ThisWeek CW 11/23/2011
The founder of The Laughing Ewe hopes her new downtown Canal Winchester store will make area quilters and hooked-rug artists smile.
“I have some wingback chairs and a faux fireplace in the back of the shop. I want people to feel comfortable coming in off the street to sit and work on their projects and chat,” owner Teri Brown said. “This is a warm and welcoming place.”
The new store opened Saturday, Nov 19, at 25 N. High St. Brown said the shop offers beginner and intermediate classes upstairs, with supplies and project space available on the main floor.
“I’m trying to get to people from around the community who have always wanted to quilt but were afraid to, or didn’t know where to start,” Brown said. “This is a place where people can get help and inspiration from fellow artists.”
To build that interest, she is offering a beginning quilting class for free, with the donation of five canned goods to the Canal Winchester food pantry. According to Brown, fiber art is a lot like painting, which she hopes will appeal to people considering this hobby.
“I particularly like the texture of the fiber, how it feels to touch it, and being able to implement my original designs,” she said. “I hand-dye a lot of my wools and I use strips of wool to get the shading I desire, so it’s the same as what a painter would do.”
Brown is a nationally recognized fiber artist; one of her original hooked-rug designs was recently featured on the cover of the Association of Traditional Hooking Artists magazine.
“I created an original design and submitted it to the ATHA and received national recognition for it, which was quite an honor for me,” she said. “I keep that piece hanging here in the shop.
“My style leans toward the primitive style of quilting and rug-hooking, so this old historic building with its tin ceiling and wood floors is just the perfect fit. It’s a very large building so it suits our needs for stocking supplies as well as the classes.”
According to Brown, her husband, Carl Luckeydoo, used to comment that the basement at their Pickerington house looked like a fabric store.
“I was an MRI technician at Children’s Hospital when I bought my first quilting machine and started doing work on the side for people,” Brown said. “Then I started buying supplies in bulk to sell to other rug-hookers in the area.
“That’s when my husband and I began talking about opening the shop, and now we did it — it looks like my dream is coming true.”