Wonders of Wool Exhibition

I’m thrilled to team up with fellow fiber artist Cecilia Ho for a joint exhibition at the Metropolitan Arts Council gallery now through February 18th. Cecilia and I are both self-taught and although we work in the same medium and have a few techniques in common, our work is very different. I love how the exact same materials can yield totally different results!

The opening reception is Friday January 21st from 6:30-9 at the gallery (16 Augusta Street, Greenville, SC). All are welcome! There will be food, wine and other refreshments, and Cecilia and I would love to meet you and share our work with you.

About the show:

Wool is all around us. It’s in our closets, our blankets, our shoe insoles, and even the insulation in our homes. This incredible natural material has been used for centuries for a wide range of practical solutions, but in this joint exhibition Cecilia Ho and Sarah Mandell explore the material purely for its beauty. With 25 years of combined fiber art experience, Ho and Mandell use needle felting, wet felting, nuno felting with silk fabric, rug hooking and punch needle techniques to create 2D and 3D work inspired by all aspects of nature.

Enjoy this sneak peek virtual tour of the gallery!

For more information about the gallery, or to purchase work, please contact Metropolitan Arts Council: https://www.greenvillearts.com/

Artist-in-Residence: Cheraw State Park

Time in the woods, by a lake, or anywhere out in nature is what restores me the most. Making things with my hands is what gives me energy and joy. Put the two together and I’m one happy adventuring artist! My week as Artist-in-Residence at Cheraw State Park in South Carolina was such a wonderful experience. This was my fourth consecutive residency through the Parks program and as before, each experience is totally unique and always exceeds my hopes and aspirations. I feel so lucky to be invited to these parks each time, and it’s definitely one of the highlights of my year.

Cheraw is a small town near the Great Pee Dee river in northeastern South Carolina. I’ve lived in SC since 2010 had never been to this part of the state, so I was eager to get out and explore. The park sits on 7,000 acres of lake and woodlands, and is home to a huge variety of birds and other creatures.

Each day during my stay, I watched the sun rise at the lake, then went off for several hours of hiking either around the park or within a 30-40 drive. The afternoons were spent back at the cabin, creating needle felted landscapes, jewelry designs, and paintings inspired by what I’d seen earlier that day. Then I’d head back over to the lake for the sunset and a quiet stroll before a little more creative time back at the cabin in the evening. I love this schedule - explore, create, explore some more!

Favorite Things: about Cheraw:

Hiking Trail: The Cheraw State Park Trail

Sunrise Viewing & Birdwatching Spot: The Eureka Lake Boardwalk

Park Wildlife: Fox squirrels, woodpeckers, and deer!

Plant Life: Cypress trees growing in the water and the carnivorous flowers by the beach

Daytrip Destination: Carolina Sandhills Wildlife Refuge (Tate’s Trail)

The new collection created while at the park is now available on my website. I hope you’ll enjoy this short recap video of my art-cation experience!

A huge thank you to the South Carolina Parks program for hosting these residency’s and a special thanks to the Park Rangers at Cheraw for making me feel so welcome.

If you’re interested in hearing about my past residency’s with the South Carolina Parks Department, you can find them here:

2020 Devil’s Fork

2019 Edisto Beach

2018 Poinsett

Mixed Media Collection: July 2021

I can never get enough texture, and ever since I learned rug hooking and punch needle, and how it could compliment my decade of needle felting experience, I’ve been falling in love with the layers, colors, and depth made possible by working with yarn, wool fiber, and fabric, all at once.

These mixed media pieces have been such a joy to make, but dang, they’re slow. I thought needle felting was slow, but it feels like a breeze compared to this! I have only ever had 2 or 3 pieces available at a time in the past, so this summer my goal was to have a substantial collection to offer. 7 pieces may not sound like a lot but it’s weeks and weeks worth of work, plus one of those pieces is 24x36 which is by far my largest mixed media piece to date. I’m so happy to work large!

One other idea I have had floating around in my head was adding embroidery or stitching to these mixed media pieces. That’s the beauty of mixed media - no rules and anything goes! I’m thrilled with how the wild flowers turned out, my very first attempts at hand stitching tiny details with yarn.

Enjoy the new series (now available on the website) and be sure to check out the process video so you can see one of these made from start to finish.

Flat Out Under Pressure Competition

Every year in June the Metropolitan Arts Council hosts the Flat Out Under Pressure competition for local artists. It’s a fun thing the community looks forward to every year. We bring our surfaces to get stamped the morning of the competition, then have 24 hours to complete the work. This year, due to the COVID19 pandemic, the whole thing is virtual. Instead of getting our surfaces officially stamped at the MAC office, we signed and dated the blank piece before starting.

The last 2 years I have summited a needle felted wool landscape, but this year I changed things up just a bit. Since MAC is the whole reason I learned rug hooking last year (thanks to a continuing education grant) I thought it would be cool to show them what I have been doing with my new skills!

This year’s piece includes needle felting, rug hooking, and punch needle techniques. I used over 40 materials and colors, and 8 different tools for the 3 fiber art mediums. It’s SO much fun to combine materials like this! Here’s a look at my progress from yesterday - I took photos every few hours to show how the piece was coming along. It was really slow going at first. I only covered a few inches of my surface in the first few hours, but I kept at it and 12 hours later, I was happy with my finished piece. I did take a few breaks during the day so I think all in all I spent about 10 hours on the 16x16 piece.

The Flat Out Under Pressure exhibition will be virtual this year, and will begin on July 1. The winner of the competition will be announced Monday by noon, and of course all the runner’s up as well (which is also a pretty big deal!). There are quite a few other “winners” and they’ll get a cash prize plus the honor of having their work prominently displayed on one of Greenville’s recycling bins downtown.

My finished piece, plus 2 other test pieces I did prior to try out ideas and see how large I could go for the 24 hour competition, will all be available for purchase soon. I’m so glad I found out I couldn’t finish a 20x20 in the amount of time aloted BEFORE it was the actual competition. That would have been a pretty frustrating thing to learn when it mattered most.

My wrists are sore, but I’m so happy I was able to participate in FOUP2020 this year, even though there will be no big party to announce the winners as before. Even still, this has been a bright spot in my week!

Punching a Pillow

For the first time in a long time, I have room in my schedule for a personal project. Believe me, I’d much rather be out in the world doing craft shows, teaching workshops, and finding inspiration at a residency, but this pandemic had other plans for the spring season. But I’m certainly making the most of this time!

I took a week-long rug hooking course at the John C. Campbell Folk School in the fall, but punch needle is something totally different (even though they’re both referred to as “rug hooking” in many circles). The traditional rug hooking I learned at the Folk School involved pulling up little strips of cut wool fabric (with a hooked tool) through primitive linen backgrounds, working from the back to the front. Punch needle, on the other hand, uses a large needle that’s threaded with yarn (or other material) and you push the needle through your fabric from the backside, creating loops on the frontside.

As a beginner to both of these crafts, I have found punch needle techniques to be far more forgiving, and I think that has to do with using thick yarn. It fills out your piece more neatly, and you don’t have to constantly worry that your strips of fabric are getting twisted or if your loops are slightly different heights. Punching is also significantly faster so you see way more progress in the same amount of time compared to traditional rug hooking.

I received Rose Pearlman’s “Modern Rug Hooking” book for Christmas and after reading through it, I was able to get right to work. I had tried to teach myself and make some pieces on my own before that, but was having trouble getting things to work. It was simple things I had wrong - I hadn’t purchased the right background fabric, the yarn I wanted to use was way too thin (or thick) for the punch needle I had, etc. However, after reading through the book, I could move on from all of those rookie mistakes.

I’ve been dabbling in some mixed media fiber art pieces, combining traditional rug hooking with punching and even needle felting, so this was my first large scale project that’s created from 100% punch needle techniques. This accent pillow took about 10 hours of work and nearly $100 worth of yarn and other materials, so it’s not for sale (I don’t think anyone would pay that much for a pillow), but I really enjoyed making something just for myself, for my own enjoyment. I know once the pandemic is over and we get back into our busy lives, I would never have the time to invest in something like this, so I’m glad I was able to do this now during this slower season.