Mentors
You know them from the pages of Spin•Off or from previous SOAR
gatherings, or they may be a new treasure we’ve found to share.
They will delight you with little pearls of wisdom and big blocks of
knowledge garnered from their spinning and fiber experience.
Sarah Anderson has been spinning for thirty-five years. She spends her time dyeing fiber for her business, Great Balls of Fiber, knitting and spinning miles of yarn. A recent contributor to Spin•Off, she lives in Snohomish, Washington with her very patient husband, Dick.
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Rudy’s teaching career began in high school, teaching weaving at a summer camp. After college graduation he taught mathematics and was a school administrator. When approaching retirement, Rudy learned how to spin from his spinning mentor, Priscilla Gibson-Roberts. He now lives on the coast of Maine where he mentors at spinning gatherings and teaches workshops.
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Nancy Bush found her way to traditional knitting techniques and uses of ethnic patterns via a degree in Art History and post-graduate studies in color design and weaving in San Francisco and Sweden. She has published articles and designs in Knitter’s, Interweave Knits, Vogue Knitting, and Threads. She is the knitting contributor to PieceWork magazine. She teaches workshops in the United States, Canada, and abroad. She owns The Wooly West, a mail order yarn business in Salt Lake City, Utah. She is the author of Folks Socks (1994), Folk Knitting in Estonia (1999), Knitting on the Road: Socks for the Traveling Knitter (2001), Knitting Vintage Socks (2005), all published by Interweave Press. Her new book on Knitted Lace of Estonia is scheduled to be published by Interweave Press in Fall 2008.
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Maggie Casey is co-owner of Shuttles, Spindles, & Skeins in Boulder, Colorado, and has been addicted to spinning for thirty years. Some people have wine cellars; she has a fleece basement. She holds part one of Handweaver’s Guild of America’s Certificate of Excellence in Handspinning. Maggie teaches spinning at Shuttles, SOAR, the Estes Park Wool Market, and local guild
programs. She has been a Skein judge at the Taos Wool Festival, Estes Park Wool Market, Colorado State Fair, and Convergence
2004. She is the author of Start Spinning: Everything You Need to Know to Make Great Yarn, a new Interweave Press book.
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Sharon Costello has been a fiber artist for twenty-two years and for the last decade a professional feltmaker. She is well known for her needle-felted art dolls and vessels. She has studied feltmaking in the United States, Turkey, and Scandinavia and teaches workshops through fiber and doll guilds, art schools, colleges, and fiber and doll-making conferences throughout the world. She also sponsors “Felter’s Fling,” a biannual conference that brings instructors from around the world to introduce new techniques to American feltmakers. Her work has been featured in Shuttle, Spindle and Dyepot, Fiberarts, Spin•Off, Interweave Felt, Echoes, North American Felters’ Network, Cloth Doll Magazine, Soft Dolls and Animals Magazine, Hudson Valley Magazine, and a wide range of fiber-guild and doll-makers newsletters in the United States and abroad. |
Raised by textile-expert field anthropologists studying weaving in the Peruvian town of Chinchero, Abby has been spinning, weaving, knitting, and more for over thirty years. She runs abbysyarns.com in southern Ohio, serves on the board of directors of Andean Textile Arts, and spends her life practicing the fiber arts about which she teaches and writes.
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Vivian Høxbro is a Danish designer and author who has been designing handknitting for almost a quarter of a century. She loves knitting and thinks that it should be fun first of all, but she also loves to teach the kind of knitting to which she is dedicated. Vivian has worked for several magazines and yarn companies but feels like she’s “come home” playing with her own colors at Harrisville Designs. She creates kit designs and has written five books, including Domino Knitting and the forthcoming Knit to Be Square: Domino Designs to Knit and Felt, due out Fall 2008 (both published by Interweave Press).
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Sara is a longtime spinner and weaver. Her work has been widely published, received numerous awards, and has been included in many juried exhibitions. She lectures and gives workshops in the United States, Canada, and England. She maintains a working studio in Northern California, where she lives with her husband, looms, spinning wheels, dye pots, and beads. Visit her website saralamb.com, or at her weaving weblog: http://saralamb.blogspot.com.
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Judith MacKenzie McCuin has worked as a textile designer both as an artisan and in industry. Her love of textiles has led her around the world, given her great adventures and many good friends. Her work has been published in Interweave Knits, PieceWork, and Handwoven. She is a regular contributor to Spin•Off. She is the author of Teach Yourself Visually Handspinning and the DVD, Spinning Exotic Fibers and Novelty Yarns by Victoria Home Videos. She produces a variety of yarns for companies including Buffalo Gals bison yarns and Green Sheep Organics. She and her husband Nick, live in Montana on the edge of the Front Range of the Rockies. Her new book, The Intentional Spinner: A Holistic Approach to Spinning Yarn will be published by Interweave Press in Fall 2008.
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Deb has been teaching about color, dyeing, and spinning for the last twenty years. She is the author of Color Works and Color in Spinning and is co-author of the dye sample notebooks, Color by Number, with Sara Lamb. Her work uses dyeing, embroidery,
handmade papers, and beads. She lives with Buzz (the patron of her art), two cats, a bird, and a new puppy.
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Robin Russo lives in Bradford, Vermont, where she teaches spinning, dyeing, and felting. She has taught at numerous gatherings of spinners, weavers, and knitters, and historical societies. She has been a fiber enthusiast for over thirty years and takes every opportunity to explore its potential.
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Patsy Sue Zawistoski enjoys achieving design potential by handspinning yarns for use in knitting, weaving, or crochet. Continually exploring and refining her spinning and teaching techniques for the past twenty years, she is a relaxed but thorough teacher nicknamed, “The Spinning Guru.” Her three spinning videos and DVDs are perennial favorites.
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