Featuring – Lucille Crighton – member of the Textile Arts Hall of Fame and gifted gardener at The Beach
The Toronto’s Beach community is not only a beautiful waterfront neighborhood with mature trees and historic homes, it is also a favorite place of residence for many artists. I was glad I had the chance to find out more about beach arts when I accidentally connected with a local artist, a photographer named John Dowding, during my interview with Mary Lee from Spiagga restaurant. This gave me the opportunity to learn more about the wide spectrum of creative people on the beach. John then put me in touch with Lucille Crighton, one of Canada’s leading textile artists.
On a snowy afternoon, after my interesting interview with Steven Zarlenga and Paul Karamat, two creative beach bed and breakfast owners, followed by an interview with John Dowding, I had the chance to visit Lucille Crighton at her home: a beautiful historic property. It dates from the first part of the 20th century. Lucille has a strong connection to Beach, as her grandfather bought this very house in 1927. The brick came from the rubble of the Great Toronto Fire of 1904, and Lucille took me outside to show me the dark color and rough texture of the the bricks.
Lucille also has a long connection to the textile arts: she started weaving as a teenager. With a smile, she says that she hesitates to count the number of decades she’s been knitting now. She is a graduate in design arts and textile arts, she has a diploma in weaving with Nell Znamierowski of FIT, NYC and has also completed a teacher training program for professional hand knitters. She has written 2 of the courses (Fabric Sampling and Fabric Design) for the OHS Master Knitter program.
When her children were young, she opened her own yarn shop and taught classes in quilting, macramé, knitting, knitting, and sewing. Ella Lucille explained that at one point she decided to specialize in weaving because it is a deep trade in which she never stops learning. Knitting reminds her a lot of music; his brother Garry is a musician. Designing a thread is quite similar to writing music and the complexity of threading keeps you challenged for a long time.
Lucille used to teach knitting all over North America, in places like Washington DC, Portland, Oregon, Florida and Michigan, New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. All of these places have weaving guilds, and they would invite her to teach color and design in weaving. Although she enjoyed it, she had to give it up because she didn’t have enough time to produce the jackets for which she has become so well known. Ella Lucille adds that she likes to teach, but she loves to design.
Lucille finds inspiration in everyday life and is constantly looking at the relationships of one color to another, texture, line and pattern, values and intensities. As she weaves, she intuitively considers light reflection, rhythm and repetition, emphasis, balance and proportion as she experiments with new harmonious color combinations.
“Even though I work long hours, it’s creative, it’s inspiring to express my ideas in terms of color and design. I wake up every morning and love what I do.” But Lucille admits that it took her a long time to reach this level of success. Today, her brightly colored jackets are highly coveted fashion items, and her clients often wait several months for Lucille’s creations. Her special artistry was honored when she was inducted into the Hall of Fame at the One-Of-A-Kind Craft Show, a popular trade show for unique arts and crafts, held twice a year in Toronto. .
Lucille and I head upstairs where three of her rooms are devoted to her craft. The smaller loom is set up in a room with hundreds of cones of yarn, all arranged by color, which presented quite a beautiful arrangement on its own. Lucille explained that with the Leclerc loom, purchased in Canada, she uses up to 20 shuttles (the longitudinal pieces of wood that move horizontally across the vertical threads, creating one row of fabric at a time) for a jacket. Each spool on the shuttle can be set to a different color, and as a result, Lucille is able to create very intricate designs as she weaves, with occasional repeats on the same fabric.
Lucille showed me how weaving actually works: the shuttle containing the thread is thrown virtually from one side of the loom to the other, creating an additional row. A “beater” is then used to compress the new line of thread and push it close to the already woven fabric. Then, pressing a foot pedal (tredle) creates a new opening for the next row of yarn. It uses numerous threads of different thicknesses and materials; some of them have metallic or even three-dimensional effects.
Knitting is a very physical process, you always sit hunched forward and the process of throwing the shuttle puts repetitive stress on your muscles and joints, especially when you work every day from morning until late at night. Lucille explains that she needs physical therapy every six weeks and daily exercises to relieve the physical stress of her profession.
A second room features a larger California-built AVL loom that is actually connected to a computer and weaving software program. Lucille added that this setup allows her to create complex fabric designs on the computer, whereas in the past you would have had to use graph paper. The software has made fabric design much more convenient and efficient than before.
The third room is a cutting room where woven fabrics are cut, ready to be assembled into jackets. Additionally, this room houses dozens of folders of fabric swatches that Lucille has created over the years, a tangible timeline of Lucille’s artistic evolution. She could literally go back, for example, to November 1996 and show me what types of fabrics she was producing at that time. She was admiring her organizational skills in keeping such accurate records of her art projects. She added that she never produces the same fabric twice unless specifically requested by a client. Now I started to understand that this is really a trade where you never stop learning.
In fact, weaving is a very complex craft: it takes anywhere from a week to 10 days to set the threads on the smallest loom, while setting on the largest loom can take more than three weeks. This does not include designing the warp, weighing and calculating the lengths of the threads, as well as finding the threads and ordering them. Lucille installs around 200 yards of warp thread on the loom at a time, allowing her to create anywhere from 75 to 100 jackets with a single installation. The nature of weaving is such that in one warp you can create completely different fabrics; nor would you think that the designs came from the same loom.
It was obvious to me that considering the setup and manual process of weaving a fabric row by row, weaving is an extremely laborious process. I asked approximately how much a jacket would cost and Lucille replied that the average cost of a jacket is in the range of C$650 to $1000. That was actually a lot more reasonable than she expected. Lucille explained that her clients are very diverse and would simply like to have a unique garment that is not replicated anywhere else in the world.
Now a well-established successful artist, Lucille has a substantial backlog of orders and doesn’t have to worry about where the next project will come from. Her marketing consists of four art shows a year: twice a year she participates in the popular One-Of-A-Kind trade show in Toronto, while twice a year she is a key participant at the Beach Studio Tour.
The Beach Studio Tour is hosted twice a year by a group of approximately 15-24 local beach artists who open their houses to the public for free for three days in May and October each year. Ceramics, stained glass, jewelry, photography, fine art, and textile arts are represented, and artists welcome visitors with demonstrations of their crafts and the opportunity to learn about the creative process.
Artists participating in the Beach Studio Tour collectively support the marketing and publicity effort to promote this event. They raise funds and sell advertising on their flyer to pay for an advertising campaign. Flyers must be designed, a mailing list must be maintained, public relations work must be done to publicize this event and attract visitors from across the city and beyond. As a result, a large amount of work has to be divided between different artists. But the Beach Studio Tour has become a very popular regular event in the neighborhood that is a successful marketing tool for local artists.
During the studio tour, Lucille hires someone to tour the looms and answer questions, and her dining room becomes a showroom for her creations. It also usually features guest artists, and for the past several years, well-known local photographer John Dowding has exhibited some of her work at Lucille’s home. She also hires someone to help her on the main floor so potential clients have a chance to speak with the master artist and personalize it or discuss future projects.
But Lucille is not only a talented textile artist, she is also an avid gardener. Gardening is extremely popular in the beach, a neighborhood with many talented gardeners. Lucille volunteers as a librarian at the Beach Garden Society and a board member who meets once a month. The society brings expert guest speakers who speak on topics such as shade gardening and planting perennials. Lucille’s garden was recently featured in Gardening Life magazine.
Lucille Crighton is a creative person in every way, whether in the textile arts or horticulture and garden design. She’s a one-of-a-kind Hall of Famer and a prime example of creative talent in Toronto’s beach neighborhood.