(Prairie Fire Theme Song) (Prairie Fire Theme Song) (Prairie Fire Theme Song) Prairie Fire, we're on a little field trip to my house for this edition of Prairie Fire.

I'm your host.

Sarah Edwards, now every morning, I stand in front of this closet and mull over the universal question of life that we all ponder every day, which is, what on earth should I wear?

But we have found a fashion designer in Champaign, Illinois that specializes in one thing.

She makes a skirt that is right for anyone's size and shape and comes in a variety of colors and patterns.

Maybe this is what I need to solve my fashion crisis.

My name is Emily.

I'm a fashion designer.

I think since high school, I've been interested in fashion.

I've always been interested in skirts, because when I first started loving fashion, it was just watching old movies with my mom, and I Love Lucy, and everybody was in these clothes, and it was so elegant.

And it this was the 90s, when grunge, you know, so the juxtaposition of, like the clothes that I was wearing and like these people who were just moving so elegantly through life, I think that stuck with me.

It came out in 2018 with an elastic waist skirt.

I can go up to a 56 inch waist.

So it's a really wide size range, and then I have 11 different lengths, and then within that I have different styles.

So it's like it is an elastic waist skirt, but it's also the width and the depth of the product is extremely important to me, like because you can come back every season buy the same skirt, it's gonna fit the same way, but it's gonna look completely different.

I make them feel where it is an experience.

And I think that's what clothing should be, that you should put it on and you should feel better.

My product is made to fit petite women and tall women and all the sizes and all the shapes.

I'm all about simplifying the dressing routine so that we can get dressed faster, not think about it, but feel really good in our clothes and have them functioning really well for our lives.

And in order to do that, I had to keep almost like refining what it was that I made.

So that's where I landed on the elastic waist skirt.

My favorite way to style my skirt is to take it to the consignment store.

My skirt is like a foundation piece, and you're gonna wear that, and then be able to infinitely change what goes around it.

And so I think the more options and the more you try with the skirt, the more you're gonna like the skirt, because the more you're gonna understand the skirt you have that one piece in your closet, then all of a sudden you can be more creative with what you put around it.

You Since 2020 I've been using handmade fabrics.

A lot of them come from Bangladesh, and half and half, the rest come from India.

So hand woven fabric means that it's on a wooden loom.

There is no electricity.

It's foot powered.

The fabric is just it's like an art to have fabrics where I'm like, oodit made this and Mohammed made this one, and Chai Irani made this one, and to have pictures of them at the loom, you know, like that, just as a romantic who is so inspired by fabric, I was like, Oh, this is it.

I'm done.

My product is so simple in some ways.

It's an elastic waist skirt, but as soon as you enter all of these fabrics like I think I could design infinite skirts, you know, based on all these exciting fabrics.

And I'm always finding more too.

The majority of us, if we stop and think about it, we're uncomfortable in our clothes.

In some point, something is pinching, something is needs adjusted with my skirt.

I want women to feel a level of comfort that they haven't felt like in a long time, so it only sits, it only touches your body at one place, and it's a place that makes sense.

You know, it's not too high, it's not too low.

We need clothes that can flex with us through our day comfortably, but we also need clothes that can move with us through size changes, because that's just like a part of being a woman.

We all need one.

We need to have clothes.

We don't have to think about Super logical, massive pockets, you know, out of really beautiful fabrics, because they just are gonna be skirts we buy today and we'll be wearing 15 years from now.

What I want is to almost like, raise our skin.

Standards, so we're more aware of that, because then we can hold the fashion industry to better, you know, because they're the ones who are doing it to us.

We're too serious.

You know, life gets hard and we don't know what to do with it, and then all of a sudden, we're dressing in gray.

We need clothes that can flex with us through our day comfortably, but we also need clothes that can move with us through size changes, because that's just like a part of being a woman.

It's a part of life.

I mean, grief happens, or sickness happens, and all of a sudden we're up or down 10 pounds and and all of our clothes don't fit.

It's easy to get so wrapped up in the many important jobs that we're doing that we become totally back seat right?

There has to be a returning to play, to interact again with beauty, and that those two things like, kind of unlock, like, joy again, kind of like, I think some of that can be helped if we just are more intentional about personal style.

But I think it's so hard to get personal style, because you're like, I don't know what to pick.

I don't know how to do it.

So to just make it easy and comfortable, so that it's what you're reaching for, because functionally, it's working the best.

And then the added bonus is, like, you feel great and you look great in it, and it goes with your flip flops.

Yeah, I think I definitely should invest in a few skirts.

You know, I'm married to a Scotsman, and in this house, we enjoy a strong cup of British black tea with a splash of milk.

But the pomp and circumstance of the British High Tea doesn't even hold a candle to the ancient art and tradition and beauty of the Japanese tea ceremony.

Tanisha Spain sat down recently for a lesson with one of the great teachers in the Midwest.

I think it's important for people to really learn about another culture, not just by seeing it online or reading about it, but actually having the opportunity to use their five senses, hearing, smell, even taste.

The custom and practice of Japanese tea started more than 500 years ago, and there are hundreds of different styles of serving tea.

Japan House, located on the campus of the University of Illinois, is a place that teaches Japanese arts and culture.

There, they practice the orasenke School of tea from the Illinois Arts Council, we received this year's ethnic and folk arts master and apprentice program award, and it was to teach and share Japanese tea ceremony as part of Illinois cultural heritage.

And I think that's so important that you know, being in the United States, being immigrants, being Asian, it's the idea that we all come from very different walks of life.

But how can we come to that common human understanding?

And sometimes for us, we just say it begins with a bowl of tea.

On this day, Professor Kimiko gonji, a tea instructor both in the US and Japan, invited our crew to a tea room at Japan house for a traditional table style Tea Ceremony.

You it's not just a serving World Tea to chat to.

By your physical thirst, more like satisfy your whole spiritual thirst, to see beautiful equipment, to hear, to smell, to touch, to taste, so then you are sharpening for five senses.

Well.

To enjoy this moment much more clearly.

So this process is not physical cleaning more like spiritual cleansing.

This moment comes only once in your lifetime, so why not make most out of it?

That's a very important philosophy behind tea ceremony.

The greatest tea master, San DIQ come up to the codified four print book, tea ceremony, which is harmony, Respect, purity and tranquility.

You.

Love.

We often tell people in the next hour when you're in the tea ceremony, don't think about anything else, just let go.

But it's to see the world with a fresh set of eyes.

We hope that that's what people take away, and that sincerity and that kindness.

I think people could just stop fighting, if they could just put aside their differences, see each other respectfully as humans, and then just have a bowl of tea.

And so we hope that people, when they have a bowl of tea here, they just go out into the world and they say, I feel refreshed, I feel relaxed, and I just want to be a better person and treat those with the kindness that I experienced today In the tea ceremony.

You I think one thing that Professor Bunji always says, and it's actually the scroll right behind me right now, it's the statement ichigo ichie, we tell all of our students and visitors, if you forget everything about the two ceremony, we hope you take this one statement away and it translates to the.

One lifetime, one opportunity we only have one life.

But it's the idea that tea ceremony just says, sometimes it's good to slow down, recenter yourself and really appreciate something as ordinary as serving and having a bowl of tea with those whom you care so much about and that you only have one life.

So don't take it for granted and appreciate even something as small as eating and drinking and sharing with someone around you.

Not far from here, in the small town of Monticello, Illinois, is the aptly named Prairie Fire Glass Jim Downey, who is the sculptor there, began his career making simple things like vases, but now he's more well known for his whimsical creations.

So we're going to make a pumpkin this afternoon.

Jim downing Prairie Fire Glass, I'm the owner and glass artist here at Prairie Fire glass.

I've been blowing glass for about 27 years.

Proud to be in Monticello, and hope to be here for another 22 years.

To me, there's something about glass blowing that requires it's almost meditative, in a sense, because particularly when you're first learning to do it, it requires this degree of focus.

You're dealing with 2000 degree stuff moving around on the end of the pipe, fire all kinds of things.

It requires this degree of focus, that requires the rest of the world go away.

I call that the Calgon moment.

We're going to take a blow pipe, heat it up a little bit.

On the end, stainless steel tube.

Inside the big insulated box, is a ceramic crucible.

And in the crucible is the liquid clear glass.

Now I'm going to use the little cherry wood block to cool it and smooth it into a nice symmetrical shape.

With glass, it's all about the turning.

For me, the turning with glass is a metaphor for the universe.

Everything in the universe turns, turns, turns, and in glass, it's all about the turning the glass and the glass color all have personalities and temperaments.

They all react differently to different levels of heat.

I have a personality and temperament.

So we're going to meet someplace in the middle.

Okay, I'm in the driver's seat.

When it comes to color, the glass isn't telling me what colors to use.

But if I'm thinking I want to make a bowl, and the glass is telling me I think I want to be a vase, it's going to be a vase, because I don't want to fight, you know, this is a collaborative kind of thing.

And like I said, the glass has a personality, and I kind of like to respect that personality.

So now I'm going to get a bubble started in there.

Watch the little blob blow into the pipe.

Really hard thumb over the hole Viola.

So let's get another layer of clear glass.

So I dip it in, turn it around a couple times.

So now I go right into the color while it's really hot.

So what I use for color is called frit, essentially crushed glass here.

This is my Illini blend, three or four different colors of orange, two or three different colors of blue, all kinds of stuff.

I have a legal and moral obligation to make things in orange and blue and Central.

I actually kind of think of myself more as a painter with glass so I can use that frit and color blends and different configurations and just kind of play and manipulate the colors.

There is an endless variety of kind of manifestations of what you can do.

And for me, I've always kind of liked the idea of having it be unscripted.

So it's not that I don't have an idea, but it's more a general direction.

And what I found is, you know, sometimes you have that general direction, and the end result ended up being a trip to ugly town.

You know, sometimes it doesn't work out.

But the other thing I've learned is, sometimes you got to go through ugly town to get to coolville.

That there's something I'm going to learn from that piece.

There's going to be one little piece that I say, I don't like the piece, but I like that part, and then I can build on that for the next piece, or the next piece of the next piece.

I'm just trying to get all that frit to melt in, and then I'm going to sit down find a block that's about the right size.

I think that one is so once I kind of smooth the shape, now I'm going to inflate it a little bit, not too much, because I still got to blow it out a little bit more when I get it into the mold to make the pumpkin.

Then I'm going to heat it up again, and I'm going to go back into the optic mold, and it comes out with ridges like a pumpkin.

Now we're going to inflate it, make it bigger.

There we go.

So I got the beginnings of a pumpkin here.

One of the toughest things is to say, Who am I as an artist?

I'm not just another version of this artist.

I'm not taking just a step further.

Who am I and.

And I think the only way to find that is to do it.

Do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it.

That's how you're going to find your voice.

You're not going to find your voice thinking about it.

You're not going to find your voice in a book looking at somebody else's work.

You're going to find your voice by doing the work.

And that's it.

So if you notice now, it kind of looks brown.

Colors are always distorted by the heat.

The warm colors, yellows, reds and oranges almost always look brown when they're hot, and it won't come back to its original color until it's completely cool.

And then I'm going to use the file to score that neck a little bit more.

Glass has a random molecular structure.

So if you give it a line to break along, normally, it's pretty happy to break along that line.

I got to cover it up because I don't want it to get too cold while it's sitting there.

I think this whole the whole glass blowing thing, just fit into my kind of life philosophy of stumbling gracefully down the stairs finding a medium that allows me to take that life philosophy and translate it into the artistic medium, and what I do for a living was just this, like kind of hand in glove thing, and that's how I know this is what I'm supposed to do.

So now we got to get the glass for the step, get a big gather, or clear glass.

That's what they call it when you're getting glass out of the furnace, gathering the glass, and then I go into the dark blue Frick.

It's actually a silver blue you'll see that right at the end.

Okay, I gotta melt that in.

So we go into the optic mold, and I squish it down in there, and it comes out with ridges.

I heat it up again, just a little bit.

So we smush it on there.

That's a technical term, stretch it up, cut it off, and then, before it either flops over, it gets too cold, grab the end, pull it up and around.

We're going to do the alchemy part that blue has silver oxides in a low oxygen environment, the silver migrates to the surface.

So it'll turn that blue stem into a silver blue.

There it is.

So now I got to put it in the kiln.

The annealing allows that cooling to happen outside, middle inside, all at the same rate.

So after about 12 hours, sometime late tomorrow morning, I'll be able to take that pumpkin out, and we'll be all ready to go.

I just want to keep doing this as long as I can do it.

You know, a lot of my friends are retiring, and to me, retirement was that thing there where I stopped doing the thing I was doing for money so I can do what I love to do.

I get to come to work every day and do something that I love to do.

So the whole idea of retirement is really a foreign thing to me.

I am incredibly blessed that the things I like to make people respond to that's not the case with every artist.

You know.

I mean the things that bring me joy bring other people joy.

So it's that's, that's an incredible blessing.

I'm very grateful.

We'll take you back to the studio now for a performance of our theme song by artist Leah Marlene, creepy dog.

Oh, she grew up beneath the starry Dawn, sold and scolded she would never make it on her own, fighting fear and doubt almost every day, she broke through the smok and clouds and found her way.

You could say she's like a prairie fire, soaring spirit riding on flames of her desire.

If you feel a burning deep down in your soul, tonight, prairie fire is the name, look how you light the midnight sky prairie fire tell us why Promise of the dark, searching for her flame, waiting for that spark.

But once the fire was lit, she was not the same, a young and restless heart no one could ever tame.

You could say more you could say she's like a prairie fire soaring spirit riding on the flames of her desire.

And if you feel a burning in your soul tonight.

Prairie Fire is the name you'll know her by.

Look how you light the midnight sky.

Prairie Fire.

Tell us why.

Us, why burn it down to the thirsty with the swirling wind?

You could say she's like a prairie fire, you could say she's like a.

You could say she's like a prairie fire, a soaring spirit riding on flames of her desire.

If you feel a burning in your soul tonight, prairie fire is the name you'll know her by look how you light the midnight sky.

Prairie Fire tell us why.