go through the processes in such a small and focused group as well as getting very cool insider tips from a daily dyer. After a good few hours of solid experimentation we were soon finding our feet and selecting our favourite techniques and vat strengths.

Thankfully Vic provided us with some fresh fruit and cheese platters to keep us going, as most of us were barely stopping long enough to breathe let alone eat, and soon we'd not only filled the clothes line but the clothes racks as well with our output.

After lunch - yes we did all eventually have to sit down for a few minutes - we moved from our cotton samples to silk scarves. In keeping with Ramona and I playing the part of over enthusiastic mature age students we'd remembered to not only bring along some extra fabric for dying but a bunch of big raw wooden beads to dye. I decided to combine the two extras and was pretty happy with the results.

And the beads turned out a treat as well. Bonus!

Followers of Ramona's instagram feed will know that blue is pretty much colour de jour both within Ramona's wardrobe and here at HML HQ, so she was all for getting as much indigo on everything as possible. She even came to the workshop wearing white plimsoles with the sole purpose of 'accidentally' dyeing them during the day. 

Regular readers know that my dye course with the inimitable Joanna Fowles at harvest last year was pretty much a game changer for me professionally and creatively, and as it turns out this session and the alchemical magic of indigo has had a similar effect on Ramona. Team HML has most definitely got the blues. BECK

WORKSHOP OF THE WEEK(END) - GEMMA PATFORD

Give us enough rope...

Last Sunday we braved the heat and headed to the supercool Pop&Scott co-operative workspace to learn how to make rope bowls with the wonderfully generous Gemma Patford. Every time we head to Hayes street we're reminded of what a brilliant and much needed resource this space is,  and just how lucky we are to have it in our hood!

You all know what suckers we are for upskilling and this is a technique that we've long been fans of, lets face it we are both big accumulators of stuff, and subsequently are always on the look out for ways to make new vessels to hold our craft supplies and equipment. Presented via the magic of Instagram (thanks pop&scott and patford feeds) with the chance to learn how to to whip up our own collection of custom bowls, baskets and trays we were pretty much sold on sight.

Regular readers know what big fans we are of simple techniques that give makers lots of scope to develop their own particular aesthetic style. Rope based craft comes with a looooong history and rope itself is such a (pardon the pun) flexible  material that it really lends itself perfectly to experimentation and reinterpretation. So its been inspiring to see the development of Gemma's practice and the new direction she's moving in with her sculptural wall works. 

                                    

Despite the heat Gemma had created a cool and welcoming environment complete with ginger beer, cheese and fruit platter and even a double layered brandy chocolate cake that was seriously delicious. Not to mention a customised badge name tag making service that Ramona and I took full advantage of.

In addition we also got a super cool goody bag complete with everything needed to go home and whip up another to ensure that we nailed the technique, and a pre made bowl to play around with on the day! See we told you she was generous.

We got some insider knowledge (which we can't divulge), step by step instructions, lots of opportunities to have a practice both constructing on the machine and decorating our own 'blank canvas' bowl.

From the paint, embroidery and trimmings stations we chose the embroidery table most likely because it was right in front of both the open door and super sized fan. Funnily enough we both went straight for the bead jar. Anyways in true HML fashion we both chose similar materials and then came up completely different styles.

It was amazing to see how this happened right across the workshop - each person gravitating to the different decorative elements - sharp metallic geometrics, fluffy pastel pompoms, bold graphic brights, embroidery, painting, glue, creating bowls as individual as their makers. The more we engage in these crafter-noon style workshops the more we realise how wonderfully refreshing it is to sit in a room full of strangers linked together by a simple but incredibly profound love of making. Its kind of awesome. BECK

ACTIVISM OF THE WEEK - KATE JUST, MARYANN TALIA PAU

INTO THE NIGHT

a scene from Just's 2013 UK Knit Hope project

It would seem that these are dark days indeed for women worldwide. Violent acts against women in seemingly safe areas are being widely reported and quite frankly are distressing and disturbing. This is why so many of us were uplifted my weaver Maryann Talia Pau's recent 1 Million Stars to end Violence Project.

The cynical amongst us may question the power of craft to solve or even salve these issues but community craft, heart and soul is about bringing people together. As a group we  process these terrible events in a way that can make us feel safer and stronger.

Australian Artist Kate Just, fresh from the success of her similar project in the UK 'Knit Hope is undergoing a new version here in Melbourne titled 'Knit Safe'. The idea is to come together, everyone knit a section of a large black and silver banner and then take to the streets as a craft army. If you would like to know more about this community project you can visit the face book page here. the next knitting workshop is February 1 at Westspace Gallery from 1-4.