There is nothing better to get one into the spirit of fall with the vibrant colours and the cool temperatures it brings than a show of finely made, hand-crafted textiles. That was the case at the Southern Frontenac Community Services Grace Centre for a one-day show titled Textile Adventure. Sponsored by the Grace Centre Arts Committee, the show included displays and demonstrations by the Trinity Quilters, the Frontenac Rug Hookers, the Cataraqui Guild of Needlework Arts, weaver Beth Abbott and knitter Michelle Zigman.

I spoke with long-time painter turned rug hooker, Linda Hetherington, whose 3 by 9 foot hall floor runner was front and center at the show. Titled "Fantasy Creatures" the piece demonstrates how craft can quickly become art in the right hands. Hetherington worked for years as a professional painter and said the piece was not planned but rather just seemed to grow of its own accord. She said that she looked at mythological drawings and old tapestries to inspire the fantasy animals that appear in the piece. The colors of the piece are both rich and subtle and were hand dyed by the maker. The piece took Hetherington a full year and over 1000 hours to complete. “It is repetitive and methodical work and is really meditative.”

Hetherington makes her pieces for herself and, disappointingly for fans of her work, does not sell them.

The show included various kinds of block quilts both in traditional and modern designs, a historic name quilt and a barjello, different types of needle work and embroidery including Swedish weaving, felting, black work, long and short stitch, Elizabethan style needle work and examples of gold thread work. Master weaver Beth Abbott was on hand to give spinning demonstrations and Michelle Zigman demonstrated various knitting and weaving techniques. Many of the Trinity quilters were also busy working on projects that they had on the go. For those with a passion for the textile arts, the show was a delight and an inspiration for those looking for new ways to get their hands busy this coming fall and winter season.

Participants on the North Frontenac Back Roads Studio Tour, which centred around the Plevna area, were no doubt pleased with the weather that brought many visitors to the first-time tour in the scenic township. The weather could not have been better and the drive was almost as pleasurable as my destination proved to be.

I visited Plevna's Good Stuff bakery where owners Jean Heinemann her husband Sean Sheeham had great, affordable home-made snacks and a delicious lunch for hungry tour goers in need of some tasty home cooked fare. Jean also offered up her walls and extra space to two artists, local graphic artist and photographer Brian Roche, who unfortunately was not present for the tour, and long-time area cottager Miriam Silburt, a glass artist who specializes in fused glass work.

Silburt creates her colorful work at her home studio in Ottawa. Originally a stained glass artist, she switched her focus to fused glass close to a decade ago since it allowed her to create work with more fluid lines. “Fused glass allows me to create images that are unbroken, images that are more fluid and that have no divisions within them, which is something you cannot get with stained glass work”. Silburt is a self-taught artist and has also taken many private classes with other glass artists in the province. Her work includes colorful functional pieces: vases and serving trays that are definite eye catchers for those who drawn to colour and patterns. To create her stacked glass trays she lays down, one on top of the other, different colored squares and rectangles that fuse together in the firing process. The results are reminiscent of 1960s and 1970s patterns and make great functional eye candy for the home.

Her more graphic pieces can be found in her jewelry. Many of her pendants involve using cut outs to create one of a kind wildlife and animal themed motifs that include trees, leaves, and various animals, birds and insects. Each is masterfully composed, very intricate with no two the same. Some of her more involved pieces include her “glass canvasses” - scenes she creates by applying a number of different techniques that come together to form wildlife scenes, many of which are inspired by the views from her lake front cottage and include vistas of birch groves and lakes. Silburt frames each completed scene in a shadow box and installs special LED lights that can be manipulated to change the over all colour and mood of the scene.

The Good Stuff bakery was just one stop on this new North Frontenac studio tour, which no doubt will attract many adventurous art and craft-loving explorers to the area.

Fans of old-style English music hall humour are sure to enjoy an evening of skits, songs and dance courtesy of the five-member cast of “On No, Not Again”.

The play, a collection of comedic pieces, is the brain child of long-time pals Dick Miller and Peter Lovett, who have been acting together for over 14 years. The two wrote and directed the play, which is actually now in its fourth installment. The original was formulated seven years ago and has been put on for audiences in Kingston and also at the Selby Theatre. The skits include many clever costume changes, which I will not reveal here, and which form the basis for some very entertaining sight gags, racy conversations and classic old-school English shenanigans. Both Miller and Lovett are stage chameleons of sorts, as comfortable sporting their talents as Elvis tribute artists as they are bundled up and bonneted in cotton onesies or boasting black and white habits.

The two gentlemen's antics are buoyed by their two female counterparts, Miller's daughter Lisa Wilberforce and her long time acting pal Julia McKay, who have also worked together before onstage. Some of their primo offerings include a funny musical take on Canadian nationalism, a new and interesting way of cementing the nine times table and some top notch musical faves that they perform with aplomb.

And we cannot forget the lovely and talented Sandy Turcotte, who plays a hard to please accompanist. She also has some very powerful vocal stylings of her own and caustic one-liners to add into the mix. The evening includes one intermission and Miller describes the show as “ a fast-paced evening of entertainment that will keep people laughing.”

Comedy is one of the toughest of stage genres to nail and timing is of course of the essence. Both male and female leads were able to work on their parts independently of the others before bringing them together in five weeks of final rehearsals, which made for a night of seamless back-to-back fun.

The actors’ wives, Jan and Debbie, work hard behind the scenes on costumes, props and sets and behind the lights are Howard and Lynne Hutcheson.

For those who missed this weekend’s performances, the show continues on with three more: Friday & Saturday, Oct. 3 & 4 at 7:30 pm and Sunday, Oct. 5 at 2 pm at the Schoolhouse Theatre in Bellrock.

As part of their programming titled "Home Town Home Front: Kingston Frontenac in World War 1", the Kingston Frontenac Public Library's Sydenham branch invited Laura Robinson (photo left), head of the English department at the Royal Military College in Kingston, to present a talk on the life of famed Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery and her reflections of World War 1.

Robinson's talk coincides with a multi-media exhibit she put together that will be up in the Delahaye Room at the Kingston Library's Central Branch until Saturday, September 27.

Robinson focused her Sydenham talk on Montgomery's 1921 novel titled "Rilla of Ingleside", the eighth novel in her Anne of Green Gables series. Robinson said that while Montgomery drew on the raw material from factual war time realities, she used this material to create her own style of fiction and in doing so “highlighted the heroism that took place in rural Canada during those times.”

Robinson also said that Montgomery demonstrates in the "Rilla" characters some of her own ambiguities about the war by presenting many female characters doing their best to serve the war efforts, some happily, but others not so much. Similarly some of her male characters are presented with some opposing emotional feelings about the war itself.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Robinson's talk was when she spoke of Montgomery's more private self as gleaned from the author's journals, which when published beginning in the 1980s, caused a huge resurgence of interest in the Canadian author. The journals laid bare a side of Montgomery not formerly known, a more caustic, biting side, less charming and up beat than how she presented herself in public.

Robinson is the perfect choice to speak about Montgomery, having focused on her as a PhD student while at Queen's University in Kingston. Robinson included Montgomery's Anne series in her PhD thesis, which focused on girls' stories.

In her talk Robinson was careful to present Montgomery as a complex character, one who experienced her own personal woes throughout her life and who was a far more complicated individual than her books infer. For Robinson it has always been Montgomery's mastery of irony that attracted her to her work. “On the surface she always managed to toe the party line and behave properly and yet she still managed to get away with a lot. I think that is why so many people continue to love her and read her. It's because she writes things that are not as straight forward as they appear. Her characters and their feistiness show that although everything seems to work out in the end, in the middle parts of her books, her characters are always getting away with lots of stuff.”

Judging by the wealth of questions and comments from the audience at Robinson's talk in Sydenham, Lucy Maud Montgomery continues to inhabit the hearts and minds of many Canadians.

On September 22, in an effort to make their fundraising efforts visible and accessible to the local community, members of St. Paul's Anglican Church in Sydenham hauled out tables, chairs and all of the extension cords necessary to keep 17 pots of home-made chili warm for hungry passers-by. Music played from speakers set up outside the doors of the church on Mill Street as guests sampled the enormous variety of chilis, each donated by members of the church and the local community.

The event was a fundraiser for the church and was organized by Katt Bulch, a church member involved with the church's weekly Saturday night Crossing event. Katt was pleased with the turn out and said it was not just the delicious smelling chili but also the affordable prices of $5 for adults, $2 for teens and free for children under 12 years of age that attracted over 150 people to the event. The funds raised will be used to keep the church doors open.

Prizes were awarded for the best mild, medium and hot chilis as well as a prize for the best overall chili. Ginny Trousdale's entry won the best overall award and she said her secret ingredients are, surprisingly, a bit of strong coffee and cocoa powder, which she said “helps give the chili its rich, meaty flavour”.

The prizes were special commemorative Sydenham Chili Fest t-shirts that were donated by Paula MacDonald, who owns a print shop called Nothing But A Tees. Those who missed the Chilifest but who would like to donate by purchasing a T-shirt, please contact Katt Bulch at 613-876-9712.

This was St. Paul’s first Chili Fest but it was such a success that it will not be the last.

On September 20 the community room at Trinity United church in Verona was handily transformed into a Victorian tea house as close to 70 guests, many of whom were dressed in fancy bustles, petticoats, lace and fascinators, enjoyed tea, fancy sandwiches and dainty pastry desserts at a special fundraiser. Guests were also entertained by the local flute quartet Toute Ensemble and enjoyed the musings of a properly Victorian attired Debbie Lovegrove, who emceed the event and who mused on the era when Queen Victoria, England's longest reigning monarch, held sway over her empire for 64 years.

Lovegrove spoke of the Queen’s epic reign, of her taking the throne at age 18, her marriage to Albert, their nine children and 42 grandchildren, who gave the Queen the title “grandmother of Europe”. Albert’s death at age 42 from typhoid fever sunk the Queen into a deep depression, and she wore black for the remainder of her life.

Lovegrove recounted Victorian times, when “women's fashion surged to the forefront with horsehair petticoats stiffened with cane and padding”, and the popularity of crinolines, pagoda sleeves, hoop skirts and bustles. She cited the “great cultural expansion” that occurred during Queen Victoria's reign and the many advances made in industry, science, communications and infrastructure.

Included in the event was a festive lunch meal that included tea served from shining silver teapots, cheese and cracker appetizers, followed by a vast array of rolled and other fancy assorted sandwiches. Dessert included fine pastries plus scones, cream and homemade strawberry jam. As an added treat, guests were also invited to have their photos taken by local photographers Carl and Sharon Sole.

Numerous members of the church volunteered their time and services for the event and were also dressed to the nines as they served the guests. Noreen Peters, who organized the tea, was thrilled with the turn out and said she plans to hold another Victorian tea party fundraiser again at the church in the future.

An autumn drive up the Ardoch, Buckshot Lake, or Sunday Lake roads is an attraction of its own, but this weekend there is an even better reason to drive in North Frontenac. On Sat. & Sun. Sept. 27 & 28, the first North Frontenac Back Roads Studio Tour will take place.

Centred in Plevna, the studio tour features 16 artists in 13 studios located all across the east and central portion of the township. The hours are 10 am to 4pm each day.

Jim Craig, a jeweller who lives near Plevna, is the tour's founder. He said that he organised it because he realised that “there are a lot of unrecognised artists in the Plevna area. People might be interested in the incredible work that they do,” he said.

The tour includes painters working in a variety of media, as well as carving, jewelry, fused glass, multi-media, cement work, quilts, an alpaca farm and much more.

There are also three different food establishments participating in the tour – Good Stuff Bakery in Plevna, Johnston Lake Organic's off River Road, and the Out of the Box chip truck at the corner of Hwy. 41 and road 506.

A studio tour map is available at any of the tour locations, which will be easily identified by signs, at the eateries, and online at the tour website northfrontenacbackroadsstudiotour.com

The website also includes artist descriptions, photos, and other information.

The trees have changed colour this week, making the weekend prime for viewing colours, and along the route are some of the most spectacular roadside vistas in the region, from the Hill above Pine Lake on Ardoch Road, to Mississagagon on 506, and all of Buckshot Lake Road.

And the art is sure to be beautiful as well.

For information, call Jim at 613-479-2464

Fans of Elvis should mark Fri. Sept. 26 on their calendars. That's when Stephen Goodberry will be sporting everything Elvis and performing his Elvis Tribute act, Gospel/Inspirational-style at the Oso hall in Sharbot Lake for those who can't get enough of the famed jailhouse rocker. The event will begin at 7pm and tickets are $15 per person or $25 per couple, with all proceeds going to the Canadian Diabetes Association. Goodberry is no stranger to the area. The award-winning Elvis Tribute Artist grew up near Parham and is a graduate of Sharbot Lake High school. The show he performed there a few years back for a special Ladies Night event was the talk of the town for weeks after. So for those who love the King, Goodberry is sure to deliver a great night of entertainment - Elvis style.  

Ten local artists displayed their unique creations at the second annual Art in the Saw Mill show in Verona on September 7. The venue is perfect for such an event, spacious and roomy and the show attracted a large crowd of art buyers and enthusiasts to the historic old mill. Five painters covered a wide array of subject matter including landscapes, flowers, and wild life and five artisans displayed their more functional wares: gorgeous quilts, metal lawn and garden ornaments, photographs and woolen items. Ted Stewart of Newboro, an award-winning wildfowl sculptor who is self taught and who has made over 1400 bird carvings over his 20-year career was on hand carving a basswood wood duck. His display included numerous wild fowl, including loons, Niska (Canada geese that he carves out of single piece of cedar), pied-billed grebe

Stewart carves mostly basswood but also cedar, tupelo, pine and he paints the carvings with acrylic paints. He taught for 15 years at the Kashechewan school in James Bay and also does archeological work. Stewart has won over 135 awards for his work across Canada and in the United States including a first place award at the 2014 World Championships in Ocean City, Maryland. His work can be seen on his Facebook artists page at tedstewart-art.

Renovations are usually not much fun but for Reverend Judith Evenden of Land O’Lakes Emmanuel United Church, designing and renovating what will be a brand new church is a dream come true.

In 2009, the Harlowe, Cloyne and Riverside Flinton United churches amalgamated and became the Land O’Lakes Emmanuel congregation. In 2011 the members made the decision to sell their three churches (and one manse) and begin the search for a new place of worship.

Evenden said that it was accessibility issues and/or lack of washroom facilities at the three churches that led to the decision to find a new place of worship. “The congregation came at that time to a place of knowing that if everyone let go of their churches and grieved that loss, we could then move forward and start fresh with a new vision and a new sense of coming together.”

Following the sale of the Cloyne United Church in October 2011, the last of the properties to be sold, the task group appointed with the job of finding a new facility decided on the criteria that needed to be met. They wanted a centrally located, accessible, and multi-purpose facility to be purchased outright so that the church would not have to go into debt.

That goal was reached in November 2013 when a three-bedroom bungalow with a three-car garage in Northbrook, which was built 10 years ago by Sandor and Eleanore Kaltner, was purchased. The building is located on a 23-acre parcel of land and is slowly being transformed into the new church facility that Evenden believes will meet all of the needs of the congregation while also serving the community.

The architect working on the project is Bruce Downey of Kingston with local contractor Mike Cumming. The 2900 square foot main floor, which incorporates the former garage space. is wheelchair accessible and boasts a 1600 square foot sanctuary. “The worship space is bigger than any we have had in the past and the plan is to make it completely flexible with no permanent furniture so that we can use it for worship but also for weddings, funerals, yoga, movie nights and other community events,” Evenden said earlier this week.

Also on the main floor are a servery/ kitchen area, three washrooms, a meeting room, main office and the minister’s study. In the main vestibule will hang a panting by Don Wise titled “Church Street”, which depicts the five churches in the former pastoral charge. A verandah that stretches across the entire front of the building will be a place for visiting and Evenden hopes to be able to have numerous walking trails on site. There are also plans that the indoor elevator on site will also be upgraded as well. Some of the old furnishings from the former churches will grace the new building, including the three crosses from the church's sanctuaries, the pulpit from Cloyne, communion tables from Harlowe and Cloyne, the organ from Harlowe, and the piano from Riverside Flinton. Many of the smaller worship symbols were also kept and will be used at the new church. “The aim is to create a safe, beautiful place where people can gather and be in the midst of nature. What we can do here is only limited by our available finances and by people's imaginations.”

The renovations have not come without challenges since as a space of public assembly the building must meet specific health, fire and building codes. “I think people are wondering what is taking so long but a lot has to be done to make sure that everything is done properly and up to code.” While most of the major construction work has been done, the drywall and finishing touches still need to be completed. Much of the work being done and the materials have been donated by members of the congregation and the community. Evenden hopes that the community will also use the space and with that in mind is inviting members of the community at large who support the values of the church to consider donating to the cost of the renovations. Those interested can contact Rev. Judith Evenden at 613-336-2655 or by email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Evenden is hoping that the project will completed by October. “Personally I'd love us to be in here for the World Wide Communion Sunday that takes place the first week in October.” Until that time worship will continue at the Lions Hall in Northbrook on Sundays at 10am.