A scarf dancing with fluid figures of hand-painted bison. A delicately crafted needle-felted seahorse sculpted carefully from wool. A rug designed and meticulously hooked by hand.
These are only a few of the items artists at the Fiber College of Maine can create.
These artists and many others are teaching 50 different classes offered at the annual festival aimed at celebrating fiber arts in all forms.
Fiber artists, crafters and students are gathering in Searsport for classes in spinning, rug hooking, knitting, quilt making and wood carving, among many others. This year the Fiber College takes place from Wednesday, Sept. 9, to Sunday, Sept. 13, and was expected to draw more than 250 students for classes taught by artists from Maine and beyond.
The event is hosted at Searsport Shores Ocean Campground, a business that has been in Fiber College founder Astrig Tanguay’s family for 22 years and has hosted the event for nine of them.
The campground boasts 125 campsites but also has organic gardens, angora goats and Navajo-Churro sheep. It’s a place for families to stay and enjoy the quarter-mile beachfront property in the summer, but come September people flock to the campground for a different kind of repose: learning about fiber arts.
It all began when Tanguay went to the World Ecotourism Summit in 2002 as a representative of her family’s 40-acre campground on Penobscot Bay and learned the United States lacks in culturally based tourism. At the time the campground also was lacking in visitors during one of Maine’s most beautiful seasons: autumn.
“We had the whole month of September where we weren’t getting any guests,” Tanguay said. “It all started with the idea of creating an event that would celebrate Maine traditions when we’re looking beautiful and don’t have a whole lot of visitors at the campground.”
A trip to Florida later on led her to develop her ideas for an event of her own. She visited a festival hosted by the Florida Gourd Society in Tampa, which specialized in classes about decorating with and creating art out of gourds. The format of the college and support of those hosting it led to her own resolve to create a gathering dedicated to celebrating fiber arts.
Tanguay thought the campground would start small with the event, so she put out a call for teaching applications. She figured an offering of 20 classes would provide a well-rounded function.
She never thought she would receive 40 applications and accept all of them.
“They were all so good we had no idea how to say no,” she said.
What began in 2002 as a simple idea has blossomed into the largest fiber arts education gathering on the East Coast.
In addition to classes, vendors give demonstrations, bonfires light up the beach in the evening, there are nightly gatherings of music and dance and plenty of booths sell food and merchandise.
Two of the instructors this year are artists who came to their craft later in life and find fulfillment in creating pieces that hold artistic merit.
Katharine Cobey of Cushing and Sally Savage of Searsport will teach classes at the five-day event. Cobey, once a writer and poet, came upon her craft of sculptural knitting at a challenging point in her life.
“In ’76 I got injured. I damaged my spine, and my ability to walk went out the window. I was getting sick of reading and writing, so I started to knit again,” Cobey said. She revisited the craft she had learned at a young age and found herself becoming more and more involved with it. “At some point I found I was going to have to make a choice between writing and doing what I was.”
So she chose to keep knitting.
“I decided I would only do it if I could knit anything I wanted,” Cobey said. “I was going to try to use it as a serious method of expression.” Since she made that choice, she has created works of art addressing topics that include aging, death, Alzheimer’s disease, feminism and war. Her knitting skills take shape in sculpture, and each piece she creates has a connection to her beliefs.
“I’m thinking of [knitting] in a completely different way than something for decoration,” Cobey said. “Anything that I feel very deeply about I have to find a way to knit it.”
One of the pieces she’s most proud of is called “Portrait of Alzheimer’s,” which depicts a knitted shawl hanging around invisible shoulders, disintegrating and unraveling as it unfolds to the floor.
“My mother died of Alzheimer’s. I had a personal commitment to the piece,” Cobey said. “I made the shawl, and there’s an absence. The shawl just disintegrates into tatters of a pattern.”
A veteran of the Fiber College, Cobey was scheduled to teach a master class Wednesday and Thursday and on Friday will show others how to spin with a Navajo spindle and teach a class about how to make a dress.
Sally Savage, another local instructor, will be teaching for the first time this year.
Savage is a mixed-media artist who has focused on papier-mache for the past eight years. She’s drawn to the craft because it reuses items that otherwise would be thrown away. She began her artistic journey in college but never finished, instead deciding to pursue a career in nursing. After 15 years she found herself continually coming back to art and decided to pursue it more seriously.
Since that time, she has dabbled in different forms of art and even published a book of photographs and stories called “A Fair Day — The Horsemen of County Kerry,” chronicling the fairs of County Kerry, Ireland.
At the Fiber College she will teach classes in papier-mache and focus on one particular figure: the rabbit. Savage has found herself drawn to creating figures ever since she began her artistic endeavors and finds rabbits are a universal love for many, hearkening back to childhood Easter gatherings and other fond memories. She also finds herself drawn to fiber arts because she says she’s “a farm girl at heart” and grew up on her family farm in Belfast.
“For me, when I do the figures for the rabbits, they all have individual personalities. Their personalities emerge as I go, and that tells me how I have to finish the piece,” Savage said.
Many may view the work of these artisans as a hobby or as crafting, and Savage realizes that.
“There’s always that debate: Is this craft or is this art?” Savage said. She argues that any time one uses skills a painter would — such as using scale, color or design — they are creating art.
She uses these skills every day in her creations and finds joy in teaching others her craft.
“I love to encourage people to be creative,” she said.
For Tanguay, that’s what the Fiber College is all about, and it celebrates Maine and the people of the state.
“We have some of the biggest names in the industry teaching, but we still have lots of local people who are excellent at what they do,” she said.
In addition to the online registration available for classes at the Fiber College, there are scheduled, free demonstrations every hour Friday through Sunday. Even if you don’t sign up for a class, you can take a trip down to the campground to check out the goings-on for $8. There also are four drop-in classes available to join for $20 each. These classes include making ceramic buttons, crafting chainmail jewelry, making hammered metal shawl pins and cranking socks. The Makers Market will take place from 5 to 7 p.m. Friday and is free to all.
“I didn’t think it would become this satisfying,” Tanguay said. “I always knew that it would be an economic success. What I didn’t understand was how much it would change people’s lives and how many people would walk up to me and say ‘I look forward to this every year.’”
To learn more about the Fiber College of Maine, or to see a full schedule of events and register for classes, visit fibercollege.org.
