Mini & Extended Workshops

June 2023: Anatomy of an Improv Quilt
Cindy Grisdela, from Reston, VA, is an award-winning fiber artist with over 30 years’ experience creating eye-catching quilts. She specializes in Improv piecing and design and using color fearlessly in your quilts.

Cindy has been teaching and lecturing in person since 2014 and online since April 2020. Her classes use Improv techniques to engage student creativity and encourage making original quilts without patterns or templates. There’s no way to make a mistake!

She comes from a long line of women who have expressed themselves using a needle and thread, although curiously there weren’t any quilters in her family. Creating with various forms of fabric and thread has been a part of her life since childhood, and she is self-taught as a fiber artist, with lots of experimentation along the way.

Cindy is the author of Artful Improv and a new book, Adventures in Improv Quilts. She appeared on The Quilt Show with Alex Anderson and Ricky Tims in 2021 with segments on Improv blocks and curves.

For more information, please visit Cindy’s website and blog at www.cindygrisdela.com or follow her on Instagram @cindygrisdelaquilts
Cindy Grisdela’s website

May 2023:  Split Shed Figurative Weaving
Deborah Silver is a native of Cleveland, Ohio. She discovered her love of weaving while attending the Cleveland Institute of Art, attaining a BFA as a Fiber major and Drawing minor.

After a weaving internship, Deborah learned the craft of antique furniture upholstery. She then combined her skills to open her own fiber art business. She worked closely with interior designers, creating site-specific fiber commissions for private residences, businesses, and religious institutions.

Currently, Deborah designs and weaves pieces using the split-shed technique, transforming traditional patterns into a signature method of hand-weaving. All weft yarns travel from selvedge to selvedge, differentiating this cloth from tapestry. Her work is inspired by the increased cross-culturalism in the world which has been facilitated by technology, the ancient realm of road and trade, now advanced to hyper-speed.

Deborah’s weavings have been shown in numerous local and national juried exhibitions. In 2015, she received a Cleveland Jewish Arts and Culture Fellowship award. In 2017, she received third prize in the ARTneo national juried competition. She received the Complex Weavers Award and First Place at Complexity 2018. Deborah is also the recipient of a 2019 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award.

Deborah teaches split-shed weaving workshops internationally. In 2019, she published The Technique of Split-shed Weaving, a book that illustrates pictorial weaving using the split-shed process on four-shaft looms. Her articles have been published in Complex Weavers magazine.
Deborah Silver’s website

April 2023:  Figurative Crochet in Landscape and Portrait
Jo Hamilton moved from Scotland to Portland, Oregon, in the 1990s after graduating from the Glasgow School of Art. She continued making art and eventually began to experiment using crochet, which her Gran taught her at the age of six. Her technique evolved over time, uniting her craft heritage with her fine art training. It enables her to create tactile art objects that reference everyday life, while simultaneously exploring conventions of western fine art and traditional craft. Her work is large scale and may appear realistic at first, but the colors, textures and hanging threads reveal her process and medium. She works directly from photos without sketches or patterns, beginning in the middle and working outwards until the substance of the representation is secured in her knots. The process is time-consuming, but slowly the images materialize knot-by-knot in rows of color and pattern, the products of tiny actions. Her studio walls are lined with thousands of balls of yarn arranged by color and tone, mostly found in thrift stores. To date she has completed dozens of crocheted works, often in series, including portraits, nudes, masks, cityscapes, mug shots, and commissioned work.
Jo Hamilton’s website

March 2023: Tattered Splendors
California-based artist MartyO creates wearable art, assemblages and sculptures from salvaged textiles and found items. From a background in social work advocacy and law practice, in her fifties she changed careers and became an artist. MartyO adheres to zero-waste principles as she transforms discarded, tattered, and stained quilts and linens into distinctive art quilts, garments and sculptures. Marty’s work alters traditional patchwork and embroideries into the unexpected. Often the provenance of the textiles has been lost, yet new narratives emerge. Her work is emotional, speaking to controversial issues through her art, while honoring the handwork of forgotten quilters.
Instagram: @MartyO_fiberartist
Facebook: www.facebook.com/marty.ornish
Mary Ornish’s website

February 2023: Fiber Art Journey – Abstract, Improvisational Embroidery to Quilting Adventures
Heather Kerley is a mixed media and fiber artist living in the Washington, DC area. Originally an abstract painter, she found an artistic home in the medium of embroidery. Kerley creates unusual embroideries using found fabric, primarily vintage kimono silk scraps and vintage linen. Her work is often improvisational, with designs riffing on the existing cloth pattern and using an eclectic mix of different yarns, flosses, beads, and an array of different stitches. Kerley is committed to bringing the tradition of embroidery into the 21st century and evolving as an art form. She continues to experiment with mixed media and embroidery and, since the pandemic, has added quilting to her fiber art repertoire.
Heather Kerley’s website

January 2023:  Proprietor of Artistic Artifacts
Judy Vincentz Gula, owner of Artistic Artifacts and Batik Tambal, is a published fiber and mixed media artist who loves to share her knowledge and skills in textiles and mixed media art with others.

Judy has had a passion for fiber most of her life. She began as a weaver, spinner, dyer, and a collector of all things vintage and ethnic fabrics. She studied fashion design at Radford University, earning degrees in fashion design and business marketing. Judy spent fifteen years as a member of the Potomac Fiber Arts Gallery at the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, Virginia, and her studio at that time was included on the James Renwick Alliance Studio Tour.

Judy now enjoys merging all that she has learned from her many interests and channeling that into her business. She makes mixed media art quilts as well as shop samples using the unique collection of fabrics carried at Artistic Artifacts

Judy grew up in a family business that sold and manufactured parts for European automobiles. Her entrepreneurial spirit was born of this hands-on, real-world education, preparing her for the business side of running a brick-and-mortar shop and online store.

Judy finds inspiration in new and vintage materials and shares her love of art and empowering others to develop their own style. You may find her teaching a class or working with a customer on choosing the right fabric or supplies to create their own vision.

In 2012, Judy and her husband Dave purchased Batik Tambal, which includes hand painted batik panels from Indonesian artists, her own line of batik fabrics, sarongs, and an unique collection of new and vintage copper tjaps used in the batik making process.

In 2019 her first book, Colorful Batik Panel Quilts: 28 Quilting and Embellishing Inspirations from Around the World, was published by Landauer Publishing. In it you will enter Judy’s world of bright, colorful batik panels. Judy’s passion for vivid and intricate panel designs inspires beautiful art quilts and home décor that celebrate the fair-trade movement.

Judy’s work has appeared in A Quilt Block Challenge: Vintage Revisited and Cutting-Edge Art Quilts, both by Mary W. Kerr; Creating Celebration Quilts by Cyndi Souder; First-Time Beading on Fabric by Liz Kettle; and Modern Hand Stitching by Ruth Chandler. Her work has been juried into the Sacred Threads Quilt Exhibition.

Judy was a co-founder of “Power Suits: An Art Quilt Challenge” and “Arts & Old Lace: An Art Quilt Challenge”. She is a member of Studio Art Quilt Associates and the Textile and Fiber Art List (TAFA).

Artistic Artifacts is a sponsor of Sacred Threads Quilt Exhibition and the Textile and Fiber Art List.
Judy Gula’s website

December 2022:  Nantucket Lighthouse Baskets
Terri first started visiting the island of Nantucket in the 1980s. She remembers seeing a Nantucket Lightship basket in one of the gift stores on Main Street and asked to see it. It was $500 and her first thought was “I’ll never be able to afford one of those!” Moving forward, Terri herself would be selling her baskets on Main Street for $2,500-$5,000.

Terri holds a BS in engineering. Her first “real” job was working at NASA in Greenbelt. She was always curious about construction and how things work.

The cottage industry of the manufacture of Nantucket baskets back in the early days was very secretive. Terri managed to take many, many workshops with master weavers like Dick and Donna Cifranic, Karol Lindquist and Alan Reed. She made her first basket in 1996.

After taking a one-on-one class with Alan Reed, and recently having taken early retirement in 2002, she was asked to join Alan’s shop and have her spot at the bench between renowned basket makers Nap Plank and Alan Reed. She became a master craftsman herself and was juried and accepted into the Nantucket Basket Makers and Merchants Association. Terri was also heavily involved with the Nantucket Lightship Basket Museum where she was on the Advisory board, historian, docent, lecturer, and demonstrator. She would also collaborate on each year’s exhibits.

Terri is a collector of Nantucket baskets, does repairs and restorations, and taught workshops in the barn on her Maryland property. Terri considers herself a traditional Nantucket basket maker but makes contemporary baskets as well. She purchased her own home on Nantucket in 2002.

Besides making baskets, Terri enjoys weaving (she owns 6 looms), spinning (she owns 5 spinning wheels), knitting (there is fiber hidden in every nook and cranny), and rescuing vintage sewing machines and getting them to make perfect stitches again (she owns 27 sewing machines.).

November 2022:  Shibori & Me:  From Ancient Techniques to Contemporary Quilts
Carol Anne Grotrian began quilting in the early 1980s, and soon discovered shibori, Japan’s ancient tradition of tie-dye. Shibori helped her find her voice in landscape quilts. She dyes the fabric for her quilts using fiber-reactive dyes and indigo. In recent years, she added the slow stitch techniques of raw edge appliqué and Japanese boro to her beloved hand quilting. Sharing all these traditions by teaching is, for her, important.

Though the subtext is always ecological, Carol Anne’s landscapes usually express a quiet sense of place, often places she has experienced. They are “breathing spaces” that stop time– seasons, tides or day to night.

Haiku have inspired recent landscapes. These compact Japanese poems usually refer to a season and to commonplace nature. Though she continues to create larger quilts, especially commissions, haiku have led her to smaller, more intimate works. Experiencing a moment of simple beauty in poetry or landscape is a welcome antidote to today’s divisive tensions.

Carol Anne’s sense of place emerged in New England, where she has lived since 1979. Her quilts are in corporate, private and museum collections. They have been exhibited nationally and internationally and appeared in various publications.

Her best critics are her husband of 54 years and her crit group of over 34 years. Her studio is in her home in Cambridge.
Carol Anne Grotrian’s website

October 2022:  Swedish Weavers, Their Weaves, Looms, and Traditions
Joanne Hall is a weaver, teacher, and author with a master’s degree in textile design from the University of Minnesota. After teaching at the University of Montana and Cal Poly, she started the Elkhorn Mountains Weaving Studio in Montana, where she weaves tapestries and teaches classes. Joanne has made seven trips to Sweden to learn about Swedish weaves and looms. Author of “Tying up the Countermarch Loom” and “Learning to Warp Your Loom,” she is very knowledgeable about looms and how to make them work. She teaches for art centers, weaving shops, and guilds throughout the U.S. and Canada.
Joanne Hall’s website

September 2022:  My Life in Quilts
Joe Cunningham has been a professional quilt artist since 1979. He has written essays on the subject for museum catalogs, books, and magazines. His book, Men and the Art of Quiltmaking, was the first book on its subject. Joe travels throughout the country to give lectures and workshops on quiltmaking. His ten books on quiltmaking include the first biography of a living quilter, the first book on men who make quilts, and a definitive book on marking quilts for quilting called Quilting with Style, published by AQS. He has been seen on the Peabody Award-winning PBS series Craft in America, the HGTV series “Simply Quilts with Alex Anderson,” “The Quilt Show” with Ricky Tims and Alex Anderson, and others. Cunningham has performed his musical quilt show, “Joe the Quilter,” for guilds and theaters nationwide. His latest book is “Man Made Quilts: Civil War to the Present,” a catalogue for the show of the same name at the Shelburne Museum. His quilts are in the permanent collections of the DeYoung museum, The Shelburne Museum, The Newark Museum, The San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles and many private collections.
Joe Cunningham’s website