The holidays are upon us! So much to do…I hope you are taking time to appreciate the joy of the season. We will be offering some fun events here at the studio and through out the Oak Park Arts District to make the season brighter!! Please stop in the studio with your kids on either Saturday December 12th or 19th between 2:00 and 5:00 pm. to create this lovely wire and bead angel. Perfect to give as a gift or keep on your own fireplace mantle to decorate your holiday home! Come over to the Oak Park Arts District to see Santa this weekend – for more information please go to www.oakparkartsdistrict.com . We will also be open Friday December 18th until 9pm. for the 3rd Friday gallery walk in the Oak Park Arts District. Please continue to bring in your canned food or personal care items for the OPRF Food Pantry and we will give you a 20% discount off any item in the gallery! Happy Holidays to One and All!
Once again I have had the experience of working with a wonderful student intern from the Dominican University Fashion Design program. Jacqui started working this past summer and jumped right in! She’s been great at observing and making suggestions. Today she helped me entertain and create felted scarves with eight 9 year olds for a birthday party. She has modeled for me, done a lot of sewing, helped with retail displays and is great at working with the customers and selling in the gallery. She has finished her hours needed to get her credits and 
will be finishing up her internship soon. I am really going to miss her and all the great help she has been.
It’s finished! The Crazy Crochet Afghan is a unique piece of art perfect for holiday gift giving or to keep as a gift to yourself! It is a nice cozy lap sized blanket created in greens, reds and accents of gold and blue. We will be taking silent auction bids from now until December 18th at 9:00pm. The proceeds will go to benefit Sarah’s Inn, a local organization dedicated to restoring and preserving the dignity and self-sufficiency of battered women and their families by providing a broad range of comprehensive services in the areas of safety, prevention, intervention, advocacy, education and support. Please call Pam at 708.383.2602 to place your bid or better yet, stop in to the gallery to see the piece in person!
It’s November already! Time to start thinking about your holiday shopping. Also, time to count our blessings and show our gratitude for everything life has provided us. To show our gratitude to our customers we are offering 20% off any one item or 10% off your total purchase (just a couple of exclusions apply) during the month of November if you bring in any canned or boxed food item to be donated to the Oak Park River Forest Food Pantry! Lets not let anyone go hungry this winter! If you are interested in more ways you can help the community this winter please go to http://www.oprffoodpantry.org/ Find out about the Holiday Food & Gift Basket program or find out how you can sponsor a family this holiday season.
Thanks to a great group in the “Crazy Community Crochet Class” last Friday afternoon during the Oak Park Arts District Arts Retreat (ArtRageous Oak Park!), we have a wonderful one of a kind art-blanket started. The goal is to have a lap sized finished blanket in the next couple of weeks. I have great sample pieces and crocheted medallions to add to reach that goal! My great class consisted of Donna, she had some crochet experience but it had been a while and she wanted to “brush up” on it! Bonnie, an avid crochet artist who added her expertise and taught all of us some new tricks. Beth, my dear sister who claims to have just taught herself to crochet a couple of weeks ago, but came in wearing a gorgeous shawl she had made for herself and Marta, a knitting student of mine that I convinced it would be helpful if she learned some crocheting skills as well! If you would like to add some loving stitches to the project, please just stop by during our regular gallery hours and sit down for a few minutes to create a patch or two. We will be holding a silent auction on the blanket from now until December 18th with the proceeds going to benefit Sarah’s Inn, a local organization dedicated to restoring and preserving the dignity and self-sufficiency of battered women and their families by providing a broad range of comprehensive services in the areas of safety, prevention, intervention, advocacy, education and support. If you are interested in bidding on the blanket please call Pam @ 708-383-2602 or email pam@pamelapenney.com.
Yes, we’ve worked all year long and it’s finally almost here. What is ArtRageous, you ask? It is simply a celebration and awareness campaign of all of the Art & Humanities available in Oak Park, Illinois. It all started from a conversation I had last January with Pat Zubak, the Executive Director for DownTown Oak Park. I was talking about the initial plans we had in the works for an Art Retreat Weekend in the Oak Park Arts District. My hope was that it could become an annual event that could grow into a village wide arts event that could appeal to both the local community and ultimately to tourists as well and tie into the Illinois Arts Month of October
. Pat was so enthusiastic and she encouraged us to think about the idea of making it a village wide event right from the start! We put together a steering committee consisting of representatives from the Village of Oak Park, the Oak Park Library, the various Oak Park business districts, The Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio, the OP Art League and the OP Arts Council, the OP Area Convention and Visitors Bureau and several other enthusiastic team members! It has been a wonderful process to birth this idea. And now it is ready to hatch. I think we’ve already “succeeded” whatever next week brings! If you can join us for the Arts Retreat, the Artist’s Studio Walk, the Edgar Allan Poe event at the Library or any of the 100+ other events next week, please do! It will be an “ArtRageous-ly” good time! Please go to www.artoakpark.com for more event information.
We have been creating many new and exciting garments for fall and winter. This jacket “Aztec Autumn” will be featured in the mobile fashion show during “Art On Harrison” in the Oak Park Arts District on Saturday September 12th. Please visit www.oakparkartsdistrict.com for a complete schedule of events for the weekend! Stop by our store as we will also be having a “pre-season” sale featuring felted wool hats and holiday items created from reclaimed and re-used wools.
Arts Dans La Rue was a great evening in Downtown Oak Park again this summer! The Oak Park Arts District came out to show the rest of Oak Park all it has to offer! Read more about it HERE!
We had a great time again with the Kid’s Art Camp in the Oak Park Arts District! For the last two weeks we had almost 40 kids rotate between 10 studios each morning for a creative experience they just can’t get anywhere else! They had the opportunity to learn from professional artists in their professional art studios and galleries. Everything from fusing glass to dance and performing arts, culinary arts, print making, origami, painting, mixed media and of course fiber art too! And the kids were so enthusiastic, creative and inspiring and fun to be with each day. I love to share the joy of what I do and to see the kids respond and appreciate it is wonderful. I’ll never know if I created a spark that starts the fire in a child…but sometimes the kids restart my fire and this group really did that for me. Now I just need to find some time to get creative in the studio myself!
