"Seattle Weekend"

I just completed this basket called "Seattle Weekend" while celebrating my husband's birthday weekend with friends in the big city. The drive takes about 6 hours each way so while in the car and in the room we rented I completed this piece.
Hope you like it!

Sheri E. Smith pine needle creations - Sheri's Gallery

Sheri E. Smith pine needle creations - Sheri's Gallery

I just added new pine needle creations to my web page and the 2014 workshop schedule.

Happy Spring,

Sheri

http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Spring-has-sprung-at-Eugene-Textile-Center.html?soid=1102390194389&aid=h-K3K7KgHuQ

My next workshop at Eugene Textile in Eugene Oregon is on March 15. Learn to make beautiful baskets and sculptural pieces.

 http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Spring-has-sprung-at-Eugene-Textile-Center.html?soid=1102390194389&aid=h-K3K7KgHuQ

I had a great year teaching basket workshops from Rockaway Beach on the northern Oregon coast, to Morro Bay in the central California coast, and from Eugene to  Ashland Oregon.
The people in my classes were as varied as the pieces they created. Charlie, a horse veterinarian  was probably the most inspiring of them all. He has very large hands, but his first basket was quite small and his stitches were perfect, as I am sure the stitches he used to care for the horses were. He referred to the waxed linen we were using as sutures. The next basket he made  the following week is the one pictured above , I think for his wife. He chose a beautiful stone for the center.
 In Eugene I taught a pair of twin girls who were 10 years old. They caught on very quickly and were going to take their new talent to New Zealand where they were going to attend school.
This upcoming year I plan to teach once again in these wonderful places and hopefully reconnect with Charlie and all the other wonderful people I have met on my quest to get people hooked on making pine needle baskets. Maybe I will meet some of you along the way. I hope so.......
 Until then, good night and sweet dreams.    

Basket workshops in Solvang and Morro Bay, California

Welcome to my workshops in California

 This week and next week I have had the pleasure of visiting my sister in Morro Bay, California.
Along with having a great vacation I have had the pleasure of teaching workshops in two new locations.www.kandrasbeads.com and http://www.morrobaybeads.com/the-garden-at-beads-by-the-bay.html
Both of these bead shop owners Kandra and Susan, invited me with open arms to teach in their lovely businesses.
The students in each class were a variety of nurses, designers, craftsman and a soon to be retired horse veterinarian. Their baskets came out as different as their personalities, all beautiful and unique.
Well the sun is out on the shimmering ocean and we are off to see the sights.............

"Swirl"

This piece is called "Swirl" and I recently sold it from The New Zone Gallery in Eugene, OR. I emailed the gal who purchased the piece to thank her for choosing it. Two days later I got this email.

Dear Sheri,

My beloved Dulcy bought the piece for me as a semi-surprise gift (I didn't know, but I sorta suspected she'd done that) because I was so deeply moved by and attracted to it when I saw it during the Eugene Celebration. 

I have spent several hours in the last week since she gave it to me absorbed in it, studying it carefully, "seeing" significance and symbolism in its many parts and their relationships and textures and colors and "movement". These meanings -- which arise from my odd resonance with your "Luminous Pinwheel" -- have to do with the multifarious, fractal, "intertwingling" spiral flow of the world, with the relation between real-world patterns and my/our mental models of them, and with complex co-evolving wholeness in all its dimensions. Whether or not you had any intention of putting any of those meanings into it when you made it, I have no idea. But the whole thing really speaks to me and is one of my all-time favorite art pieces.

Thanks so much for creating it (or letting it be created through you, if that fits your experience better). It is truly a blessing.

Blessings on the Journey we're all on together.

Coheartedly,

Tom

 

Bay City Arts Center to host community education classes - North Coast Citizen: News

Bay City Arts Center to host community education classes - North Coast Citizen: News: The Bay City Arts Center will host two community education classes: Pine Needle Basket Weaving and Pine Needle Ornaments led by artisan, Sheri…