Bethany Garner explains why she joined the Guild and looks back on her experiences in the fibre arts.

Bethany Garner explains why she joined the Guild and looks back on her experiences in the fibre arts.

July 29, 2021

© Kingston Handloom Weavers and Spinners

Shaelagh Cull

Bethany Garner

Zoom

I had a fall in 2014 in my backyard with my dog who, a small puppy, came running down off the deck with a long lead hooked onto him and he unfortunately ran around and round my legs and then took off in another direction. I went flying through the air and fractured my wrist, seriously fractured my wrist. So after a couple of months of rehab and growing my wrist back onto my arm, my Occupational Therapist had a friend, Bridget Lewis, who was very activist as an instructor at the Kingston Handloom Weavers and Spinners. And my Occupational Therapist said if you want that hand back, because I couldn't hardly move it, she said you should take up weaving. And I thought about it and thought about it, and the Tett Centre was just getting ready to reopen in 2015, and I thought, okay, I'm going to give this a try. So I dropped in and asked what it would take to become a member and if they could teach me to weave. Obviously, with a textile background, I had done some weaving before, but nothing seriously. And most of it was hand weaving on a handheld loom, not a floor loom. So I joined the Guild, and that was the start of the adventure. I grew up in a family who didn't sew, didn't stitch. My mother was an operating room nurse and so all of her stitching related to being in the hospital, she wasn't really interested. But I did have a grandmother on my father's side who was an award winning quilt maker from Kentucky. So, I watched, I listened, I didn't try to learn but certainly, like a sponge as all kids are, I picked up a lot of tips. When I married and started having my own children, and I'm in a family with seven children, and eleven grandchildren from my side of the family, I just decided that, you know, if I wanted pretty things in my house, I needed to learn to sew. So in the 20s and early 30s, I spent a lot of time making clothing, household items. But as the years passed along, and as my responsibilities became more professional in the healthcare industry, where I worked for 47 years, I had some time to direct my skills in other directions and decided to start studying the fiber arts. So I made quilts for years and years and years. Bed quilts, everyone in the family has my bed quilts, volunteer for a lot of organizations doing items that were needed in shelters and different things. And as I approached, oh 45 to 50, I decided that, you know, those were mundane, I don't want to call them boring, but you know, regular everyday activities and I wanted to do something a little more exciting and I joined a lot of groups and organizations. We have wonderful fiber arts groups here in Kingston. I was blessed to have a very good friend Hilary Scanlon who started the Kingston Fibre Artists group in 1996, and invited me to be part of that organization. And so it's been many long years that the Kingston Fiber Artists have been developing new work. So I've been focused primarily on contemporary quilts. I'm constantly making, I'm totally retired now and resident artists, so I think I've tried just about everything in the fiber arts world. I do a lot of eco printing, which means I'm out on the trails, foraging, choosing my printing materials from what's natural, rather than what I can get. And especially during pandemic days, it's hard to get supplies. So I'm picking and choosing my plants and my flowers and doing a lot of outdoor cooking and boiling and mashing and printing with natural products, With the connections that I've made through both international and Canadian groups and clubs, and certainly studying at the [St Lawrence] College and Queen's [University], as well in their textile programs, I have several friends who are in the Conservation Department. I've spent time as a volunteer at the ROM [Royal Ontario Museum] in their textile department, I've also gone through the National Gallery a couple of times as a as a volunteer, you know, go up and spend a week in Ottawa and spend five days in the bowels of the National Gallery exploring textiles and learning more about composition, color, design, shape, form. All of the things that I want to devote my time to in my own work.