Elizabeth Bryan (Weaverbee) brings 30 years of experience as a weaver mixing fibres and colours in her hand-dyed and handwoven scarves, bags and household textiles at her home studio in Orangeville. Natural dyes mix with commercial dyes to create wearable/usable art on cotton, wool, silk, bamboo and Tencel. She loves the interplay of colour and watching it unfold on the loom. Elizabeth has honed her craft at courses throughout North America and has previously exhibited with the Credit Valley Artisans, the Guelph Guild of Handweavers and Spinners, the Rare Threads Gallery – Alton Mill and the Tapestry Line Collective at the OOAK Toronto.
Weaverbee’s video started out as a joint production with other businesses in the Dufferin County area. Elizabeth seized the opportunity to ask for an alternate edit focusing exclusively on her. We love the flexibility of video to be able to create something for every need.
Full video transcript:
I’ve been weaving for 30 years now. It progressed from being a hobby for me to wanting to do a little bit more with it and deciding to start a business. The products that I make are primarily luxury, hand-woven accessories: scarves, I’ve made some baby wraps, and baby blankets, I make tea towels for people’s kitchens. I also do some snow dyeing in the winter. I love it because it’s a little more freeing than the weaving. With weaving, I know exactly how the pattern is going to turn out and the colors. With the snow dyeing I take silk scarf blanks, and I bury them under the snow, mix the dye and put it on top. And I let the dye mix and mingle. And it creates some unusual patterns on the silk when it comes out. So I really like that. It’s very freeing. I like the snow dyeing because of the mixing in the melding. And you never quite know what color you’re going to get. So the process for me is first to choose the colors that I want to use, color’s a big part of my life, and I love it. Then I will choose a pattern and I will do the weaving and from there, I create a finished product, whether it’s a scarf or then I turn the fabric into something like a handbag or a jacket. The process of making a scarf takes me approximately 16 to 20 hours per scarf. It does vary based on patterning and and the number of threads that are involved and how complicated it is to set up the loom I think the thing that makes my products special or unique is the colors that I use. I tend to use very bright colors very happy, joyful sort of things, and people seem to really respond to that. A lot of weavers think there’s a lot of rules. I don’t really believe in the rules too much and I don’t believe in the color rules too much. And I like to mix things around and just try different things. So I think maybe that’s what I really enjoy about it the most.