Recommended: the wildly talented Kari Fell

Welcome to my second “Recommended” series. Here, you’ll find various sites and channels that I’ve been enjoying and wanted to share with you. With so many people currently looking to find ways to be more self sufficient or prepared for emergencies, that will be the focus for most of these, but I’ll also be adding a few that are just plain fun. Please feel free to leave a comment or make your own recommendation. I hope you enjoy these!

I’m going in a completely different direction with my recommendation this time. Partly due to content, but also because this is someone I have known personally for years, though we now live in very different provinces.

Today, I am very proud to recommend the exquisitely talented Kari Fell, fine artist and weaver.

My older daughter is an artist and, since we’ve moved here, her work is completely digital. Before we moved, however, she also did non-digital art, and took part in a major art market that happened once a year, and took up many blocks of a particular neighbourhood. I would usually accompany her to help set up and help out any way I could. She tended to pay for a spot in the same little park every year, and after a few years, we got to know some other artists that liked to set up in the same park. It was at one of these events that we happened to find our booth next to an really awesome woman and her paintings. You can view some of them at her website here. Her grid paintings were particularly amazing in their detail. Believe me; the photos do not do the originals justice! Along with her paintings, she also sold items she sewed herself. Especially hats, each featuring a unique decoration, one of which my younger daughter still considers a favourite. As with her paintings, her attention to detail in sewed was just as perfect. Then she started tablet weaving and making hand woven Viking hats, made as authentically as possible, inspired by re-enactors at festivals she had booths at.

After she and her family moved to the Cape Breton, she was able to set up a studio, get back into dying and weaving, and start making YouTube videos. At first, her videos covered a number of topics, but eventually she started a second channel, just for her drawing and painting videos, while the original focused on Dying and Weaving. If you go to her About pages, here and here, you will also find how to follow her on social media, her shop, and her Patreon links.

You know those grid paintings I mentioned? She’s done videos on those.

You can watch part two, here.

Her attention to detail, to be able to make all those squares fit into the larger image is pretty mind blowing. That attention to detail extended into her tablet woven bands.

While setting up a booth at various event, she started going to Viking re-enactment events. They are a really awesome community that took her youngest son under their wing. They inspired some of her paintings, and she began making these era appropriate hats.

In her new studio, she has really been able to delve into loom weaving, with the same incredible perfection in skill and detail that is her trademark in everything Kari does.