Common Threads

A guide to creating community-based art installations using green waste, invasive species and natural materials Disposing of unwanted natural materials can be expensive and time-consuming, or it can present a tremendous opportunity for creating collaborative eco-art. Invasive-species control, green-waste management, urban gardening, and traditional crafts can all be brought together to strengthen community relationships and foster responsible land stewardship. Simple, easily taught, creative techniques applied with shared purpose become the modern-day equivalent of a barn raising or a quilting bee. Common Threads is a unique guide to engaging community members in communal handwork for the greater good. Sharon Kallis provides a wealth of ideas for: Working with unwanted natural materials, with an emphasis on green waste and invasive species Visualizing projects that celebrate the human element while crafting works of art or environmental remediation Creating opportunities for individuals to connect with nature in a unique, meditative, yet community-oriented way Combining detailed, step-by-step instructions with tips for successful process and an overview of completed projects, Common Threads is a different kind of weaving book. This inspirational guide is designed to help artists and activists foster community, build empowerment, and develop a do-it-together attitude while planning and implementing works of collaborative eco-art. Sharon Kallis is a Vancouver artist who specializes in working with unwanted natural materials. Involving community in connecting traditional hand techniques with invasive species and garden waste, she creates site-specific installations that become ecological interventions. Her recent projects include The Urban Weaver Project, Aberthau: flax=food+fibre, and working closely with fiber artists, park ecologists, First Nations basket weavers, and others.

Common Threads: A Cultural History of Clothing in American Catholicism

When young Adam is separated from his parents in a bustling market, he finds many diverse people in similar clothing who kindly help him search for them.

It is the early 1850s when thirteen-year-old Ashani tribe member Berko Yaba is snatched from his home in Ghana, West Africa, and placed on a slave ship bound for Jamaica. A short time later, Berko takes a new name, Jed, and reluctantly begins a new, imprisoned life with his shrewd owner. Meanwhile, in Cupar, Scotland, Johnny McDonald is like most teenage boys in his farming community, focused on raising healthy crops and animals. But when Johnny marries Diana and begins farming his own land, things begin to go wrong. Halfway across the world from each other, Jed and John endure very different challenges. As Jed battles the torture of slavery and falls in love with Mary, another slave, John fights the daily obstacles that accompany a life of farming. But when John encounters a disaster that ruins his crops and Jed discovers the Underground Railroad, fate eventually leads both men and their families to journey to a small community in southern Ontario, where common threads tie them together as they become owners of one of the largest potato farms in Canada. In this historical tale, the years pass and the families grow to include multi-racial twins, as events eventually lead a new generation to Mississippi, where everyone must face the sorrows of prejudice.

School safety is paramount in today’s educational system. Now, more than ever, the need to be proactive and systematic when it comes to handling even the most minor infractions in schools must be required, as demonstrated by the tragic events of recent school violence. An administrator’s work revolves around investigating. Whether it involves issues with parents or students, disciplinary incidents or teacher situations, being able to investigate in a non-biased and systematic manner is paramount for success. Yet, despite this premise, guidance for new and experienced administrators concerning how to investigate an incident is limited at best. Common Threads is a straightforward, practical guide for administrators in the job or professors to use as a guide for principal preparatory training.

Practical, inspiring, and thought-provoking, Common Threads shines a light on the impact of trauma and mental illness on individuals and their families as they search for healing. From a young age, Melissa Collins Harrell was acquainted with the toll mental illness can take on a family, particularly children. Although she knew her parents loved her, she was thrust into the role of caregiver at the stage of life when she needed to be cared for. Through dance, faith, and a growing resiliency, Melissa began her healing journey. She pursued training in counseling and public health, had a family, and built a good life. But more trauma was waiting for her. In this moving memoir that weaves together her personal life and professional work, she provides resiliency tips, inspirational and uplifting scriptures, and insight and commentary based on her own experiences. It’s an offering that will reach into the hearts of those suffering from trauma as well as the helping professionals walking alongside them.

Common Threads explores ideas of artistic identity and memory contained within the narrated stories of ten textile artists. It reveals how individuals bring a sense of linearity to fragments of memory and create a cohesive sense of self through telling their life’s story. By employing a systems model, the author constructs new ideas of interrogating identity and art practice. The model, “Constructing Personal Narratives”, brings into focus the hermeneutic circle of learning, and identifies the importance and need to provide opportunities for lifelong learning. The stories told by the participants who returned to the formal education sector later in life reveal the profound effects adult learning had upon their lives. The writer reveals how the model generated the interview questions that provided the rich biographical content that emerged within dialogues. The common threads of experience and feelings of the ten participants and the author are revealed, and from these emerge deepened understandings of both the place of stories within our lives and how stories can further an understanding of what it means to be an artist. Emerging from these stories are implications for teaching practice; these are presented as observations and questions in terms of how educators should be part of the learning experience with those they educate.

The middle-aged women described within the chapters of "Common Threads" are ordinary yet extraordinary. They have faced one of life's greatest challenges, working day-in and day-out to design new lives for themselves. As readers witness the resilience of the human spirit, they come to a new perspective on their own experiences, recognizing the good still in their lives. "Common Threads" is a tender and warm embrace, a story of faith and love, of insight, determination, independence and strength. These women's large and small victories are metaphors for hope and continuity.