Folk Arts Marketplace
Vendors invited to participate in the Great Lakes Folk Festival’s “Folk Arts Marketplace” sell authentic traditional arts or related items rarely available in any stores or other festivals. Vendors include past participants in state and regional folklife festivals, apprenticeship and award programs, and other activities of the Smithsonian, Michigan State University Museum, and upper Midwest regional state-funded folk arts programs.
Amish Rocking Chairs and Footstools
Levi Yoder (Clare, Michigan)
Businesses based at home are common among Amish where they can more readily adhere to the practices dictated by their religious beliefs. Many earn or supplement their living by making and selling directly out of the their homes, from their horse-drawn buggies, or stands along the roadside. Especially popular items are quilts, lawn ornaments, jams, baked goods, and furniture. A number of Amish craftsmen in the Midwest specialize in rocking chairs made of hickory and hardwoods such as cherry, walnut, or oak.
Levi Yoder got his patterns for rocking chairs, footstools, and tables, and learned the art of steaming and bending hickory from Roy Yoder, who participated in the 1999-2001 National Folk Festival and the 2002 Great Lakes Folk Festival.
Braided Rugs
Julie Sullivan (Eaton Rapids, Michigan)
Braided rugs are an old American folk art. Made of readily available and often recycled materials, they are both practical and decorative. Because wool is durable and stain resistant and the color variations in the braids hide spills, braided rugs of wool are especially practical and desirable.
Hand-braided rugs are a family tradition for Julie Sullivan, who learned to braid from her grandmother. In 2000 and 2001 Julie was awarded a Michigan Traditional Arts Apprenticeship award to teach her daughters. Using pure wool, needles, and a tool for sewing called a bodkin, they braid strips, lace the braids together, and connect the braid ends to each other, creating a seamless effect. They use the rugs in their own households and as gifts for others.
Chinese Cord and Jade Jewelry
Angela Welti (Harrison, Michigan)
Jewelry made from tied cords and semi-precious stones is a traditional Chinese art that is more than 2,000 years old. Into silk cord designs, it incorporates good luck symbols, carved jade, amber, amethyst, tigers eye pearl, olive pit or linden root beads. Large pieces are used as decoration in households or temples. Intricately designed cords with an attached piece of jade are considered a special gift and are handed down from generation to generation. They are also given as gifts when babies are born.
Hsiu Chin “Angela” Lin-Welti was born and raised in Taiwan. She began tying cords when she was eight years old. In 1993 she married her husband, Jeff Welti, an English teacher in Taiwan. They now live in Harrison, Michigan, where Angela continues to make jewelry. It takes her up to nine hours to complete one cord.
Handspun Yarn and Textiles
Jacqueline Vaughan (Lansing, Michigan)
Like many other traditional artists, Jacqueline Vaughan was exposed to her art form within her family. At 8 1/2 years old, her mother presented her with her first loom and spinning wheel and taught her the arts of knitting and crocheting. However, it was not until Jacqueline finished college that she began to develop her spinning and weaving skills. Wool, fleece, silk, cotton, and alpaca are just a few of the materials she uses. She prepares the fibers, dyes them, and designs patterns for the many fiber arts in which she is skilled.
Jacqueline is particularly interested in the similarity in pattern, color, and function between West African textiles and African-American textiles . She is the program director of the Mid-Michigan Knitters Guild, has been featured in Spin-Off magazine, and is involved in the public presentation of this art form and related historical and cultural aspects to public schools, guilds, and art centers throughout the Great Lakes region.
Hmong Embroidery
Ia Her (Lansing, Michigan)
Teng Yang (Warren, Michigan)
Like their relatives in their homeland of Laos and in communities scattered throughout the world, Hmong-Americans begin to learn how to make paj ntaub (flower cloth) at a very young age. A variety of patterns, motifs, and needlework techniques, including appliqué, reverse appliqué, and embroidery, are used in creating the colorful textiles. Mastery of the techniques and expansion of the repertoire of designs and motifs usually takes years, and expert craftsmanship is valued within the community.
While certain types of paj ntaub are still made for traditional uses such as baby carriers, baby hats, funeral collars, and wedding apparel, most paj ntaub made in the United States today are sold to non-Hmong. Bedspreads, purses, eyeglass cases, pillow covers, wall hangings, and articles of decorated clothing are among the items now produced.
Musical Instruments
Elderly Instruments (Lansing, Michigan)
Elderly Instruments first opened for business in 1972 in a basement location on Grand River Avenue in East Lansing and moved in 1983 to their current location at 1100 N. Washington in Lansing. Elderly features vintage and new instruments, such as button accordions, fiddles, dulcimers, harmonicas, and bodhrans, and specializes in fretted instruments, such as guitars and banjos. With their extensive inventory of instructional books and hard-to-find CD’s and cassettes, sold both at their Lansing store and through widely distributed mail-order catalogs, Elderly Instruments has established itself as an important local business with a national reputation.
Polish Wycinanki
Krystyna Rosas (Grand Rapids, Michigan)
Krystyna Rosas’ parents were born and raised in Poland, but Krystyna was born in England and immigrated to the United States with her family when she was 5. Her father was a potter, woodcarver, painter, and sculptor. Their home was decorated with many beautiful Polish objects: pottery, amber, weavings, carvings, and, of course, wycinanki (paper cuttings). Krystyna’s father taught her how to duplicate and design wycinanki when she was a child; at an early age she recognized that these pieces were a special part of the way she thought of herself and her heritage.
Wycinanki originally decorated walls, ceilings, beams, and furniture in rural homes. The brilliant colors, traditional themes, and beautiful designs of the paper cuttings symbolize Polish folk art, and today, different regions of Poland produce distinct styles of wycinanki.
Quilts
Lula Williams (Detroit, Michigan)
As a young child, Lula Williams occasionally helped her mother quilt by putting colors together and piecing. However, she only returned to quilting in the late 1970s when her young teenaged son encouraged her to take a course in it at his high school; she remembered her mother’s techniques almost immediately and has been quilting ever since.
Lula has made more than 120 quilts and won numerous awards. Her work reflects many traditions . She is a needle worker keenly interested in the latest techniques and patterns; she is an African-American committed to conveying information about her heritage; she is a woman of faith who communicates her beliefs through her quilts; she is an individual proud to be an American. One series of her quilts using African cloth pays homage to Martin Luther King, Jr. Another series is of red, white, and blue fabric with designs of stars and stripes. A special quilt, her original “I Am” design, depicts the times Jesus utters “I am” in the Bible as well as the declarations of “I am” by African-American preachers in their sermons. She is perhaps best known for her baby quilts, of which she has made scores as gifts for family and friends.
Lula’s excellent craftsmanship has won her invitations to participate in shows within the African-American community and beyond. In addition she has taught quilting for a number of years at the Evans Recreation Center on Detroit’s northeast side, at the Michigan State Fair Senior Center, and at Detroit’s Westside Tindal Recreation Center and readily assists those who seek her help. She has been recognized with awards of Michigan Traditional Arts Apprenticeship grants to teach her skills to other aspiring quilters in her community. In 1997 she was honored with a Michigan Heritage Award.
Rag Rugs
Adell Beatrice Raisanen (Hartland, Michigan)
Adell Raisanen, known as Bea, is a master rag rug weaver in the Finnish-American tradition. She was born in 1917 and grew up in a Finnish-American community in Minnesota where rag rugs were used in homes and weaving was a skill brought by immigrants from Finland. Bea’s mother taught her to weave, but like most women of her generation, it was many years before she returned to this tradition. In the interim, Bea moved to Detroit where she held several jobs, including a position in an aircraft factory during World War II, and she raised a family. In 1958 she purchased her first rug loom, and since then she has been recycling old clothes, blankets, sheets, towels, etc., into beautiful, highly coveted rugs for her home, gifts, and occasional sales.
Bea’s technical perfection and use of breathtaking colors are the result of many decades of weaving. Weavers refer to Bea’s loom as “the canvas of a great artist.” “There is no suggestion of randomness in her choice of materials; everything is integrated into a complete picture.” With her mother’s instructions, occasional reference to books and other weavers, visits to Finland where rag weaving is also highly prized, and her husband, Arnold, who keeps her loom in top working order, Bea continues to excel in her art and to attract admiration and praise.
Bea is a recipient of a 2002 Michigan Heritage Award. She has taught her weaving skills and techniques to apprentices through the Michigan Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program (1994, 1996, 1998-2000), infecting her apprentices with the love of weaving and reinforcing the tradition in the greater Detroit area. Bea is an active member of FinnWeavers, a group affiliated with the Finnish Center Association in Farmington Hills. She has also displayed her work at the national FinnFest, demonstrated weaving at the National Folk Festival, and has received awards from the Michigan League of Handweavers and at the Michigan State Fair. Despite all the attention, Bea continues to give generously of her time to help weavers with their problems and to teach her “tricks of the trade.”
Ukrainian Embroidery and Gerdans
Eugenia Worobkevich (Warren, Michigan)
Traditional embroidery plays an important part in public events, celebrations, and special occasions of Ukrainian-American communities. For festive events, women may wear embroidered blouses and men wear embroidered ties. Embroidery appears on pillows, table linens, cloths placed near household religious icons, and in Easter baskets.
Eugenia M. Worobkevich is a master artist of Ukrainian embroidery. She became a citizen of the United States in 1955 after emigrating from Lviv, Ukraine. In 1973 her favorite aunt sparked Eugenia’s desire to learn traditional embroidery. In 1985, she met Oksana Tkachuck, a master designer in Ukrainian nyzynka technique, and became her apprentice. In 1988 Eugenia also learned to make gerdan collars, because they share similar elements of color, texture, and form with traditional embroider. In 1996, Eugenia was granted a Michigan Traditional Arts Apprenticeship award to teach traditional embroidery to other Ukrainian women.
Ukrainian Pysanka
Roman Seniuk (Detroit, Michigan)
Roman Seniuk’s earliest memory of pysanka is seeing intricately decorated eggs in church on Easter Sunday; he considered them the most beautiful things he had ever seen. Under his mother’s tutelage, he learned how to make pysanka using various kinds of eggs, bee’s wax, a kistka stylus, a candle, and dyes.
The word pysanka stems from the word pysaty, “to write,” because the designs are drawn upon the eggs in a prescribed and meaningful manner. Pysanky symbols include geometric motifs, the sun, the cross, the triangle, endless lines, the tree of life, the church, and fish (symbolizing Christianity). The colors of the dyes are also symbolic. The tradition of pysanky precedes Christianity and reflects ancient myths in which the egg symbolizes life, the sun, and the universe. The eggs have been used as talismans to protect against evil, and they serve a variety of social and religious occasions.
