Lisa Telford

But I call it my thread to sanity because when I’m angry or something’s wrong, I pick up that basket because everything that’s in my mind disappears. Everything that I’m thinking about is gone. I don’t worry about my troubles, I don’t worry about my aches and pains, it all becomes relaxed. I’m just melting into my work, enjoying my time, and I could do it all day long.

[Speaking Haida] In my family, because I come from a long line of weavers, form follows function. That simply means that if you see a basket with a fish eye on it that that was always a clam basket or you could recognize a seaweed gathering basket, it was always used for only gathering seaweed. Form follows function. That was what I was always taught to believe. When you do cedar clothing, it’s always traditional. They didn’t make form fitting clothing. It was meant to keep you warm.

I got a call from somebody who said I know you do cedar clothing and I’d like to have a contemporary piece and I said well, I’m very traditional, I don’t know what that means. He had a couple suggestions and I kept shooting him down. I said let me think about it for a couple weeks and I’ll call you back. And I had just bought a dress form and it was in the living room and I’m thinking why did I get that dress form? Then it dawned on me, I’ll make a bustier, so that was my first piece.

My contemporary pieces were so well received, my mind just went insane. I started thinking of all these things, I started doing, you know, I could make a necktie out of cedar bark. I can make a bow tie. I can make this, I can make that. At that point, my mind was anything was possible and I’d always have dreams about dresses and I had one more stuck in my head.