Instructor Biographies

ButlerStarfleet Academy Stars

Su Butler has been passionate over weaving and color for nearly 40 years. She loves playing with yarns and dyes and then blending them in weave structures, creating her own unique designs.  Everything from plain weave to jacquard intrigues her.  Since earning her BFA in weaving and watercolor painting from the University of Northern Colorado she has taught private students and guilds; regional, national and international conferences.  “I have always loved to work with my hands, beginning weaving at age three.  To me weaving is a tactile dialogue – a puzzle to solve.  Given limited elements and equipment I am left to answer creative questions, each answer pushing me to grow as a craftsperson and artist.”  Author of The Answer Lady column. Also numerous articles in HANDWOVEN and WEAVERS magazines, and Complex Weavers Journal. Her first book, Understanding Rayon Chenille was released in 2002. She is leader of the Complex Weaver’s Tied Weaves Study Group.  http://www.subudesigns.com

Su is teaching:
Untying the Mysteries of Tied Weaves (Workshop)
Intro to Tied Weaves (Saturday AM Seminar)
Color Interaction in Weaving (Saturday PM Seminar)
Taqueté and Samitum (Sunday AM Seminar)

MullarkeyJohn Mullarkey is a nationally recognized teacher. He has been tablet weaving for nearly a decade.  His work has been displayed in the Missouri History Museum, and garments using his card woven bands have been featured in international fashion shows.  His designs are featured frequently in Handwoven.  John is the primary author of “A Tablet Weaver’s Pattern Book,” and has produced two DVDs for Interweave Press: “Tablet Weaving Made Easy” and “Double-Faced Tablet Weaving”. He is the developer of the Schacht Zoom Loom.  www.malarkycrafts.com

John is teaching:
Tablet Weaving: Threaded-In Designs (Saturday AM-PM)
Woven Silk Flora (Sunday AM)

Starship Academy

BrittCarol Ann Britt  wove as a 15-year-old Girl Scout and vowed to own a loom someday.  It took 40 years, but now she has an 8-shaft Macomber floor loom, a 6-shaft small Macomber, a rigid heddle loom, an inkle loom, Zoom and Weave-It looms and probably some she has tucked away from herself.  She loves to share her craft with others.  As a retired college professor of English, she has years of teaching experience and is making a welcome change to teach weaving.   twitter.com/CarolAnnDB

Carol Ann is teaching:
Warping & Weaving with a Zoom Loom or Weave IT (Friday PM)

CarmelInga Marie Carmel enjoys trying to convince her looms that wire and straw are really yarn, and thinks linen is an easier fiber to work with than wool.  She lives and weaves in an old Victorian house in Austin, Texas, with her linguist husband and  high school son—with the occasional summer weaving excursion to Sätergläntan in Sweden. She’s a recovering Landscape Architect with a BA from UC Berkeley, and has taught garden design as well as knitting and weaving classes. Currently, she teaches weaving at The Contemporary Austin Art School and is on the Board of the Weavers and Spinners Society of Austin.  She can be found as ingamarie on Weavolution and at  ingamariecarmel.com

Inga Marie is co-teaching:
Designing with Computers (Friday PM)

Doak PictureSandra Doak is a veteran weaver and cum laude graduate of Kent State University’s B.F.A. program, 1990. From 1991 until 2004 she owned and operated two weaving studio store fronts and taught weaving and related topics as she moved with her family from Ohio to North Carolina, Arkansas, and finally Austin, Texas.

Other ventures along the way included; starting a summer art camp for kids in Ohio, teaching at the Art Center in Charlotte, N.C. and starting a weaver’s guild, “Fiber Interest Guild” in Arkansas. From 2007 to 2011 she lent her expertise to get a weaving studio and yarn store off the ground in Wimberley, TX. Sandra has also shown and sold her work in various galleries in all four states.

Since 2013 she has been sharing studio space with several like-minded fiber artists in South Austin and Sandra currently sells one-of-a-kind woven wearables. www.sdoakdesigns.com

Sandra is teaching:
Plain Weave Isn’t Plain  (Friday PM)

FricksSusan Fricks has been passionate about spinning and weaving, and they have been a major part of her life over the past 30+ years. She’s woven on simple frame and rigid heddle looms, floor looms of all kinds and dobbys. She loves tools of all kinds and is a bit of a gadget geek. But, at the end of the day, what inspires and motivates her is using color and texture to create beautiful fabrics!

Susan began knitting and crocheting at age 5 with her mother, and has dabbled in nearly every fiber craft there is. With a degree in MIS from UCLA, her career was in business and IT-related work, which solidly developed her analytical, research and problem-solving skills. In 2007, she retired from corporate life and opened Yarnorama! A Playground for the Fiber Obsessed, in 2008. There, she strives to give customers a fun, inspiring shopping experience and environment where they can learn, explore and challenge themselves to create wonderful textiles of their own.  www.yarnorama.com/

Susan is teaching:
Demystifying Drafts and Designing on the Fly (Saturday AM)

ImperiaGiovanna Imperia is a fiber entrepreneur, teacher and braider, beader, weaver and jewelry maker.  She has owned and operated Giovanna Imperial Designs from her historic home base in Houston since 2008.  Giovanna has always been interested in fiber as a creative medium, and her creative work has been focused on the tactile and organic nature of fiber and related materials.  Her work has pushed the boundaries of the expected definition of body adornment and 3D objects.  The search for materials took her to wire and then to active yarns and plastics and even less common materials. giovannaimperia.com/

Giovanna is teaching:
Weaving with Futuristic Yarns  (Sunday AM)

JacksonMidge Jackson is an experienced knitter, spinner and weaver.  Having a lifelong love of textiles and using her skills as a seamstress, Midge enjoys designing knitwear and developing knitting patterns and original garments from handwoven fabric.  She loves to teach and is “the only free lance knitting teacher in Smith County!”  As a member of the Wildflower Fiber Retreat committee, she has introduced many to fiber arts through the group’s annual knitting camp and spinner’s retreat.  In addition, she teaches workshops in other diverse areas of interest, including bread baking, nuno felting, designing with the triangle loom, gourd craft and jewelry making.

Midge is teaching:
Blending for Spinning (Friday PM)
Big Bang (Sunday AM)

JamesPam James has been weaving for about 10 years. Pam was active in the Pikes Peak Weavers Guild in Colorado Springs before moving to Austin 2012. During her weaving career she has woven almost exclusively with reclaimed sweater yarns.  She has also been active in WSSA, scheduling and curating gallery shows including one at the Austin Airport in 2014.  In 2010, she won “Best Rigid Heddle Project” in the “Not just for Socks” weaving contest in Handwoven Magazine.  In 2013, Pam led WSSA’s Study Group, You Wove with What?!

Pam is teaching:
Repurposing Sweater Yarn for Weaving (Saturday PM and Sunday AM)

KandlAimee Kandl is a graduate of The School of Design at NCSU. She designed and created everything from a 15 foot tall skeleton marionette to handbags sold in department stores around the country. Her experience as a costume designer has given her extensive experience understanding color interactions under different light, and the ability to use color to help tell a story and create a mood. Her recent artwork explores color and landscape using paint, dye, handspun, and freeform weaving. YarnTrekker, her line of hand­dyed yarns, celebrates the colors of Austin and beyond. Teaching with innovation and humor, Aimee offers alternate viewpoints to students and encourages unjudged exploration of themes and ideas through creative and constructive exercises.

Aimee is teaching:
Get Your (color) Wheel out of a Rut! (Sunday AM)

KlingensmithYohannah Klingensmith began weaving on a rigid heddle loom when she was ten. At thirteen, she apprenticed with Ann Chase, on Martha’s Vineyard where she was living at the time. Using the techniques she learned, Yohannah began weaving and selling placemats, coasters, and runners to neighbors and at craft fairs on the island. Over the next five years, she saved enough to buy her first floor loom and three Corridale sheep. She continues this business to this day selling custom weaving through the Homestead online store, Homestead Gift Barn and Homestead Fiber Arts. Yohannah has taken classes with Jason Collingwood, Becky Ashendon, Joanne Hall, and Jette Vandermeiden.

In addition to rugs and runners, her current weaving pursuit is draw loom weaving, having completed two, three panel, double weave, “pine tree and snowball,” queen size coverlets this past year.  Yohannah works and teaches weaving at Homestead Fiber Arts, part of the Homestead Craft Village, Elm Mott, Texas, which features award winning woodworking, blacksmithing, pottery, leather work and quilting in addition to fiber crafts. Her classes (averaging 75 per year) range from introductory to advanced in rigid heddle and floor loom weaving. At the CHT conference in 2012, Yohannah was awarded the Handwoven Magazine “Weaving for the Home Award of Excellence” for her log cabin weft faced rug.  www.homesteadheritage.com

Yohannah is teaching:
Warping and Weaving with Ease (Workshop)
Overview of Warping with Ease (Saturday PM Seminar)

McClintockDeb McClintock constantly reaches to use the traditional technique of weaving to present a contemporary feeling as a craftsman and artist.    She helps people rediscover the skill of textile weaving, appreciate the textiles in our surrounding museums and understand the link between our present and our past in the world of textile production.  She is an independent scholar; currently expanding her Lao study to Northwest Vietnam, Cambodia and Burma in light of their geographic relationship to Laos.  Her work at the natural dye pot gives her meditation time and a chance to reconcile with what nature gives her and what she expects from it.  Acceptance is a good thing in the world of natural colors.  http://debmcclintock.me

Deb is teaching:
Designing with Computers (Friday PM)
Roots, Wood, Bugs and Berries (Saturday AM)
Intricate Patterns – Simple Threads, Looms of Southeast Asia (Saturday PM)

StamMickey Stam has been a weaver, spinner, and dyer for 14 years. She has a Masters in History of Decorative Arts in America, from the Smithsonian Institution/Parsons School of Design.  She achieved the HGA Certificate of Excellence in Weaving, Level I in 2014.  She is a past president of WSSA and is leading WSSA’s new Austin Creativity Study Group in 2015.

Mickey is teaching:
Open Your Weaving To New Possibilities (Sunday AM)

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Ella Strawman has been sewing, knitting, and dyeing since the age of 4. It became a passion for her while in college and she majored in Fibers at the Appalachian Center for Craft. There Ella learned to weave and spin. After moving to Texas in 2011, she was employed at a now defunct fiber arts center in Wimberley where she taught weaving, dyeing, knitting, and children’s crafts, as well as learned how to run a shop and gallery. When the shop closed, Ella decided to open Me & Ewe, a yarn and fabric store in Austin. There she teaches weaving, dyeing, sewing, knitting, and children’s crafts. Ella likes to think of fiber related hobbies as heritage hobbies, meaning they will most likely be passed from one generation to the next. “To be able to teach others is the highest honor as my knowledge and skills will continue for years to come and bring many generations of people great joy.”

Ella is teaching:
Hand Painted Warps and Wefts (Pre-conference)
Felting with Handwovens: A Lesson in Texture (Saturday PM)

ThompsonEileen Thompson was born in England, to a family in which knitting, sewing and making most of one’s own clothes was a way of life.  She learned to knit and crochet as a small child and taught herself tatting from a book as a teenager.  She has been spinning for 30 years, weaving for 20 and is continually fascinated by the many different ways threads can be manipulated.  She has taken ply-splitting workshops with Linda Hendrickson and Julie Hedges.  She won the Judge’s Award at CHT in 2013.

Eileen is teaching:
Make a Ply-Split Necklace (Friday PM continued on Saturday AM)

WilsonMeg Wilson has been weaving since 1987 and felting since the late 1990s.  She started using weaving software early on and has had WeaveIt since Version 1.  She loves twills and weaves garments, household items, tapestries and wire art.  Meg has taught weaving software for Hill Country Weavers in Austin and has taught felting and warping processes a number of times.  She has won two third-place prizes:  one for a hand-dyed, handwoven shawl and one for a tapestry which was in HGA’s Small Expressions show in California.  Her weaving and fiber life includes HGA, UKOnlineWSD, CW, CHT AFA and WSSA.

Meg is co-teaching:
Designing with Computers (Friday PM)