Candice Sudlovenick learned how to sew and make mitts and kamiik from her mother.
Around age 19, the crafter was well on her way to keeping the knowledge of her family’s traditions alive “as a hobby.”
“I like to keep my hands busy all the time. My friend [also] taught me how to bead [last year]. It’s a lot of fun and just something I want to keep doing — learning from my mom, crafting and sewing,” says the thirty-one-year-old Iqalummiuq.
Although Sudlovenick is now well-versed in making mitts to order, she still consults her mother regarding kamiik “when I first start… to help me trace the patterns and cut the seal skins.
“It’s nice learning,” she says of this collaborative process, “because that’s how my mom grew up and you’re connected to your family more… I’m more connected to my culture, my being.”
It also becomes a nice holiday activity for the mother-daughter team, as the Christmas break affords the two the time they need to produce a pair of kamik “because of the amount of work that goes into that, and my mom has the time off, so we can focus on it together.”
Before last Christmas, Sudlovenick started an Instagram account, @Sanaugakka (or “my creations” in Inuktitut) to showcase her extraordinary assortment of earrings and mitts, which are routinely prize items every Wednesday during Nunavut Brewery’s Trivia Night. She has also begun to sell her custom-made products at craft fairs around Iqaluit.
“At the beginning,” she says, “it was a lot of trial and error. I checked my designs a lot with a friend. Now I [am comfortable] free-styling with colours and patterns. I play around with the colour scheme.”
Besides beads and seal skin, Sudlovenick experiments with found and bought materials such as caribou and muskox horn. She hopes to work with more Inuit materials in the future and mix-and-match designs.
“I want to showcase Inuit culture and the beauty of Inuit creations,” she says. “[My culture] is everywhere, and I want to put it in my work to display the creativity and beauty Inuit culture has, but also the adaptation of traditional ways, and how they work well together.”
Although for now Sanaugakka is just a hobby, Sudlovenick dreams of one day making it a small business. In the meantime, she’s content to enjoy “zoning out and relaxing at the end of the day” by crafting. “I can’t imagine relaxing without [it],” she says. “It’s something I enjoy doing so much that it’s always on the go.”
She’s working on building more of an inventory, but she also takes special orders through her Instagram account.
“I always want to accommodate to how someone wants to do something, and I’m open to that.”
She asks, though, that because she works on multiple orders in her spare time, customers understand that “there will be delays, but I will do my best to get to everyone’s order.”