Sola Fiedler stands in front of her yarn picture showing the city of Vancouver. Photo by Amanda Skuse.
Adapted from The Province by Nancy Carson
Level 1
Sola Fiedler,78, is a fiber artist.
She makes beautiful pictures.
She makes pictures
of cities, like Vancouver.
She makes these pictures with yarn.
Sola uses yarn like this to make her pictures. Photo by Elliot Margolies/CC, Flickr.
No paint
She does not use paint
to make her pictures.
Paint is expensive.
She uses old sweaters!
Where does she find them?
She goes to thrift stores.
In thrift stores she finds
cheap thread to make her art.
Sweaters of every colour
Sola pulls all the threads or yarn
from sweaters.
She looks for different colours.
To make Stanley Park,
she used parts of a dark green sweater.
Fiber artist Sola Fiedler has made a picture of Vancouver with yarn from thrift stores. Photo by Amanda Skuse.
Thirty years ago
The artist did not have a camera.
She said she could not paint.
And she could not draw.
But she could knit.
So, she thought I will
“paint a picture with yarn”.
She made over 40 pictures.
Sola paints pictures with different colours of yarn which she pulls from old sweaters. Photo by Amanda Skuse.
Weavings become history
People come to look
at her pictures.
They get excited!
They look for their house,
or the place they work,
or a favourite restaurant.
Sola is weaving her way into history.
A closeup picture of some of the buildings in Sola’s weaving. People look for places they know. Photo by Amanda Skuse.
Love your work
Sola’s picture of Vancouver
is large.
It is 12 x 6 feet (3.7 x 1.8 metres).
She started it in 2009.
It took her 5,000 hours
to weave the picture.
Sola says, “I love what I do.
I’d rather do this
than anything else.”
Vocabulary:
- fiber: the thread part of a plant or artificial material which can be made into cloth (for example, wool, cotton, silk threads).
- yarn: thread used for knitting, weaving, or sewing.
- thrift stores: shops that sell used clothes and things for the house at cheap prices
- knit: to make clothing or blankets, etc. by interlocking loops of wool with knitting needles or on a machine.
- weave: to make cloth by crossing long threads over and under each other on a special machine called a “loom”.
Links:
See pictures of other cities made by Sola Fiedler on her Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sola_tapestry/