Have you ever noticed that you feel better after you have made something with your hands?   As you admire your handy work, a feeling of satisfaction fills your being – you are a creator!

Creating a stencil – which ultimately becomes a flag! – starts with stretching your mind around negative and positive space. It can be frustrating, but the result is always worth it! If you think in terms of holes in paper, held together by little bridges, this helps with the composition.

Collect images for reference – from everywhere! – and start doodling. How do the shapes of your image fit together? What parts of the patterns want to be cut out? When you’ve got a good start on your image, transfer the sketch onto a water-resistant paper, like Yupo paper, and start cutting.

You can test the results as you go by flipping the paper over, and seeing what is missing in your image. Or you can hold your stencil up to the light and look at it through squinted eyes. These are the tricks I use as the stencil takes shape. You may discover others.

Power of Hope Camp  Whidbey Island, WA 2015 and 2016

hazel and the flags were invited to attend and participate at the Power of Hope Camp on Whidbey Island, Washington. Power of Hope is a camp hosted by Partners for Youth Empowerment.  It was here where we first experienced the healing impact of the flag installation on a gathering of youth and facilitators.  The flags were hung in the forest and created a soothing space for youth and adults to rest and reflect.  Everyone remarked on the flag’s capacity to hold space.  It was also here at this camp where hazel began to refine her stencil making and silk screening workshops.

IndigenEYEZ Camp  Okanagan, BC and Through out BC 2016 to 2019

It was at IndigenEYEZ camps where we were privileged to witness the consistent supportive power of the flags to hold space for play, growth, learning, conflict, joy, and healing.  Over the years many gorgeous stencils were made by youth and adults at these camps.  hazel raises her hands to IndigenEYEZ and all the folks who have made IndigenEYEZ possible. These camps offer the opportunity to learn to re-village and indigenize ourselves, the opportunity to connect to land, self, others, ancestors, and great mystery.

Yaima Campout  Orcas Island, WA 2016

A weekend workshop on Orcas Island, with us weaving community, experimenting with silk screening and making flags together. Featuring a special Yaima CD Release Concert under a Bedouin Tent, workshop participants created original designs and stencils, and then sewed flags together, ultimately taking home their own unique strands.

Reconciliation in Action Vancouver, BC 2016-2017

Reconciliation in Action was a community-powered celebration and conference built on core principles of openness, mutual respect, inclusion, understanding and collaboration. The event recognized that reconciliation with the past and building a healthy, sustainable future requires coming together. In 2016, partnering with Aboriginal Life in Vancouver Enhancement Society (ALIVE), the Kinship Flag Project produced the first highly elaborate, now famous, ‘Bear of Reconciliation’ image for the March 2016 event at Hastings-Sunrise Community Centre. About a hundred kids, youth and elders silkscreened the bear while the PrayerStream flag collection held the space.

Kinship Flag Project participated in three Reconciliation in Action Events. Hastings-Sunrise Community Centre March 2016, RayCam Co-Operative Centre June 2016, and at Britannia Community Services Centre in 2017. Grandmother Turtle and the 13 Moons stencil was created for the Britannia RIA. The PrayerStream collection held space outdoors for the first time here, hung between trees and lamp posts, gently flying in the autumn breeze. This marked the beginning of a new chapter for the flags.

World Tree Vancouver, BC 2019 in partnership with REACH Community Health Centre

“Community Health in Community Hands”

We all have this in common: the earth under our feet, the sun over our heads, the trees that shelter and shape our breath, and the water that flows through us, nourishing our bodies. ~ hbk

On a crisp fall day in October 2019, Hazel sat down with the 80 plus beautiful folk of the REACH Centre, in a group composed of Indigenous elders, Chinese Vietnamese elders, Latinx elders, as well as the nurses, doctors and administrators of the Multi-cultural Community Services Centre. Hazel had been invited by Journeys Around the Circle and REACH to create a mural for the waiting area of the Health Centre. Their mission on this day was to illuminate and collect images from the community, which might evoke a sense of home, belonging, warmth, and welcome for the community.

Water on Walk 2020 Gibsons, BC in collaboration with Deer Crossing the Art Farm

Circular Water Cycle – Awareness of the inter-relatedness of water

This stencil was made as part of a project to bring awareness to the Gibsons’ Aquifer. The Town of Gibsons commissioned Deer Crossing the Art Farm to redevelop the Walk on Water community engagement project highlighting seven key locations in lower Gibsons which relate to the Gibsons Aquifer. hazel worked with members of the Art Farm Team to come up with this concept and her stencil forms the frame of the seven circular signs which share historic and scientific information about this beautiful and amazing system.

The stencil depicts the cycles of water from evaporation, transpiration, precipitation, and snowfall, moving from mountains to rivers through the forest to the estuary to the ocean and back into the air. There are seven animals chosen to illuminate the understanding that water is for everyone from slugs and seals to eagles, from deer to ducks, seagulls to salmon.

This is another moment in the life of a Kinship flag which is largely shaped by spirit and colour.

Laying the flags out allows them to speak to what they want, how they want to be matched up, what colours and images want to come together to create a strand. A broader statement, combining ideas and values from different members of the community, to weave the collective together.

With individual flags chosen and arranged in order, it is a simple matter to sew them to a length of binding fabric and create a new strand, a new expression of insight added to the collection.

Choosing flags for a strand, or even choosing a strand, involves the individual’s connection to the images, the colours, the resonance they experience and want to share with the world.

Five flags make a perfect length to honour a doorway or window. Nine will hold a patio or path in sacred balance. Each gathering of images is unique, felt in the heart first, then brought to life with the simple act of sewing.

Your stencils can be used for other things! For example, spraypainting your car or making shadow puppets!

This part of the story began with Olga the Sasquatch. Olga grew out of a storytelling game in the summer of 2016 on the shores of the beautiful Quesnelle Lake.  Olga took on a life of her own and kept showing up, at other camps, in other stories. One thing lead to another, and Olga found her way into a shadow puppet show at which point she became a stencil. Someone decided they needed to spraypaint Olga onto their car (which by the way saved them the cost of a tow truck ride and tune up, because the tow truck driver and mechanic both felt an affinity for Olga and didn’t charge. This work can change the world!) By the next year, we were wild with the spray paint and stencils, and some of our cars became driving art galleries – mine in particular!

Stencils and shadow puppets work very well together and can be interchanged creatively.

Once we started spray painting our cars at camp there was no going back.  All cars consented to be painted.

To use your stencil with spray paint. Tape the stencil to your vehicle (or any surface). You may want to tape extra paper around your stencil to block the spray from hitting the surface outside of the stencil. Then grab a can of spray paint, shake it up real good, test your nozzle,  use a light touch on the nozzle, or a heavy touch if you want some drips, let it dry and gently lift the stencil. Ta Da!  Play with colour! Layer the stencils!

The first flag we had made from a vector was the Joutsenet (swans). Here are the flags hanging in the Sunny Crest Mall for the 2022 Sunshine Coast Art Crawl. This installation of PrayerStream, honours the four directions from the Anishinaabe Medicine Wheel. The Medicine Wheel is a tool for guidance and structuring one’s day/life.

We love how the swans take up space. Hazel wondered why she had left so much space in parts of the stencil but realized it looks different when blown up. Because there is actually very little blank space in the original stencil. Hazel cut many tiny holes to tell the story of the swans!