January 18, 2025 STATE MEETING
Open: Rug Weaving: What I’ve Learned along the way
Guest Speaker: Stephanie Morton
Stephanie will share her rug-weaving journey with us, starting with her college experience weaving knotted pile with Tibetan refugees in India through the various types of rugs she has woven over the past 50 years. These include weaving with wool, alpaca and rag, and employing weft-faced, double-bind and lately, krokbragd weave structures. Along the way she has picked up many useful techniques and tricks relating to warp, weft, sett, headers, materials, heddles, types of looms that are best for rug weaving and finishing ends. If you are interested in trying your hand at rug weaving then bring your notebooks! She will share a lot of relevant information that she teaches in her rug weaving classes that you won’t want to miss.
Mini #1: Introduction to Tapestry Weaving and Tactile Collage:
Make a mini wall hanging
Jessie Mordine Young
Let’s Weave! In this workshop, you will learn the basics of frame loom weaving from warping the loom, to drafting a design, and to learning basic tapestry techniques. Your instructor will demonstrate how to build imagery as well, and will help you develop your piece through every step of the textile-making process. A brief presentation of history and inspiration will be given. You will leave this class with a small wall-hanging or “woven drawing”.
Weaving is a tactile and sensory experience; students are encouraged to use class time to play and experiment on their looms; to explore material, texture, color and pattern in an effort to develop their own visual language. Alternative materials such as dried botanicals, beads, rope, shells, branches and rocks will be available for students to use. All materials will be provided and you will take home your frame loom so you can continue with your weaving practice.
Participants should bring: Scissors. All other materials will be provided, but students are welcome to bring additional material that feels personal to them that they would like to incorporate into the piece.
Materials fee: $15 or $30 ($15 for students who bring their own frame loom) ($30 for students who will be given a frame loom by the instructor.
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They will be able to take their loom home.
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The instructor needs to know who wants to be provided with a frame loom 3 weeks prior to the workshop). Yarn is provided.
Class size: 16
Mini #2: Carve, Print, Repeat: An Introduction to Block Printing, Claudia Mathison
Learn basic block printing techniques. Draft, carve, and print stamps on textiles and paper goods to create unique patterns and designs. Participants do not need to bring supplies.
Materials fee: $20 Class size: 6
Mini #3 Make a Mini Basket, Elisa Kessler Caperole
Make a mini basket with multi colored round reed, finished with a braided or looped rim. It can be a hanging basket, or stuff it and make a pin cushion from your handwoven fabric.
Teacher will supply all tools necessary for basket making, dyed and undyed basket reed and stuffing and cotton fabric for the pincushion.
Participants should bring: Scissors, any bulky yarn to add to the basket, or a handwoven square approximately 6” x 6” to personalize a pincushion.
Materials fee: $7 Class size: 12
Afternoon Program: A Woven Year: Making Memory Tangible with
Materials in Mind, Jessie Mordine Young
Jessie Mordine Young, a Brooklyn-based artist and educator, will share her weaving practice, highlighting the evolution of her daily projects like the “100 Day Series” and “A Woven Year”. She will unpack her unique approach, which she describes as “tactile collage”. Additionally, Jessie will discuss the interplay between her research, writing, and art, particularly the significant influence of the Bauhaus weaving school on her work. Jessie will also share the progression of her natural dye practice, what informs it, and how she incorporates it into her woven artworks. Jessie will also discuss the significance of her textile teaching profession and how she hopes to share weaving on a frame loom with the world.
Artist bio:
Jessie Mordine Young (b. England, 1993) is a Brooklyn-based artist who researches, writes about, curates, makes and teaches textile art. She believes that textiles can be carriers of empathy, memory, and lived experience and that they are evidence of humanity. This sentiment is at the root of her art practice. In one of her more recent bodies of work, she embarked on a project of creating daily artworks, which she calls “woven drawings” or “thread sketches”. These pieces directly connect to her experiences in nature, where color and textures become tangible references to sites, sounds, and forms she finds when immersed in the landscape. Jessie is also enamored of the alchemy of the dye vat; she often paints her yarn and woven fabrics through a natural dye process and by thoughtfully sourcing plant matter.
She earned her BFA in Fiber and Material Studies and Art History from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and an MA in Material Culture, Design History and Object Study from the Bard Graduate Center in NYC. She is also a part-time faculty at Parsons School of Design. Through extensively researching various craft histories in her academic and former curatorial practice, she has developed an appreciation for slow, thoughtful acts of making as an act of autonomy.