Tasmania is noted as a home for superlative craftspeople in many disciplines - woodwok, ceramics, glassblowing, leatherwork and needlework, to name just a few.
Each September, the Circular Head Arts Festival at Stanley shows the best of Tasmaniann art and craft work in a week-long celebration of excellence.
Two women who exhibited their needlework at this year’s festival were Elaine Spinks of Forest and Ilona Yana Behrendt, who recently moved from Savage River to Roger River.
Elaine has lived all her life in the quiet township of Forest, about 15 km from Stanley. A warm, friendly, yet private person, Elaine loves her life at Forest in the old family home she and her husband Leo have had since their marriage.
She has always enjoyed needlework of one sort or another - dressmaking, knitting and crochet - but last year a trip to the arts festival opened her eyes to a needlecraft she hadn’t considered before - patchwork.
“I was so interested and excited by what I saw, and I thought - I can do that too,” she says. “I couldn’t wait to try it out!”
Elaine and a friend decided to take lessons in patchwork, but there was no-one in Circular Head to teach them.
So they travelled to Burnie for 10 weeks to attend a class at the Hellyer Regional Library, held by needlecraft teacher Vicki Buchanan.
Elaine is loud in her praise of Vicki.
“She showed is so much - all the tricks of measuring and cutting out accurately. There’s no room for error if the pattern pieces are to fit together properly. Vicki taught us a lot in a few short weeks.”
At the library, Elaine began the first of more than 20 different cushion covers she has made for friends and family, She was so excited by the new skills she was learning that she rushed headlong into it.
“It’s really a craft you can pick up and put down as you feel like it; maybe cutting out pattern pieces one day between other jobs, or handstitching the seam while you’re talking on the phone. I rushed at it and tried to do too much at once.”
Making the cushion covers was valuable experience, and by Christmas Elaine felt ready to tackle something bigger - a double bed quilt.
Her son Roger had bought a beautiful myrtle reproduction four-poster bed, and Elaine began work on a patchwork cover in shades of rusty brown and soft green. Learning as she went along.
“I made all sorts of mistakes through ignorance, but I enjoyed working it out as I went along. There are some things I’d change in it if I did it over again.”
A couple of months before this year’s arts festival, Elaine felt ready to enter the patchwork section.
In her 100-year-old house at Forest is a spare bedroom in need of “doing up”. She decided to make two patchwork bedcovers to match the new wallpaper - each in the same colours but with different pattern blocks.
By the beginning of last month, the first patchwork cover in green and white tiny florals was almost completed.
Unfortunately, the quilting award was for small, cotsized quilts, and so Elaine lost her opportunity to compete.
But she was able to take her quilt with her and work on it during the festival, and is already making plans for what she will enter next year.
Her new craft doesn’t take up all her spare time, although she is very excited about all the possibilities.
Crochet, knitting and sewing also occupy her hands, and she is a keen gardener.
“I don’t go out a lot. I’d rather stay home and enjoy my family and my hobbies,” she says.
Another needlecraft worker who finds the peace of the country an inspiration is Iloba Yana Behrendt.
Ilona came to Tasmania from Germany with her husband in 1961. Her husband, Harry, was a diamond cutter in Germany; in Tasmania he became a construction worker for the HEC before taking up work as a diamond driller at Savage River, where much of their married life was spent.
She took up needlework “because I was lonely - I couldn’t speak English and I knew no-one.”
One of her first projects was to embroider flowers all over a cotton skirt to give herself a new outfit.
A natural craft-woman, Ilona has tried (and succeeded at) just about every form of needlecraft. Her list of crafts is enough to leave you gasping - knitting, crochet, rug making, wall hangings, tapestry, needlework lace, knitted lace, and Smyrna carpet making.
“I haven’t had time for bobbin lace yet,” she says, “but I’ll do it, and succeed.”
Ilona tackles each task she sets herself with enormous energy and enthusiasm. Whether it’s laying concrete or knocking down walls in the house she is renovating at Roger River, or making a lacy shawl with over 30 different patterns, fine enough to pass through a wedding ring - she goes about it with the same enthusiasm and vitality.
“It must be a challenge, an exploration for me,” she declares.
“And if it’s not perfect, it’s not good enough!”
Much of Ilona’s lace work is based on adaptations of old patterns. Many patterns are taken from illustrations of work in museums.
She way spend hours working out a pattern just from the photo in a book.
“But they must be my own work; I need to go my own way,” and so a traditional design will gain a subtle new twist.
Ilona first demonstrated her needlework skills at the 1979 arts festival in Stanley, when festival organiser Meg Close persuaded her to display some of her many hand-made items.
Since then she has exhibited regularly. A one-person exhibition in Zeehan in 1981 completely took over Gallery Z. Ilona also exhibits at the Deloraine craft fair each November.
During daylight hours, Ilona is most likely to be found outside, landscapng her extensive garden at Roger River, transforming a wilderness of long grass and brambles into an ordered lovelines of trees and shrubs.
She has planted over 40 trees already - natives and fruit trees. She is designing the property for complete self-sufficiency, and talks knowledgeably about goats, vegetable growing by hydroponics, keeping fowls and geese.
It isn’t till the sun goes down that Ilona goes indoors, kicks off her gumboots and starts work on another needlework masterpiece.
She may stay up to one or two in the morning working on an intricate design.
Between the demanding lace work, Ilona will do one of her broad colourful pieces - a tapestry picture or a wall hanging made in the Smyrna knotted style, strong enough to walk on without needing a backing.
Her old home at Savage River is filled with tapestry and petit-point wall hangings, colouful Persian-style floor rugs, hand-made lace curtains, and cushions covered in raised crochet designs - all tributes to Ilona’s skill and imagination.
“It must be a challenge - it must be an exploration” could well be the underlying force in both Elaine Spinks’ and Ilona Behrendt’s craft work.