MAKING, planning, focusing on cloth dyeing, and creating work that seems to be well-loved in my community. Simplicity reigns and sharing is what I do as the months go by. I suppose that the time I spend behind my cutting table and sewing machine tends to draw in some visitors to our Tett Centre Arts Hub who are fascinated by “a lady who just cuts cloth and takes time to sew it back together”. Then they chat with each other and wander off down the halls asking “Why?”.  I just say “it’s a habit”.

I am working with lines regularly. It’s not hard, it is comfortable in the time I have outside of meetings and visitor chats and belonging to a SAQA Land Between group that I love to create for… simplicity, focus, fun!

Some years ago, when I first joined Cloth in Common, I had just finished working with a studio artist, Lisa Call, and loved all my years of creating with her. I learned to dye the fabrics for my work, and many students are following along. I share an Arts Camp Retreat with friends at the Tett Centre where I have a small but ‘just right” size studio and bring along many friends who like to follow my LINES artwork. Just about the time I hang a newly finished piece, off it goes. A habit I guess, is choosing colour and line and simplicity.

Taking on the playful addition of adding paints is a new habit. (We have 7 other professional painters in the Creativity Studios where I work, and they dare me from time to time to mess up a piece of just stitched cloth – and I learn from their HABITS) Loved the reflection, and the “Starting All Over Again” quilt is now at home at the local Boat Museum along Lake Ontario near us. (and the centre sun always travels where I go with my work).

I tend toward softer colours, and I shared a piece a year or so ago with a friend when she invited me to do a talk at her local Quilt Guild in the Peterborough ON area here in Ontario. I talked about the habit I have for creating with lines, and this piece is close in design and that is just a habit – making with no particular design in mind, but creating with a happy result. It was different in colour -and that’s attraction in my book for choosing an artwork piece that is easy for me, and the quilt now hangs in her cottage!

 I personally love the vertical hanging of my line-focused art, but so many feel the waters they see run horizontally. I see them here and there in exhibitions that bring on more interest as a collector’s choice.

Bethany Garner, Textile Artist/Maker

HABITS- a part of this artist’s life …

23w x 40h

Cotton Lawn cloth dyed with Procion MX Dyes, movement shared randomly, cut in strips. Machine stitched, matchstick quilting.