Urban Weaver Project

The Urban Weaver Project is a Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation program that teaches people to use invasive plant species like English ivy around Vancouver, B.C. as materials for baskets and other woven items.  Website is here http://theurbanweaverproject.wordpress.com/

There's an audio news piece about 12 minutes long by the CBC's North by Northwest on the Urban Weaver Project here http://www.cbc.ca/nxnw/2012/01/14/urban-weaver-project/.  When Todd Devries is interviewed, he says that he was separated from his Haida mother when very young, then reunited much later, and the day he wore his first woven hat in public was when he felt Haida.  If you're not from B.C. and you don't know what that means, Haida is one of the many First Nations people groups in the province.

On the Urban Weaver Project's website you can find more about ways to use local invasive plants in fibre arts by going to the project's About page and clicking through to the individual artist-weavers' sites.  For example, Sharon Kallis' Materials Process Enquiry page gives among other things her experience with processing nettles and using them, unspun.  Good to know that nettle was traditionally harvested after the first frost.