The Winnipeg Art Gallery hosted Crafted 2025 from Nov. 7 to 9 — a craft show and market including over 100 vendors and taking up nearly the entire gallery. All four floors were packed with crowds. The event was held in collaboration with arts organizations and governments from Manitoba, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut and the Inuit regions of Nunavik and Nunatsiavut.
There was a wide variety of crafts on display and for sale at the event. Artists Sandra Klowak, Jasmyn Douglas-Schmitz and Maureen Winnicki Lyons spoke about the experience of the event and their crafts. They are just three of the astonishing number of vendors featured at the gallery over the weekend.
Klowak makes jewelry from hair, under the name Corporeal Curios. Hair work is a type of craft associated with Victorian sentimentality and mourning, though she said it dates back to the 1600s.
She makes a lot of mementos for clients with deceased pets, including one customer who went home after a visit to Crafted and returned with dog fur for Klowak to use in an on-the-spot commission. Many clients also ask her to make pieces from their family members’ hair for Mother’s Day gifts or to commemorate departed children.
“It’s such a meaningful experience for me to get to help these people in a time of intense grief,” she commented.
Klowak also taught hair work to U of M English professor Vanessa Warne, who now demonstrates the craft in some of her courses.
Douglas-Schmitz, also known as Strawberry Moon Creations, made the trip from Fort Smith, Northwest Territories to sell her beaded accessories at Crafted. She was one of several Indigenous artists from northern Canada to be invited to the event, including two others from her community.
“[Crafted] was such a great experience for all of us from the north,” she commented. “It was just really nice to have those really heartwarming conversations and make different connections. It’s definitely something I would want to do again.”
Her work at the event incorporated pieces of antlers from moose and deer as well as sea glass, which is broken glass that has been smoothed and frosted from sitting under shifting tides. All of her works include something from nature, including tufted fur as well.
Douglas-Schmitz spoke on how her family has impacted her and her crafts, saying she learned to bead from her mother. When she visits her mother-in-law, they also bond by finding sea glass together along the coast of Powell River, British Columbia.
“Mixing a little bit of [what I have learned] from my mom, a little bit from my partner’s mom, it makes [my art] all the more special for me,” she shared.
Lyons is a multi-disciplinary artist with a passion for wool. She makes wool tapestries, needle-felted works and wet-felted works for her business, MWL Wool Mountain. Her table at Crafted included needle-felted bird ornaments with assigned names and personality traits on the adoption cards in the packaging. She also promoted her classes where she teaches needle-felting.
“I loved [Crafted]. Both from a maker’s perspective, but also from a textile artist’s perspective, because it was encouraging for me to [feel] represented from a couple of different avenues,” Lyons recalled. “There’s certain people who really excel at representing a fine art-type landscape using wool as the medium instead of paint — that excites me.”
Lyons is most passionate about her tapestries, which she creates by attaching various types of wool together. She said they “look, for the most part, as if they would be sheepskins, but they are minus the leather that would make them a pelt.”
She collects wool from various types of sheep bred for different purposes and estimates that she owns wool from roughly 200 breeds. Many can be found locally, but not all. The tapestries are the most challenging for Lyons to create in terms of labour and especially location. So, she does not teach it as often.
Sandra Klowak, Jasmyn Douglas-Schmitz and Maureen Winnicki Lyons can be found on Instagram at @corporealcurious, @strawberry.moon.creations11 and @maureenwinnickilyons.
