North House Folk School

When I moved up to Grand Marais for the Artisan Development Program, I knew that winter would be somewhat of an adjustment. I’m no stranger to Northern winters—handling Chicago’s lake effect snow, New England’s Nor’easters, and the dry air of Minneapolis, but I always considered winter something to survive, hibernating in my studio for a few months before rejoining the rest of the world in the spring. But the past few weeks I’ve been doing anything but hibernating! The longer days have brought me a much fuller calendar than I anticipated, and I’m really enjoying it. 

First, some highlights from my hibernation during the first half of January: I spent lots of time at the computer rebuilding my website, Rileykleve.com, which was due for an overhaul. One of the tricky parts of working between art, craft, and teaching is that there aren’t many examples of how to fold all three into one cohesive website. Art-world standards typically call for white backgrounds and images with captions written in a detached third-person perspective that gives little context about a piece beyond its dimensions, materials, and year created. I also wrestled with conventional ways yarn is photographed, either as a skein wrapped up for sale or as part of a finished item. I decided to take a different approach on both counts: integrating colorful backgrounds and first-person context where I felt it was needed and dynamic photos of my handspun yarn to give a sense of my portfolio rather than specific products. It took a lot of work to get everything put together but I’m really proud to launch the website, and just in time to apply to festival and teaching opportunities for the summer and beyond. 

Back to the more exciting things bringing me out of hibernation: A couple of weeks ago we had some visitors from Sätergläntan, our sister craft school in Sweden. We hosted the four of them for dinner at the ADP house, where we talked about craft in our countries. I got lots of travel tips for my trip to Sweden, Norway, and Denmark next month. The next week the four of them hosted the weekly craft night at North House, the most lively one of the year so far! 

On the topic of new people, North House’s 2025 intern cohort started midway through last month, and Cooper had a great idea to host a wintertime pizza bake to welcome them to the community of North House and its network of intern alumni around town. We had great conversations, playing a bit of “musical tables” at Cooper’s suggestion—everyone was mingling around and chatting with new and old friends. 

I’ve also managed to squeeze in a couple of afternoons of cross-country skiing the past few weeks, and while I’m still falling over a bit, I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of it. I’ve only done downhill skiing previously, and while there’s definitely some transferable skills, it’s still so humbling trying to carefully step into my bindings without my ski sliding everywhere. 

I’m managing to find some time in my studio, wrapping up some stitching on the good yarn/bad yarn warp I wrote about in my previous blog post. I had room to make four pieces to hang on a wall, two larger pieces with wefts that repeat the same novelty yarn sequence that I used on the warp and two smaller pieces that explore one novelty yarn more in-depth. 

Finally, I’m looking forward to Fiber Week at North House! I’ll be spending some time in the classroom by day, plus enjoying other programming in the evening and in between classes. The full schedule is online here, it’s going to be a very full week.