Unofficial Musings
Ashford Wide Drum Carder, partly funded by a grant from the terrific Vermont Arts Council
Welcome to the Official Bonny’s Beasts Occasional-Musings-Not-Really-A-Blog!
Well, what a year. 2020 came to a screeching halt just after the American Craft Council Show in Baltimore at the end of February. We were aware of the virus but had no idea how widespread it was. As it turns out, the virus was focusing on New York at that time and we lucked out. That was my last craft fair, and it was a wonderful one for me. I expect to start doing fairs again in October. I miss my customers and I miss the other artists. I miss being surrounded by beautiful things and being blown away every time I turn around!
My “other gig,” Crabgrass Puppet Theatre, was suddenly retired. I stopped performing a few years back, but my partner Jamie was still touring. We had planned to retire the company in September 2020 anyway, so that shift wasn’t as hard to navigate. What was difficult was not so much that WE didn’t have shows and audiences, but that NO ONE did. We all found out a lot about what live performance means to us.
Jamie and I had applied to Canada for Permanent Resident status in Fall of 2016. This process takes a long time, and we got our Yes answer literally two weeks before the borders closed. We had planned to go in 2021 rather than 2020, but the actions of Bill Barr, the Republican Party and the Trump administration frightened us so much that we accelerated our moving plans. That turned out to be the right move; had we not gone when we did, we would have been shut out indefinitely. We have always planned to live in Vermont as well, and now that we are able to cross the border in both directions, we plan to divide our time, as they say, between Vermont and Nova Scotia. We bought a lovely piece of land near Annapolis Royal, a wonderful town full of artists and wonderful architecture.
As of now, June 2021, we are happily back in Vermont. We had sold our house and studio, which were getting to be a bit much for us maintenance-wise, last Fall. We now have a great studio in the Cotton Mill complex in Brattleboro, and in a few weeks we will be living in our tiny house about 1.5 miles west of our old house. Same neighbors, same town, same hikes, same bike rides, ten minutes from the Marlboro Music Festival! It became clear over the Nova Scotia winter that Halifax, Vermont is our home. It means a lot to us to be back there, next to the Green River which we’ve been living above, listening to, and biking beside for 20 years. We expect to spend most of this year and early 2022 here, regrouping and creating this new life. Our studio is in town, rather than a few steps away from our house, and we are enjoying getting to know a lot more about Brattleboro. Our gym is in the same mill complex as our studio. All we need is a cafe and laundromat and we would never have to leave.
Oh, and yes, felting! Just as we were downsizing by 80%, the wonderful Vermont Arts Council funded a grant I’d written for a drum carder. It’s a sizable machine, but no, of course I wasn’t going to leave that in storage, and we took it with us. The drum carder allows me to create my own blends of wool, and has expanded the color possibilities in my work. I am using more blends, which contain a number of colors when you look more closely, but appear largely monochromatic from a distance. This increases the surface interest and depth.
Speaking of downsizing, I find it amusing when people are impressed that we are going to live in a tiny house. They clearly haven’t seen our studio, which contains everything we own, apart from the vehicles and our travel trailer. I’m not sure we get the Downsizer of the Year Award quite yet.