Welcome back to WGGB!

Guild members, Rhea Cossentino and friends, will talk about their Chesapeake Fibershed Project, where they made cloth from a regional network of farmers, fiber producers, dyers, spinners, weavers, and tailors.

Plus guild members will describe their summer fiber explorations, fiber trips, workshops, and the HGA conference, Convergence.

Come and learn all about the ancient craft of Japanese temari (embroidered thread balls).  Find out about the history and development of this unusual art, right up to its present day prevalence both in Japan and around the world.  The secrets of what is actually inside these lovely creations will be revealed, as well as what they are used for and how they are made.  Best of all, you’ll get to see oodles of examples.  Temari offer fiber artists a great avenue to explore bold color theory — you might not want to weave or wear a bright rainbow scarf, but a rainbow temari is a delightful thing!  And you’ll learn about some of the different geometries and patterns that are unique to this craft.  There will be plenty of time for questions, so bring your curiosity and get ready to fall in love with the amazing art of Japanese temari!

About the Artist

Jen has been a fiber arts addict since the early 2000s.  Her background in mathematics heavily influences her love of patterns in all of her pursuits.  While she teaches weaving, spinning, and dyeing, her true passion of Japanese temari was discovered in 2011.  Jen is an active member of various weaving and fiber arts guild, Complex Weavers, and the Japanese Temari Association (JTA).   Her studies pursuing the certified temari teacher status (Shihan Level 3) through the JTA will finish up in the Summer of 2022. Her original creations has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including the Akita National Temari Competition in Japan, in which she was awarded the Governer’s Prize in 2019.    Jen is always looking to expand her own knowledge of fiber-related fields, but above all, her passion is for teaching.  She strives to make “heavy” topics understandable for all of her students, and to provide them with the techniques and skills necessary to continue exploring their fiber passions.  Her pet peeve is hearing people say they “can’t do something” before they even try, and her mission is to spread the addiction of fiber arts.  Oh… and she REALLY loves bunnies.

Artist’s website: www.temaritwins.com

 

When Nilda Callañaupa from the Center for Traditional Textiles of Cusco was planning her 2013 conference in Cusco, she asked me if I would come to the conference to teach the pre-Columbian doubleweave techniques to her weavers. I spent a year preparing for the experience by studying backstrap weaving, Peruvian doubleweave and Spanish. In November 2013 I attended and taught at the conference and then traveled to a number of weaving villages and archeological sites in the Peruvian highlands. I will present a slideshow of my experiences in Peru, as well as show textiles and demonstrate what I taught at the conference.

PLUS Noelani Jones will provide a brief overview of Blue Light Junction – a natural dye studio, alternative color lab, retail space, dye garden, weaving studio, and educational facility in central Baltimore.

About the Artist

From the first time that I sat down at a loom, I was drawn to the orderly universe of colored threads and the rhythmic repetition in the process of weaving. Because of my background in piano and pipe organ, I felt an immediate affinity with this new stringed instrument whose patterns flowed from my hands in the form of color and design rather than sound.

After experimenting with various structures for several years, I found my home in the ancient technique of doubleweave pick-up. In doubleweave two layers of cloth are woven simultaneously, one above the other on the loom. Through the exacting process of hand pick-up, I exchange threads between the two layers, building original designs onto the underlying grid. By blending numerous colors together in both my warp and weft and playing one layer against the other, I am able to create a nearly limitless range of subtle color gradations.

Over the years I have developed new methods of setting up and weaving doubleweave that I feel make it accessible and understandable for all weavers. As much as I love practicing the art of doubleweave, nothing brings me greater joy than sharing it with others. I travel extensively throughout the U.S. and abroad teaching workshops on doubleweave, color and geometric design. My techniques and systems for working in doubleweave can also be found in my book The Weaver’s Studio: Doubleweave Revised and Expanded and in my online courses.

Website: https://doubleweaver.com/

Avani is an Indian artist and heritage professional.  She will share her journey of learning to spin on the charkha and will discuss how it developed as a nationwide movement to revive hand spinning in India.  She will demonstrate spinning with the takli (a hand spindle) and the charkha (a portable spinning wheel).

She will share Chalo Charkho Ramiye, a contemporary charkha movement to spread the knowledge of spinning with this traditional wheel and to encourage spinning as a daily practice. Avani will also present research findings on hand spinning, its significance as a community craft, its ritualistic elements, and its role in formal Indian education.  She will then engage in an interactive session with participants at the end to answer questions and further explore these topics.

About the Artist

Avani (pronounced “av-nee”) hails from the traditional family of potters of the Varia community, from the state of Gujarat in India. It is from here that she gets her sense of aesthetics and love for the arts and crafts. She admires the great culture of her home country and its rich legacy of arts and crafts. She has maintained a frugal and simple life where living was dependent on natural resources and the daily routine circulates around the movements of the sun. From that humble upbringing she picked up values of living with upcycling, reuse, recycling and the handskills of crafts and design from her mother and father.

She received formal education in India in numerous aspects of design and teaching, and subsequently received an MA in Arts and Heritage Management from London. Her work experience includes teaching and managing art, craft, and design projects and has worked in various professional capacities since 1996.

Artist’s website: www.avnivaria.com

Wedge weave is a tapestry weave originated by the Navajo around 1870.  In contrast to most weaving which is woven horizontally on the loom, wedge weave is woven on the diagonal which gives it its characteristic scalloped edge.  This trait, which I find intriguing, is thought to be one of the reasons the Navajo abandoned it in the 1800’s though it has resurfaced in recent years.

I have been working with the wedge weave technique almost exclusively since 1999.  I will present the basic steps of wedge weave along with a short video demonstration and pictures of my work.

About the Artist

Connie Lippert weaves tapestries using the wedge weave technique and yarns hand-dyed with natural materials. Her work has been exhibited in 30 states. She has received several artist grants from the South Carolina Arts Commission. Connie’s work is represented in museum, corporate, academic, and private collections and has been widely published. Her tapestries are represented in several new books including Tapestry Design Basics and Beyond by Tommye Scanlin, The Art is the Cloth by Micala Sidore and in The Art of Tapestry Weaving by Rebecca Mezoff. Connie’s journey with weaving is documented in a book by author Carole Green in Connie Lippert: A Wedge Weaver’s Storied Cloth.

She has taught wedge weave workshops and given seminars in California, New York, Michigan, Colorado, New Mexico, Georgia, Florida, New Jersey, South Carolina, North Carolina, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin. Connie is represented by Blue Spiral 1 in Asheville, North Carolina.

Artist’s website: www.connielippertart.com/

Elevate your handwoven garments into the arena of wearable art.  The Theo Moorman inlay technique allows you to create an isolated tapestry-like image of any shape or size, wherever desired on the surface of the background cloth.  During this three day workshop, the versatility of this structure will become apparent as you weave samples on a pre-warped 4-H loom. You will learn to adapt the technique for clothing through fibre selection, appropriate garment styles, placement of design elements, weaving with a cartoon, and incorporating threading variations to suit special needs.  This weave structure is equally useful for ecclesiastical pieces, wall hangings, accessories, and interiors and is not limited to use on clothing. Instructions for setting up your loom and your supply list will be available on registration.

(NOTE: This is the first 90 minutes of Heather’s workshop which will be open to the entire guild – see below. The workshop will continue right afterwards only for registered participants.)

 

About the Artist

Heather Winslow is a nationally respected teacher and textile artist. She is chairman of the textile department of The Fine Line Creative Arts Center in St. Charles, Illinois where she teaches weaving, knitting and spinning. Spinning, dyeing, beading and embellishment are also part of her teaching repertoire at guilds, shops and state, regional, national and international conferences. She has taught for 50 years, sharing her passion and knowledge with others. Her one of a kind garments have been exhibited internationally and are in several private collections. She has written many articles for fiber related magazines; she is the author of “More on Moorman: Theo Moorman Inlay Adapted to Clothing.”

Elevate your handwoven garments into the arena of wearable art.  The Theo Moorman inlay technique allows you to create an isolated tapestry-like image of any shape or size, wherever desired on the surface of the background cloth.  During this three day workshop, the versatility of this structure will become apparent as you weave samples on a pre-warped 4-H loom. You will learn to adapt the technique for clothing through fibre selection, appropriate garment styles, placement of design elements, weaving with a cartoon, and incorporating threading variations to suit special needs.  This weave structure is equally useful for ecclesiastical pieces, wall hangings, accessories, and interiors and is not limited to use on clothing. Instructions for setting up your loom and your supply list will be available on registration.

(NOTE: The first 90 minutes of the workshop are open to the entire guild. The workshop will continue right afterwards only for registered participants.)

More Details >

 

About the Artist

Kathrin Weber has been a full-time studio fiber artist since 1980. Her work revolves around dyeing, weaving and teaching. She has a fearless enjoyment in using hand-dyed color in her teaching, shop sales, and weaving. She enthusiastically encourages student to dive into color. No matter what her classes are officially entitled, they are ultimately about color, technique and weaving good fabric.

Kathrin is a member of Southern Highland Handcraft Guild. She has a strong belief in encouraging technical proficiency and personal design. She served 6 years on the Standards Committee for Southern Highland Guild and as the chair of Standards for Piedmont Crafts Guild. Kathrin is currently serving as a member of PCI Standards Committee. She teaches at Penland, Arrowmont, John C. Campbell Folk School, Peters Valley, Appalachian Crafts School, Fiber Guilds and Fiber Conferences across the country.

Kathrin encourages fiber folks to join her on Blazing Shuttles Chatter Facebook page to meet and join several thousand weavers who are making beautiful woven items with her hand-dyed yarn.

Artist’s website: www.blazingshuttles.com

Block designs consist of black and white squares on grid paper, where black is considered the pattern block and white the background block. Learn how Rosalie used the binary number system and the textures of 4-shaft shaft huck lace to develop the definitive number of two-block designs, and how these simple designs become the building blocks of more elaborate designs. The lecture illustrates the construction and deconstruction of complex designs by showing how to use the printed design pages and transparent overlays from her book An Exaltation of Blocks.

 

About the Artist

Rosalie Neilson loves using color and geometric design in her weaving, her specialty being warp-faced rep. She is featured in a 2-hour DVD called Rep Weave produced by Interweave Press (now Long Thread Media). She publishes articles regularly in weaving journals and maintains an active teaching schedule. Her publications include three books on Kumihimo design and An Exaltation of Blocks, a two-volume book with a toolkit of printed Design Pages and Transparent Overlays for weavers and designers to explore literally millions of unique symmetric patterns.

Artist’s website: www.rosalieneilson.com/

Deborah will describe parallel weave structures with an emphasis on issues of color choice.  The principles will apply to any kind of weaving.  Part of the beauty of parallel weavings is the color blending that occurs; however, that leads to color shifting and unanticipated results.  She will include examples of colors that might initially not work well and describe how to plan colors to obtain a better result.

 

About the Artist

Deborah Lawson has been involved in fiber arts of some species or another for over 60 years.  Her first love was knitting, which rapidly expanded to spinning and dyeing.  She took up serious weaving after retiring about 10 years ago, and fell in love with the colors and curves of Weaving with Echo and Iris along the way.  Over the past few years she has been experimenting with parallel weave structures and largely constructing wearable art pieces with her weavings.  She has taught workshops regionally.

She embraces her inner geek and utilizes computers as an aid to planning weavings and constructing wearables.

Nancy will do a PowerPoint presentation that outlines her journey and process for mixing fibers and colors using deflected doubleweave. She will cover a range of topics and review handwoven samples.  How do you determine sett? And what about those wonky selvedges? She’ll also discuss the finishing (washing/fulling) of samples and finished projects and will describe how to control differential shrinkage.

 

About the Artist

Natalie Drummond is a former educator and fiber artisan living in Fremont, Indiana. Born and raised in Virginia, she developed a love of science, teaching, and fiber. Her earlier work focused on sewing and needle felting and she later learned to weave from a Fort Wayne Weaver’s guild instructor in 2016. Continual learning expanded from instructors within the Fort Wayne Weaver’s Guild as well as noted weaving instructors.

Natalie has pursued weaving with a passion. She is currently serving as President of FWWG and has served as Vice President of Programming. She also maintains a membership with the Fredericksburg Weavers and Spinners Guild. Natalie was awarded a MAFA Fellowship in 2019 and has been studying Deflected Doubleweave intensively. She has also taken additional classes with felters: Janna Mattsson, Judith Dios, and Moy MacKay and enjoys felting 2-D landscapes.

Her work can be found daily at the Orchard Gallery of Fine Arts in Fort Wayne and she was the featured artist in October 2021. Weaving can be found in Handwoven Magazine Nov/Dec 2021. Photo Image below by Matt Graves Courtesy of Long Thread Media. Her handwovens have also been exhibited in Georgia: Color: Classic to Contemporary exhibit, as well as locally at First Gallery, the History Center, and Crestwoods Gallery.

Artist’s website: www.nataliewoven.com/

In this presentation, Diana will talk about the process of textile production in the Viking Age. While the main focus will be on the weaving of the period, she will also touch upon the entire process from sheep to cloth. In addition, Diana will discuss the roles of women in Scandinavia, weaving in its practical and economic sense, as well the spiritual connotations of the production of fiber and cloth. Although the Viking loom on which she works is too large to bring to our meeting room, she will bring other interpretive materials as well as a video of setting up and using the loom.

 About the Artist

Diana has been involved in fiber arts for most of her life. She grew up in a family of knitters, crocheters, quilters, needle workers and sewers; and learned these crafts as a child. As an adult, she has expanded her knowledge and experience where she found her true love — doing and teaching about textile arts through history. She has been involved in living history for over 35 years. And over the years, has focused her studies and activities on gender and textile work of the Viking Age/Early Medieval, early 18th Century and early 19thCentury time periods.

Diana thanks the many generous and kind teachers who have fostered her growth over the years.

 

This is the last meeting of the year!  We’ll have elections followed by show-n-tell for the 75th Anniversary Guild Challenge.  Bring your diamond-themed items and see what others have been up to.  Find a brief description of this year’s challenge here: Guild Challenges

Note: Guild Sale postponed to fall; stay tuned for more details.