Sue Parcels has never met a stick she didn’t like.
The willow-weaving artist has used her sticks to create baskets, furniture and sleighs in her Blue Mesa studio at Penhold, Alta.
“You don’t buy them; you go out in the ditch and cut them,” she said of the craft’s raw materials.
Parcels spends each fall knee deep in wet, snowy ditches, searching for the yearling sprouts she needs to twist into original designs. A single basket can take as many as 500 twigs, while tree branches are used for larger pieces such as chairs.
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“I drive down the road looking at twigs that would look great as furniture,” said Parcels.
Her craft grew from a childhood love of sketching to a business opportunity after taking a basket weaving course at nearby Red Deer College in 1995.
“My father called me his “little magpie,” she said of her habit of filling up her truck with twigs.
Her parents indulged her habit by buying her first power tools, which now include table, miter and circular saws.
“Women shouldn’t be afraid of power tools,” Parcels said. “They’re very empowering.”
Handwork wreaks havoc on the hands, and Parcels’ hands have the zigzag scars to prove it.
She is attempting to soften the learning curve for other would-be weavers by writing a how-to book called Never Met a Stick I Didn’t Like. It will detail where to find the best wood, what to look for and why October to May is the best time to work on the green wood.
“It will be like a recipe book with a plastic spine, a useable book,” said Parcels, who plans to publish it in June.
She sells her pieces at Red Deer’s Something Country store but also at the annual Red Deer Festival of Trees gift shop and at her home studio.
Active in charity work, she has donated many of her pieces and has been commissioned to do such pieces as a large willow sleigh.
She said willow furniture’s popularity stems from its rustic roots.
“It’s esthetically pleasing to look at and blends nature into your home,” she said, citing pieces that she has made such as arbours, benches, couches and bird feeders.
The pieces are screwed rather than nailed together and weather well outside, cracking and peeling as wood does.
Parcels’ work has branched out to include blending old barn boards and willows with stained glass to create a dining room suite. She has also mixed concrete and organic matter such as peat moss and vermiculite into a mould filled with rhubarb leaves to create bird bath basins to sit on her willow stands.
She especially likes to watch birds alight to hide their treasures in the bark.
“It’s an outlet from a stressful job,” said Parcels, who like her husband, Jim Freeman, was a nurse before becoming a psychotherapist and working in domestic violence treatment.
She said it’s those jobs that have allowed them to live on their acreage, raise their now adult children and fulfill Freeman’s dream of becoming a farmer. A native of England, he runs a cow-calf operation and grows feed on a nearby farm.
