Bethany currently lives in Winnipeg, with her husband, where they homeschool their two children. Local food and craft are a family affair. She gardens and forages. He hunts and fishes. They all love to cook and to craft.

The pieces Bethany has worked on for this challenge were not made by her alone. It took a community.
With family who offered deer hides, and friends who helped to scrape and stretch them; the leather was prepared.

With friends who gathered together and taught her how to make natural dyes; the locally produced wool was prepared.

With her mother who taught her how to warp the loom (and is an inspiration for all things craft), the woven material was prepared.

With the influence of her father who helped her to develop a passion for growing plants and who, ages ago, drove her around the countryside to make her first native wildflower collections; the plant materials were prepared.

Bethany teamed up with her friends and fellow homeschooling moms, Nicole Vechina and Anna Hunter for the OYOO Challenge.

Woven Wool Top
The yarn was made by Long Way Homestead from locally produced sheep wool. The natural dyes were made from either garden grown or wild foraged plants including, indigo leaves, elm bark, apple leaves, apple bark, onion skins, sumac berries, cosmos flowers, coreopsis flowers and dock seeds. The material was woven on a vintage 4 harness jack loom made by Leclerc.

Leather Wrap Belt
The hide was from a deer hunted in the Spruce Woods area of Manitoba. It was scraped and brain tanned by the artist and her friends and family, then woodsmoked at Manitoba Buckskin (where the artist had taken a hide tanning course a few years prior). In preparation for the project the hide had to be stretched and softened by the OYOO team. The belt was sewn with cord made from milkweed fibres.

The deer hides for the project were scraped in 2014, by Bethany and Kat and their families. In these pictures, Bethany’s husband is scraping the hair off an Elk harvested by a friend in Manitoba's Interlake.

Fingerless Mitts
Hand knit by the artist using wool produced by The Last Dance Ranch from locally sourced wool and dyed with yarrow. The pattern, named Little Sister Mitts, was designed by Laura Harby, a Manitoba knitwear designer.

Nicole Vechina, lives in MB on treaty one territory. Has wanted a pet sheep since she was seven years old. Plays pretend farmer instead.

Hat: pattern: purl soho classic ribbed hat, knit on US #3 needles. With Clover’s first shearing (2019)
One time Nicole and her son who was 7 at the time, fostered a baby lamb named Clover for a friend. The baby lamb enjoyed trips to the skate park, library, and dentist office, wore a diaper with a hole cut out for the tail, and slept in a cardboard box full of straw in the bathroom. When the lamb was big and strong enough, she returned to her flock at Ferme Fiola Farm, where she still lives and has become one of the bosses of the flock, and a wonderful mother despite growing up believing she was a dog.