Visual Artist and Craft Maker Award

Although I am in a state of complete exhaustion after the last few weeks of making and marketing, and have several more pre-Christmas tasks still to go, I have some good news I really want to share. I’m excited to let you know that I have been granted an award from the VACMA: Dundee programme to develop some new work next year.

VACMA stands for Visual Artist and Craft Maker Award, as per the post title, though I keep having to check whether there are any plurals in it. It’s a scheme run jointly by Creative Scotland and local organisations – in my case that’s Leisure & Culture Dundee – to support, you guessed it, artists and makers in Scotland on all kinds of projects. My project will entail creating more work along these lines:

and these:

These are a couple of the pieces I made earlier this year using warps painted with natural dyes. Both pieces have two warp layers: one has an interleaved threading and the other is turned summer and winter. In both cases, though for slightly different reasons, I struggled to manage the two warps because my Megado has only one warp beam. I worked around it, because that is what weavers do, but it made the process slow, awkward and error-prone so it was far from ideal.

The award from VACMA: Dundee will fix that by helping me to purchase a second warp beam as well as the materials for a new collection, so I can really dive into this way of working with natural dyes for weaving. I can’t wait to get started!

Visual Artist and Craft Maker Award” was posted by Cally on 10 Dec 2018 at https://callybooker.co.uk

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14 Responses

  1. Lynn
    |

    Congratulations Cally – you deserve it! Have fun w/ that second warp beam too.

  2. M. Auch
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    Hi Cally, fantastic! Such beautiful work you made, looking forward to more. Greetings from weeflab Amsterdam, Monika

  3. Rebecca kugele
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    What did you use to get the orange? What did you use to get the pink? Right now I’m using alum and black beans to dye some wool blue! Love your scarfs! Congratulations!

  4. Margaret Martin
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    Congratulations on achieving this award, obviously very well deserved! Take a break now so you will be ready, when your second beam arrives to follow wherever your weaving instincts take you.
    Cheers

  5. loomtalk
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    What wonderful news, congratulations. Look forward to seeing the results.

  6. Sheila C
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    Wow! Congratulations and have a great year exploring new things!

    • Cally
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      Thanks, Sheila. Who knows, I might even manage to repackage it as a study group project…!

  7. Neki Rivera
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    both are beautiful pieces of work deserving the award. congratulations! the second beam will make your loom sing!

  8. Sandra Rude
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    Congratulations, Cally! Your work is wonderful, and the award is well-deserved.