All wealth comes from the earth and from the hands of those who know how to transform the earth’s raw offerings. Textiles, essential to our survival, comfort, and creative expression, once held a central place in all human cultures as the treasures they truly are. Textiles are invaluable human technologies, literal materialization of the highest order of cooperation between people, plants, and animals, displaying the ingenuity and artistry of the maker and the lineage they carry. From simple string to paper and ink, to colorful woven wools and silks, textiles are a key part of our human story, representing millennia of universal and culturally specific knowledge and relationships with the natural world.
Why the Wheel? In tending the land, we move in seasonal rounds. The circle has no end and it is always turning, drawing us through time. Seasons repeat, but ecologies shift each year with species succession and weather vagaries. The wheel of the year is rhythmic yet dynamic, and humans have always attuned our lifeways to these ancient Earth cycles. We are an incredibly creative species. When we turn our creative focus from the end product that we envision to the wholeness and integrity of the process of creation, there is a deep shift. We see that we must plant in October what we wish to work with in May, that this month the bees need the coreopsis more than we do, that our wastewater could create a small oasis of reeds to welcome birds and bend into soft baskets, that it took a thousand flowers to make that stunning yellow, that our prunings can create whole new groves, that November’s seed (well kept) holds July’s flourishing pleasure garden, that our heavy harvest last year left less for this one, that everything we use, everything we touch, everything we wear, is incredibly precious when we consider its making. Our process becomes an inseparable piece of our artistry, connecting us to the web of life and to the turning wheel of the year. We become an ally of these cycles, helping to turn that wheel. Our art becomes regenerative rather than consumptive, and what we make is infused with great beauty and meaning.
The Weaver’s Wheel Program is a survey of fiber arts techniques, materials, and ways of working directly with the plants in our Green Anchors home base gardens. We will meet one weekend per month for nine months, with bits of land tending, craft, folklore, ritual and song woven throughout each of our days together. We will learn traditional craft technologies that are deeply entwined with the turn of the seasons and deeply relational ways of tending land. In addition to practicing weaving, spinning, felting, and botanical dyeing, we will seed, propagate, tend, harvest, ret, cure, and redistribute our plant allies. Participants will have the opportunity to take plants home and start dye and fiber gardens for themselves and their communities. In practicing these ancestral skills, we revive old ways of being together, suffusing our gatherings with song, storytelling, and light ritual inspired by the wheel of the year and by the plants themselves.
Who is the Weaver’s Wheel for and what is the offering?
This program is for people who want to expand their creative practice widely to explore a variety of land based craft techniques, and also for those who wish to deepen their practice to include more time on the land, growing and foraging materials, and being in connection with nature and the seasonal rhythms. It is suitable for seasoned crafts people as well as folks who are craft curious.
The Weaver’s Wheel is a very exploratory program, delving into a wide variety of land based fiber arts crafts. We give our participants the essential knowledge and techniques to inspire and strengthen their own creative practices in several vital areas- various types of basketry including soft fiber, flat work, and whole shoot weaving styles, silk worm cultivation and cocoon processing and spinning, wool processing and spinning, garden grown and wild foraged botanical dyes,wool felting, basic loom weaving, papermaking, book binding, and so much more. Our focus is cultivating a sense of place- growing, wildcrafting, and harvesting our materials locally, and building stronger relationships with the land that we stand on. We weave our craft exploration and land tending with song, folklore, and kinship, following the turn of the seasons to guide our offering.
So much of the value of our programs is also in building relationships with other creatives in our local community, celebrating turn of the seasons together, having access to beautiful gardens to tend and grow dye and fiber plants throughout the year, setting aside time for land-based creativity, and coming together in the very human act of tending land collectively. Each month’s offering is designed to inspire years of study and experimentation, giving students enough experience and information to reproduce class results and confidently continue to develop their craft. Our focus on land tending also bolsters confidence in gardening, propagation, plant ID, and wildcrafting. Participants will take home many different finished wild fiber crafts, and a generous stash of materials to continue their own craft practices and experimentation. We also provide written resources each month and will add samples and notes to our swatch books/ journals to refer back to in what we hope becomes a lifelong beauty-making and nature connection practice of working with the fibers and colors of the earth.
Our sessions run from 10am-4pm with time for a lunch in the middle. Some classes may shift due to plants, weather and the vagaries of working with the cycles.
Takeaways
Rich resource binder with history, folklore and processing techniques for fiber and dye plants used in class, additional online resources, and access during class time to Rewild’s relevant library materials
Plaited, twined, and ribbed baskets made from mix of wild-harvested, cultivated, and urban foraged materials
Variety of botanically dyed and printed silk, wool, and cotton textiles
Hand felted, dyed and adorned wool pouch
A small, beautiful weaving with fibers processed and dyed through our turn of the seasons
Hand harvested and formed plant paper and waxed linen journal with material swatches and notes
Fiber library of bast, wool and silk fibers
Access to a discussion forum with process videos and community crafting opportunities between in-person classes
Plants and seeds for your own fiber and dye garden, and to share with your gardening community—may include coreopsis, madder, indigo, marigold, safflower, daylily, milkweed, flax, dogbane, and many others
Book of songs and stories shared in class
Program Dates and Themes for 2026
Both Land-Tending and Project session run from 10am-4pm with time for a lunch in the middle. Some classes may shift due to plants or teacher availability.
April
Seed, Initiation, Spiral, Matrix, Greeting the Land
As the buds swell with potential, we meet together for the first time and weave our container in an opening ritual. We then begin our year by sowing seeds of the plants we will work with throughout our cycle, learning about their propagation and cultivation. We will talk labor-wise tips for tending urban land and developing working relationships with the more opportunistic and invasive plants among us with our first fiber exploration of paper making. We will work with fresh plants that grow abundantly on site and walk through the entire process from harvest to sheet. We will also begin distributing seeds and plants for people to start their own dye and fiber gardens at home.
*We will each take home sculptures made from our pulped plant fibers, woven flax straw charms, some pieces of our own handmade paper in May after it dries, and dye plant and flax seeds for our own gardens.
4/25 Land tending—flax harvest and replanting, seed rippling, beginning retting process, flax lore and song, seeding and tending dye plants—indigo, coreopsis, scabiosa, bachelor’s buttons, and more. Making paper-sizing goo from flax seed and distributing seed for home gardens.
4/26 Japanese knotweed and grass papermaking. We’ll work these on-site, common invasive plants both fresh and dried into plant paper, learn paper history, terminology and tools, how to make paper at home using simple household or thrift store items, identify other plants that can be made into paper, We’ll sculpt our remaining plant pulp and discuss and experience other uses for the difficult plant, Japanese knotweed.
May
Emergence, Pleasure, Folding, Flower and Bee, Beltane
As the green leaves emerge and the blossoms unfold, we honor the bees in their joyful, exuberant dance. We will plant out our seedlings in the greenhouse and gardens, meet our resident flaxpert, and pull out traditional wooden flax tools for a picturesque processing party that separates flax fibers from retted plants. This is both foundational fiber knowledge that applies to many fibers as well as specific to this time-honored plant and the uncommonly long, strong fibers it produces. What is so great about linen? Let’s find out! We’ll sew fiber sample books out of our handmade paper, bound with waxed linen cord that we make.
*We will each take home small books adorned with our grass and knotweed paper and bound with our own hard earned waxed linen thread, origami folded with our handmade paper, some flax to work with at home, and silkworm eggs for those who would like to raise their own silk worms.
5/23 Land tending—indigo time! Planting out Japanese indigo (Persicaria) seedlings in the greenhouse with attention to soil preparation for the needs of this special plant. Tending Indigofera suffruticosa seedlings and cuttings, and discussing the many indigo-bearing plants. Planting out dye flowers. Preparing flax processing tools. Also, an introduction to silkworms and silk’s relationship to the mulberry tree. Peeling our dried paper from couching sheets to make an origami box
5/24 Flax to Linen with Mel of PNW FiberRevolution. We’ll hand process our retted flax fiber into raw linen using traditional wood tools, learning terminology and history of linen in Europe and the Willamette Valley as well as what’s so amazing about linen and why it is such a coveted fiber. We’ll make waxed linen thread with beeswax from the onsite apiary and use it to bind a small knotweed paper book to hold our fiber samples and notes.
June
The Magic Hand, Human Ecology, Abundance, Sap Flowing
As summer rises and the sap flows, we explore bark as a basketry material, making peace with the verdant, vigorous, sassy and ever-present blackberry and getting more acquainted with willow and maple as well. We will learn best harvest practices and how to dry and save materials for later use, an important part of basketry practice. Then, we move to the mind-bending and oh-so satisfying geometry of plaiting, weaving on the diagonal.
*We will each take home a sweet little plaited bark basket and a blackberry bead necklace.
6/6 Land tending—clearing blackberry to prepare weaving materials, coppicing stands for optimum fruit production and easy picking, discussing the ecological roles and uses of blackberry and observing native versus invasive canes, harvesting inner bark for weaving and doing some whole cane-craft. We’ll check in on the silkworms and set fleece in a suint bath to prepare for dyeing in July.
6/7 Plaited Blackberry and Bark Basketry. Peeling Willow, Maple and other spring shoots to weave in with Blackberry bark. While weaving we’ll talk ecology, praxis, ethics, and metaphor around native, invasive, and naturalized populations of both plants and people.
July
Sun on the Water, Spiral Dynamics, Fullness, Balance, Tension
As the heat swells, we enjoy the long hours of summer harvesting the golden flowers in the garden, and reveling in our first big cutting of indigo. We will capture those bright solar goldens, balanced with the aquamarine mermaid palette of fresh indigo ice dye on silk textiles. We will also immerse some of our sheep’s fleece to soak up a bit of our summer pot of gold and then will hand fashion our own drop spindles so that we can use some of our freshly dyed wool to begin our exploration with spinning. We’ll set silks in a solar dye bath to harness the powers of the sun and time.
*We will each take home gold and aquamarine-dyed silks, a hand made drop spindle, spun wool and extra fiber to continue to develop our spinning practice with, and indigo cuttings to root and plant at home if desired.
7/25 Land tending and Botanical Dyes— Begin Blue explorations with fresh indigo leaf ice and salt dye, and an introduction to extracting indigo pigment for vatting. Rooting cuttings. Washing fleece to dye. Harvesting dye flowers for a pot of gold immersion dye bath for fleece and silk cocoons. Introduction to Mordanting. Solar Dye Bath
7/26 Spinning Wool –Spiral Dynamics, from fleece to fiber! We’ll make our own drop spindles and work with dyed and raw fleece, learning terminology, techniques, and uses for various types of yarn. Plying tales and spinning yarns about yarns.
August
Dive into Blue, Contrast, Pattern, Alchemy, Intuition
As summer reaches its apex and the indigo is at its fullest, lushest abundance, we ask: How does one coax blue from green? We will learn about the special nature of indigo, different from all other dyes, tricky and elusive, and astonishingly magical. Our weekend together will be focused on this incredible plant and you will surely be convinced to join the Blue Hand Cult, or perhaps the Blue Hair Club? We will delve deeply into the history of indigo around the world, a variety of ways to make indigo vats, and will explore ways of using resists to conjure beautiful, surprising patterns. While plying the indigo waters, we’ll begin working with our silkworm cocoons.
*We will each take home multiple beautiful indigo-dyed textiles in many tantalizing shades and patterns of blue and aquamarine, an experimental pigment extraction jar, and raw silkworm cocoons to process yourself.
8/29 Land tending—dye flower harvest, second indigo harvest, pigment extraction, vat setting, sig vat discussion, the satisfyingly direct fresh-leaf salt dye. Silk cocoon processing, degumming and hankie-making for later spinning..
8/30 Indigo Vatting–Finally, those coveted dark blues. We’ll develop our understanding of the fascinating chemistry of indigo by making a vat, and practicing dip and resist dye techniques that will keep a vat dyeing strong for a long time.
September
Deepening, Ripening, Ease, Catching before the Fall
As we enter fall, the leaves are developed and hearty and the last flowers linger in our dye gardens. We will learn how to capture their glorious shapes and colors on silk, exploring bundle dying (aka eco printing or leaf printing). We will also delve more deeply into the world of wool, working with the ancient craft of felting to create a small, magical pouch which we will later needle felt some of our colorful dyed fleece onto. Fall is also the season to tend green nettle- tall, strong and flexible, prepared to release its silvery fibers now that it has set seed. We’ll hand process nettle stalks while our botanical printing cauldrons bubble. We will discuss fiber processing cycles as a way of life–how something is always growing, something is always ready, and how to keep a healthy stash to draw from in our ongoing craft. And finally, some spider action- our processed silk is dry and ready to spin!
*We will each take home a beautiful leaf and flower printed silk scarf, a wool, silk, and bast fiber stash to continue exploring at home, and a small felted pouch to later be adorned with our rainbow of fleece.
9/26 Early fall garden care, last flower harvests, giving back to the pollinators. Catching fall leaves and flowers with botanical printing on cloth. Beginning wet retting and field retting.
9/27 Wet felting a wool pouch. Green nettle harvest and exploration of other bast fibers. Traditional techniques for cordage and wet spinning. Silk Reeling and Spinning. Preparing fibers for our final weavings.
October
Bloodlines, Ancestry, Continuity, The Turning of Time
As the days grow cooler and the energy returns to the roots, bast fibers continue to mature and the long leafed garden plants are ready to harvest for basketry. The veil grows thin and we revisit ancestral connections working with the old and honorable red root, madder, adding red to our rainbow of spun and dyed yarns for our hand loom weaving and needle felting. And once majestic purple appears with a last dip in our indigo vat, We are ready to weave it all together.
*We will each take home a beautiful and eclectic woven piece that contains the threads that we have spun together, a simple hand loom, and stunning red and purple dyed silk textiles.
10/17 Late harvests, fall planting, mulching and feeding. Field Retting check and more bast fiber processing. Harvesting soft basketry plants–daylily, iris, crocosmia, reeds and rushes. Tending bloodlines and ancestral connections. Courting the color Red in dyeing with Madder Root. Overdyeing with indigo for purples,
10/18 Warp and Weft–We’ll create hand looms and weave with the fibers we’ve grown, processed, twisted, spun, plied and dyed. We’ll discuss weaving terms, kinds of looms. patterns and techniques to achieve them, and honor the weavers of yore and lore.
November
Softening, Gratitude, Tending the Roots, Guiding Transformation
As the rains arrive and deep fall is upon us, we will use our last dyed fleece strands to adorn our felted wool pouch with needle felting. As we lay the gardens down to rest, we will harvest long leaves from the lilies and other perennial flowers and weave a soft basket. We will also examine our cultural gratitude practices and discuss how to transform them into rituals of meaning, depth and healing.
*We will each take home a twined and twilled soft fiber basket and a woolen pouch adorned with needle felting.
11/14 Land tending—late fall garden tending of deep-rooted plants, soaking and curing techniques to prepare weaving materials. Needle felting colorful adornments from our season of dye baths onto our wet felted pouches.
11/15 We’ll weave all our workings together to create a soft fiber basket with the reeds, rushes, leaves, silk, wool, nettle, flax, and other fibers we’ve coaxed from the ground as we turned the wheel together, creating a deeply personal and unique vessel with and for our learning. Gratitude Practice and Ritual.
December
Rest, Remembrance, the Good Night, Closing the Circle
As winter arrives and the last of the leaves drop, willow takes center stage showing off their long, graceful stems that glow with color and sheen through the long winter months. We’ll identify red osier and the common willows that grow along the river here, harvest for our basket craft, and plant some back so this weaver’s treasure will increase. We will also harness the rooting power of willow to propagate other precious plants for the fiber garden. In preparation for our final weaving project together, we will harvest English Ivy vines and will learn valuable techniques for splitting materials to size for weaving. We will spend our last couple of days weaving a beautiful, sturdy basket to hold all of our future harvests and fiber explorations. And finally, we will close the circle that we have woven together with care and intention.
*We will each take home a beautiful basket woven from locally harvested materials as well as our own hand propagated cutting starts of our favorite fiber plants. We will also be leaving with a whole community of fiber artist friends!
12/5 Wooing the powers of Willow. Propagating some of our favorite dye plants and weaving plants from hardwood cuttings—osiers and willows, mulberries, smokebush, cascara, and other leaf printing favorites to take home or plant out. Discussing willow magic, medicine and ecology, coppicing techniques for best basketry whips, and propagation. Harvesting Willow, Red Osier and English Ivy for our last basket. Beginning to weave.
12/6 Weaving a beautiful, strong, satisfying basket with invasive, native, and cultivated plants: willow, ivy, and osier. Closing out our year together with celebration and ritual.
Instructors
Ivy Stovall (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist who delights in the abundance, patterns, and chaos of the natural world and of humanity. She is dedicated to a life flow of learning, doing and teaching through handwork, landwork, song, story and circle-holding. Among her many passions and practices are home scale silk culture, fresh indigo vatting, weaving with wetland plants, and nurturing healthy intergenerational communities connected to and through the earth.
Erin Fahey (She/her) is a land tender and maker whose focus is connecting with the living world through craft. Her work is informed by connection to ancestry, interspecies kinship, and a deep reverence for the land. Erin delights in being a dabbler but goes deep with basketry, botanical dyes, wild tending, and plant medicine. She is an apprentice to willow above all, who loves learning and sharing ways that help us to live in reciprocity and create a more beautiful, just world.
The Weaver’s Wheel
An exploration of land based fiber arts through the wheel of the year.
A 9-month (April–December) fiber arts immersion program, 2 days per month, 10 am–4 pm.
TUITION: $3,495 (Materials Included, read our Refund Policy here)
All wealth comes from the earth and from the hands of those who know how to transform the earth’s raw offerings. Textiles, essential to our survival, comfort, and creative expression, once held a central place in all human cultures as the treasures they truly are. Textiles are invaluable human technologies, literal materialization of the highest order of cooperation between people, plants, and animals, displaying the ingenuity and artistry of the maker and the lineage they carry. From simple string to paper and ink, to colorful woven wools and silks, textiles are a key part of our human story, representing millennia of universal and culturally specific knowledge and relationships with the natural world.
Why the Wheel? In tending the land, we move in seasonal rounds. The circle has no end and it is always turning, drawing us through time. Seasons repeat, but ecologies shift each year with species succession and weather vagaries. The wheel of the year is rhythmic yet dynamic, and humans have always attuned our lifeways to these ancient Earth cycles. We are an incredibly creative species. When we turn our creative focus from the end product that we envision to the wholeness and integrity of the process of creation, there is a deep shift. We see that we must plant in October what we wish to work with in May, that this month the bees need the coreopsis more than we do, that our wastewater could create a small oasis of reeds to welcome birds and bend into soft baskets, that it took a thousand flowers to make that stunning yellow, that our prunings can create whole new groves, that November’s seed (well kept) holds July’s flourishing pleasure garden, that our heavy harvest last year left less for this one, that everything we use, everything we touch, everything we wear, is incredibly precious when we consider its making. Our process becomes an inseparable piece of our artistry, connecting us to the web of life and to the turning wheel of the year. We become an ally of these cycles, helping to turn that wheel. Our art becomes regenerative rather than consumptive, and what we make is infused with great beauty and meaning.
The Weaver’s Wheel Program is a survey of fiber arts techniques, materials, and ways of working directly with the plants in our Green Anchors home base gardens. We will meet one weekend per month for nine months, with bits of land tending, craft, folklore, ritual and song woven throughout each of our days together. We will learn traditional craft technologies that are deeply entwined with the turn of the seasons and deeply relational ways of tending land. In addition to practicing weaving, spinning, felting, and botanical dyeing, we will seed, propagate, tend, harvest, ret, cure, and redistribute our plant allies. Participants will have the opportunity to take plants home and start dye and fiber gardens for themselves and their communities. In practicing these ancestral skills, we revive old ways of being together, suffusing our gatherings with song, storytelling, and light ritual inspired by the wheel of the year and by the plants themselves.
Who is the Weaver’s Wheel for and what is the offering?
This program is for people who want to expand their creative practice widely to explore a variety of land based craft techniques, and also for those who wish to deepen their practice to include more time on the land, growing and foraging materials, and being in connection with nature and the seasonal rhythms. It is suitable for seasoned crafts people as well as folks who are craft curious.
The Weaver’s Wheel is a very exploratory program, delving into a wide variety of land based fiber arts crafts. We give our participants the essential knowledge and techniques to inspire and strengthen their own creative practices in several vital areas- various types of basketry including soft fiber, flat work, and whole shoot weaving styles, silk worm cultivation and cocoon processing and spinning, wool processing and spinning, garden grown and wild foraged botanical dyes,wool felting, basic loom weaving, papermaking, book binding, and so much more. Our focus is cultivating a sense of place- growing, wildcrafting, and harvesting our materials locally, and building stronger relationships with the land that we stand on. We weave our craft exploration and land tending with song, folklore, and kinship, following the turn of the seasons to guide our offering.
So much of the value of our programs is also in building relationships with other creatives in our local community, celebrating turn of the seasons together, having access to beautiful gardens to tend and grow dye and fiber plants throughout the year, setting aside time for land-based creativity, and coming together in the very human act of tending land collectively. Each month’s offering is designed to inspire years of study and experimentation, giving students enough experience and information to reproduce class results and confidently continue to develop their craft. Our focus on land tending also bolsters confidence in gardening, propagation, plant ID, and wildcrafting. Participants will take home many different finished wild fiber crafts, and a generous stash of materials to continue their own craft practices and experimentation. We also provide written resources each month and will add samples and notes to our swatch books/ journals to refer back to in what we hope becomes a lifelong beauty-making and nature connection practice of working with the fibers and colors of the earth.
Our sessions run from 10am-4pm with time for a lunch in the middle. Some classes may shift due to plants, weather and the vagaries of working with the cycles.
Takeaways
Program Dates and Themes for 2026
Both Land-Tending and Project session run from 10am-4pm with time for a lunch in the middle. Some classes may shift due to plants or teacher availability.
April
Seed, Initiation, Spiral, Matrix, Greeting the Land
As the buds swell with potential, we meet together for the first time and weave our container in an opening ritual. We then begin our year by sowing seeds of the plants we will work with throughout our cycle, learning about their propagation and cultivation. We will talk labor-wise tips for tending urban land and developing working relationships with the more opportunistic and invasive plants among us with our first fiber exploration of paper making. We will work with fresh plants that grow abundantly on site and walk through the entire process from harvest to sheet. We will also begin distributing seeds and plants for people to start their own dye and fiber gardens at home.
*We will each take home sculptures made from our pulped plant fibers, woven flax straw charms, some pieces of our own handmade paper in May after it dries, and dye plant and flax seeds for our own gardens.
4/25 Land tending—flax harvest and replanting, seed rippling, beginning retting process, flax lore and song, seeding and tending dye plants—indigo, coreopsis, scabiosa, bachelor’s buttons, and more. Making paper-sizing goo from flax seed and distributing seed for home gardens.
4/26 Japanese knotweed and grass papermaking. We’ll work these on-site, common invasive plants both fresh and dried into plant paper, learn paper history, terminology and tools, how to make paper at home using simple household or thrift store items, identify other plants that can be made into paper, We’ll sculpt our remaining plant pulp and discuss and experience other uses for the difficult plant, Japanese knotweed.
May
Emergence, Pleasure, Folding, Flower and Bee, Beltane
As the green leaves emerge and the blossoms unfold, we honor the bees in their joyful, exuberant dance. We will plant out our seedlings in the greenhouse and gardens, meet our resident flaxpert, and pull out traditional wooden flax tools for a picturesque processing party that separates flax fibers from retted plants. This is both foundational fiber knowledge that applies to many fibers as well as specific to this time-honored plant and the uncommonly long, strong fibers it produces. What is so great about linen? Let’s find out! We’ll sew fiber sample books out of our handmade paper, bound with waxed linen cord that we make.
*We will each take home small books adorned with our grass and knotweed paper and bound with our own hard earned waxed linen thread, origami folded with our handmade paper, some flax to work with at home, and silkworm eggs for those who would like to raise their own silk worms.
5/23 Land tending—indigo time! Planting out Japanese indigo (Persicaria) seedlings in the greenhouse with attention to soil preparation for the needs of this special plant. Tending Indigofera suffruticosa seedlings and cuttings, and discussing the many indigo-bearing plants. Planting out dye flowers. Preparing flax processing tools. Also, an introduction to silkworms and silk’s relationship to the mulberry tree. Peeling our dried paper from couching sheets to make an origami box
5/24 Flax to Linen with Mel of PNW FiberRevolution. We’ll hand process our retted flax fiber into raw linen using traditional wood tools, learning terminology and history of linen in Europe and the Willamette Valley as well as what’s so amazing about linen and why it is such a coveted fiber. We’ll make waxed linen thread with beeswax from the onsite apiary and use it to bind a small knotweed paper book to hold our fiber samples and notes.
June
The Magic Hand, Human Ecology, Abundance, Sap Flowing
As summer rises and the sap flows, we explore bark as a basketry material, making peace with the verdant, vigorous, sassy and ever-present blackberry and getting more acquainted with willow and maple as well. We will learn best harvest practices and how to dry and save materials for later use, an important part of basketry practice. Then, we move to the mind-bending and oh-so satisfying geometry of plaiting, weaving on the diagonal.
*We will each take home a sweet little plaited bark basket and a blackberry bead necklace.
6/6 Land tending—clearing blackberry to prepare weaving materials, coppicing stands for optimum fruit production and easy picking, discussing the ecological roles and uses of blackberry and observing native versus invasive canes, harvesting inner bark for weaving and doing some whole cane-craft. We’ll check in on the silkworms and set fleece in a suint bath to prepare for dyeing in July.
6/7 Plaited Blackberry and Bark Basketry. Peeling Willow, Maple and other spring shoots to weave in with Blackberry bark. While weaving we’ll talk ecology, praxis, ethics, and metaphor around native, invasive, and naturalized populations of both plants and people.
July
Sun on the Water, Spiral Dynamics, Fullness, Balance, Tension
As the heat swells, we enjoy the long hours of summer harvesting the golden flowers in the garden, and reveling in our first big cutting of indigo. We will capture those bright solar goldens, balanced with the aquamarine mermaid palette of fresh indigo ice dye on silk textiles. We will also immerse some of our sheep’s fleece to soak up a bit of our summer pot of gold and then will hand fashion our own drop spindles so that we can use some of our freshly dyed wool to begin our exploration with spinning. We’ll set silks in a solar dye bath to harness the powers of the sun and time.
*We will each take home gold and aquamarine-dyed silks, a hand made drop spindle, spun wool and extra fiber to continue to develop our spinning practice with, and indigo cuttings to root and plant at home if desired.
7/25 Land tending and Botanical Dyes— Begin Blue explorations with fresh indigo leaf ice and salt dye, and an introduction to extracting indigo pigment for vatting. Rooting cuttings. Washing fleece to dye. Harvesting dye flowers for a pot of gold immersion dye bath for fleece and silk cocoons. Introduction to Mordanting. Solar Dye Bath
7/26 Spinning Wool –Spiral Dynamics, from fleece to fiber! We’ll make our own drop spindles and work with dyed and raw fleece, learning terminology, techniques, and uses for various types of yarn. Plying tales and spinning yarns about yarns.
August
Dive into Blue, Contrast, Pattern, Alchemy, Intuition
As summer reaches its apex and the indigo is at its fullest, lushest abundance, we ask: How does one coax blue from green? We will learn about the special nature of indigo, different from all other dyes, tricky and elusive, and astonishingly magical. Our weekend together will be focused on this incredible plant and you will surely be convinced to join the Blue Hand Cult, or perhaps the Blue Hair Club? We will delve deeply into the history of indigo around the world, a variety of ways to make indigo vats, and will explore ways of using resists to conjure beautiful, surprising patterns. While plying the indigo waters, we’ll begin working with our silkworm cocoons.
*We will each take home multiple beautiful indigo-dyed textiles in many tantalizing shades and patterns of blue and aquamarine, an experimental pigment extraction jar, and raw silkworm cocoons to process yourself.
8/29 Land tending—dye flower harvest, second indigo harvest, pigment extraction, vat setting, sig vat discussion, the satisfyingly direct fresh-leaf salt dye. Silk cocoon processing, degumming and hankie-making for later spinning..
8/30 Indigo Vatting–Finally, those coveted dark blues. We’ll develop our understanding of the fascinating chemistry of indigo by making a vat, and practicing dip and resist dye techniques that will keep a vat dyeing strong for a long time.
September
Deepening, Ripening, Ease, Catching before the Fall
As we enter fall, the leaves are developed and hearty and the last flowers linger in our dye gardens. We will learn how to capture their glorious shapes and colors on silk, exploring bundle dying (aka eco printing or leaf printing). We will also delve more deeply into the world of wool, working with the ancient craft of felting to create a small, magical pouch which we will later needle felt some of our colorful dyed fleece onto. Fall is also the season to tend green nettle- tall, strong and flexible, prepared to release its silvery fibers now that it has set seed. We’ll hand process nettle stalks while our botanical printing cauldrons bubble. We will discuss fiber processing cycles as a way of life–how something is always growing, something is always ready, and how to keep a healthy stash to draw from in our ongoing craft. And finally, some spider action- our processed silk is dry and ready to spin!
*We will each take home a beautiful leaf and flower printed silk scarf, a wool, silk, and bast fiber stash to continue exploring at home, and a small felted pouch to later be adorned with our rainbow of fleece.
9/26 Early fall garden care, last flower harvests, giving back to the pollinators. Catching fall leaves and flowers with botanical printing on cloth. Beginning wet retting and field retting.
9/27 Wet felting a wool pouch. Green nettle harvest and exploration of other bast fibers. Traditional techniques for cordage and wet spinning. Silk Reeling and Spinning. Preparing fibers for our final weavings.
October
Bloodlines, Ancestry, Continuity, The Turning of Time
As the days grow cooler and the energy returns to the roots, bast fibers continue to mature and the long leafed garden plants are ready to harvest for basketry. The veil grows thin and we revisit ancestral connections working with the old and honorable red root, madder, adding red to our rainbow of spun and dyed yarns for our hand loom weaving and needle felting. And once majestic purple appears with a last dip in our indigo vat, We are ready to weave it all together.
*We will each take home a beautiful and eclectic woven piece that contains the threads that we have spun together, a simple hand loom, and stunning red and purple dyed silk textiles.
10/17 Late harvests, fall planting, mulching and feeding. Field Retting check and more bast fiber processing. Harvesting soft basketry plants–daylily, iris, crocosmia, reeds and rushes. Tending bloodlines and ancestral connections. Courting the color Red in dyeing with Madder Root. Overdyeing with indigo for purples,
10/18 Warp and Weft–We’ll create hand looms and weave with the fibers we’ve grown, processed, twisted, spun, plied and dyed. We’ll discuss weaving terms, kinds of looms. patterns and techniques to achieve them, and honor the weavers of yore and lore.
November
Softening, Gratitude, Tending the Roots, Guiding Transformation
As the rains arrive and deep fall is upon us, we will use our last dyed fleece strands to adorn our felted wool pouch with needle felting. As we lay the gardens down to rest, we will harvest long leaves from the lilies and other perennial flowers and weave a soft basket. We will also examine our cultural gratitude practices and discuss how to transform them into rituals of meaning, depth and healing.
*We will each take home a twined and twilled soft fiber basket and a woolen pouch adorned with needle felting.
11/14 Land tending—late fall garden tending of deep-rooted plants, soaking and curing techniques to prepare weaving materials. Needle felting colorful adornments from our season of dye baths onto our wet felted pouches.
11/15 We’ll weave all our workings together to create a soft fiber basket with the reeds, rushes, leaves, silk, wool, nettle, flax, and other fibers we’ve coaxed from the ground as we turned the wheel together, creating a deeply personal and unique vessel with and for our learning. Gratitude Practice and Ritual.
December
Rest, Remembrance, the Good Night, Closing the Circle
As winter arrives and the last of the leaves drop, willow takes center stage showing off their long, graceful stems that glow with color and sheen through the long winter months. We’ll identify red osier and the common willows that grow along the river here, harvest for our basket craft, and plant some back so this weaver’s treasure will increase. We will also harness the rooting power of willow to propagate other precious plants for the fiber garden. In preparation for our final weaving project together, we will harvest English Ivy vines and will learn valuable techniques for splitting materials to size for weaving. We will spend our last couple of days weaving a beautiful, sturdy basket to hold all of our future harvests and fiber explorations. And finally, we will close the circle that we have woven together with care and intention.
*We will each take home a beautiful basket woven from locally harvested materials as well as our own hand propagated cutting starts of our favorite fiber plants. We will also be leaving with a whole community of fiber artist friends!
12/5 Wooing the powers of Willow. Propagating some of our favorite dye plants and weaving plants from hardwood cuttings—osiers and willows, mulberries, smokebush, cascara, and other leaf printing favorites to take home or plant out. Discussing willow magic, medicine and ecology, coppicing techniques for best basketry whips, and propagation. Harvesting Willow, Red Osier and English Ivy for our last basket. Beginning to weave.
12/6 Weaving a beautiful, strong, satisfying basket with invasive, native, and cultivated plants: willow, ivy, and osier. Closing out our year together with celebration and ritual.
Instructors
Ivy Stovall (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist who delights in the abundance, patterns, and chaos of the natural world and of humanity. She is dedicated to a life flow of learning, doing and teaching through handwork, landwork, song, story and circle-holding. Among her many passions and practices are home scale silk culture, fresh indigo vatting, weaving with wetland plants, and nurturing healthy intergenerational communities connected to and through the earth.
Erin Fahey (She/her) is a land tender and maker whose focus is connecting with the living world through craft. Her work is informed by connection to ancestry, interspecies kinship, and a deep reverence for the land. Erin delights in being a dabbler but goes deep with basketry, botanical dyes, wild tending, and plant medicine. She is an apprentice to willow above all, who loves learning and sharing ways that help us to live in reciprocity and create a more beautiful, just world.
Registration
TUITION: $3,495 (Materials Included, read our Refund Policy here)