January 11, 2012: Jill Sanders
Guild member Jill Sanders will speak about her work teaching weaving in her Saori weaving studio in Santa Cruz. Visit the Saori weaving studio website or Jill's blog .
November 9, 2011: Carrie Ehler
Aptos Village Park
Carrie Ehler is a not just a local artist, she is a sixth generation Santa Cruzan. She studied art at both Cabrillo College and San Jose State University. Carrie has worked in embroidery, macrame, weaving, beading, ceramics, woodcarving, welding and her current works reflects all of these mediums. She names each of her pieces as she weaves their stories into the work. This amazingly prolific artist will share her stories and art with us.
October 12, 2011: Barbara Nitzberg: Warp Wrapping
Barbara Niztberg will present our October program, speaking about warp wrapping. She will share her study of this fascinating structure. Using her own work, Barbara will follow a thread stretching from Pre-Columbian Peru to 21st Century California. Barbara is one of our local treasures and her ability to ask unusual what if questions should inspire all of us to explore new approaches to familiar techniques.
September 21, 2011: Formal Guild Meeting: Weaving in Our Community
Aptos Village Park
Joan Vierra will tell us about current weaving activities at the Vista Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Santa Cruz where several guild members volunteer. Laura Rider and Joan Vierra will talk about the weaving program at Camphill, a residential community for adults with learning disabilities.
June 8, 2011: Annual Potluck and Gathering
Our annual potluck gathering will take place at Martha Stanley's studio.
May 11, 2011: Carole Beckett: Sewing with Handwoven Cloth
Guild member, Carole Beckett, has not only sewn a lot of garments from her exquisite handwoven cloth. She has also taken a number of how to sew with handwovens classes. She will share her experiences and skills developed on her own and learned from others. Carole will bring samples of various seams and talk about handling handwoven cloth. Handwoven cloth represents a huge investment of time as well as the cost of the yarn. Learn a few special techniques for enhancing your cloth as you sew it into a garment that is hand tailored and elegant.
April 13, 2011: Laverne Waddington
Have sticks, will travel here, there and everywhere! Laverne Waddington is passionate about backstop weaving. Born in India, raised in Australia she now lives in South America. In 1998, she moved to land locked Santa Cruz in Bolivia- a large city with a small town feel. Life in Santa Cruz, Bolivia is simple and laid back despite the crazy traffic and the blaring tropical rhythms. It is a perfect base from which Waddington travels and continues learning to weave, braid and spin as it shares borders with Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile and Peru. Since moving here, she has continued to travel and learn to weave in Ecuador, Guatemala and beyond.
Waddington keeps journals in which she has meticulously documented all the techniques she has learned here over the years with diagrams and step-by-step photos and it is only recently that she have found a forum in which to share all this with other weavers around the world. Visit her blog and let her tell you about her life in Santa Cruz and her weaving and learning experiences. She is the author of Andean Pebble Weave, a monograph on one of the many techniques she has learned in her travels.
April 14-16: Backstrap Weaving Workshop With Laverne Waddington
March 9, 2011: Martha Stanley
At our March meeting Martha will again fascinate us with the details of how she works, what catches her imagination and why she tries to replicate work and techniques she sees in the back rooms of museums. She will bring in a number of examples of pieces she has woven and tell the stories behind them.
February 9, 2011: George-Ann Bowers
In her work, George-Ann Bowers enlarges small landscapes or "micro-terrains" which she finds in close-up exploration of natural subjects such as tree bark, rock or plant formations. Patterns of light and shadow, color and texture are her focus and inspiration. She is not seeking recognizable images, but is interested in the structures and movement revealed in the intimate details of a larger form, and enjoys the resulting ambiguity present in the completed work. She uses multi-layer pick-up weaving as her basic structure and incorporates tapestry techniques, inlay, variable warp tensioning and warp painting, with a range of fiber materials.
In some pieces she combines weaving with painting on canvas to explore the visual and tactile contrasts between the colors and texture of woven fiber and those of paint on a smoother (though still textile) background. Using weaving as the central focus of a piece and paint on canvas as the extension of the composition, Bowers intent is for both the pattern of the piece and the eye of the viewer to move back and forth between flat, painted space and the more dimensional woven surface.
Saturday, January 15, 2011: Nora Rogers Memorial Fiber Arts Lecture at the Museum of Art and History
Desiree Koslin: Duodji Soft: Tradition, Authenticity and Innovation in Sami Textiles
The distinctive dress and fabrics of the once-nomadic Sami people of Northwestern Eurasia share methods and materials with other Subarctic groups and with the settled farming communities. The weaving techniques include the use of the ancient warp-weighted loom, extinct elsewhere in the world, as well as elaborate braided and warp-patterned bands. During the 20th century, the Sami encountered a shrinking environment for their old ways of life and work, while at the same time many found new opportunities and roles in mainstream society. At the same time, the Sami became engaged in the need to document and strengthen their cultural identity. Today, makers and artists steeped in tradition experiment with new and exciting forms of expression.
Desiree Koslin teaches a range of textile topics for graduate programs in New York City, including Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY and New York University. They include courses in textile history, fabric structure and analysis, and world dress and textiles. Areas of expertise include medieval art history with a special interest in textiles, their technology and design as well as medieval dress, clerical and secular. She is also active in the creation of fabrics in various techniques including weaving and mixed media. She has published several articles for academic press books, reference works and journals on textile topics, and lectures frequently in museums and for special interest groups and organizations.
This special program was supported by the Heritage Fund of the Santa Cruz Handweavers Guild