.png)
Freestyle Weaving for the Creative Spirit
Beginner (no experience)
Weave your heart! Learn to weave freestyle and free-spirited on a simple, easy-to-use floor loom. Honor your inner sense of beauty and truth as you play with color, texture, and technique, and come away with a unique piece of woven art that reflects your creative spirit (yes, you do have one!). The class will emphasize play, experimentation, and individual exploration of color and texture in the service of personal expression; a few simple weaving techniques will be taught along the way. Students just need to bring their willingness to experiment and explore–and to practice imperfection! Students will take home what they weave.
Class Details
Name | Type | Skill Level | Instructor | Min. Age Requirement | Length | Ticket Price ($) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Freestyle Weaving for the Creative Spirit | Weaving | Beginner (no experience) | Q Wirtz | Class open to students 8 years old and up; students younger than 12 must have an adult present throughout the class. Students must be tall enough to reach the floor pedals on the looms and able to focus for the duration of the class. | 2.5 hours | 85 |
What skills or knowledge do students need to take this workshop?
No previous experience with weaving required (though experienced weavers are as welcome as complete novices). Freestyle weaving is intended to be accessible to everyone, no matter their level of skill or knowledge.
What supplies or equipment does the ticket cover?
Use of warped two-harness floor loom; use of associated tools (shuttles, bobbins, etc.); access to and use of a wide variety of different weaving materials, including yarn in various fibers, colors, and textures, embroidery floss, fabric scraps, fiber, trim, beads, wire, Mylar, etc. Each student will also get a bag of fibery treasures to keep; these can be used in class, in a future weaving, or both.
What supplies or equipment should students bring?
N/a; instructor will provide all necessary tools and materials. If students want to bring something personally meaningful to them to incorporate into their weaving if possible, they're welcome–indeed, encouraged–to do so. Some past examples: specialty paper, pieces of jewelry (this is a fun use for unmatched earrings and stray pendants), dyed or undyed fiber, leftover quantities of treasured yarn too small to knit or crochet into a finished item.
Meet Your Instructor
Q Wirtz
Liza Q. Wirtz, better known as Q (aka the Chief Feline), runs multifaceted fiber-arts business the Foldout Cat from her home studio in Alabama with the frequent and welcome assistance of partners Fiber J and Maker J and the help of a fluctuating number of cats. Having spent several past lives in other occupations–including bookseller, lawyer, and professional singer–Q now works fulltime towards earning her living as an artist and a creative. Q has been weaving in a freestyle/free-spirited tradition for nine years, carding for six years, spinning for more than five years, and dyeing for three years. She teaches freestyle weaving, art-batt carding, and basic experiential spinning on acoustic and electric wheels with the same philosophy that infuses her praxis: create from your heart, make what gives you joy, and put beauty into the world. Q wholeheartedly believes that everyone's an artist and that giving people access to fiber-arts tools and learning lets them prove it to themselves.
Q also makes and sells one-of-a-kind art batts built from the Foldout Cat's unique Batt Buffet, handspun yarn, hand-dyed microbatch yarn and fiber, finished fiber-arts items, and simple fiber-arts tools. She has taught, vended, or both at fiber events and workshops in multiple states, including Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.
