Programs

2022-2023

Held the 2nd Thursday of the month via ZOOM (unless otherwise noted below; subject to change)

September 15th (Thursday) – Welcome Back and Show & Tell!

October 13th – Lindsey Troop at FABSCRAPS

FABSCRAP is your one-stop textile reuse and recycling resource, providing convenient pickup and recycling of textiles for businesses in New York City and Philadelphia. The Philadelphia location is opened on November 15, 2021. You can get involved in a number of ways and it’s also possible to make an appointment to visit the warehouse and shop.In addressing textile waste and climate change issues, we know education and spreading awareness are critical to our work. The presentation itself covers the basics of how waste contributes to climate change, differences between textile waste, industry practices that lead to waste, and FABSCRAP‘s work to provide solutions.

November 10th – Dana Ellen Jones

Indigo, Taupe & More: Japanese Fabric from Vintage to Contemporary In a whirlwind round of interviews with multiple generations of Japanese quilt-makers, I learned a lot about working with Japanese fabrics from indigo to taupe and beyond. I talked with master quilters Kuroha Shizuko, Yoko Seito, Reiko Kato and Keiko Goke. In this slide show, you’ll learn how each of these women selects and designs fabric. You’ll see images of quilts by each quiltmaker plus a variety of Japanese fabrics.

December 8th – Annual Holiday Potluck

January 12th – Teresa Duryea Wong

This lecture covers a tumultuous period in Native American culture beginning in 1880, when Native lands were taken away, bison herds were decimated, forced relocations were happening all over North America and the educational system changed dramatically. Indigenous Americans spent the 1880s and next few decades learning to adapt. As Western missionary women made their way into the lives of America Indian communities, they taught quiltmaking skills and provided fabric and supplies. Native American women with adept needle skills adopted Western patchwork quilts and eventually made quilts that reflected their own cultural heritage.

February 9th – Paula Nadelstern

Paula Nadelstern has achieved international recognition for her innovative and complex designs inspired by the bilateral symmetry of kaleidoscopic images. Honored by inclusion in the Twentieth Century’s 100 Best American Quilts, her designs were showcased in the American Folk Art Museum’s first one person exhibition highlighting the work of a contemporary quilt artist (2009). In addition to her numerous awards, she is a recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and The Bronx Council on the Arts. Paula is the author of Fabricadabra: Simple Quilts, Complex Fabric, Paula Nadelstern’s Kaleidoscope Quilts: An Artist’s Journey Continues; Kaleidoscope Quilts: The Workbook; Puzzle Quilts: Simple Blocks, Complex Fabric; Kaleidoscopes & Quilts; Snowflakes & Quilts and Fantastical Designs (a coloring book with selections from her over twenty-five fabric collections designed exclusively for Benartex, Inc.). She has lived on the same block in the Bronx, NYC her whole life.

For over thirty years, the state-of-the-art kaleidoscope has not only been my design inspiration, it’s also been my classroom. Analyzing not only what a scope is but also what it isn’t has steered me in lots of valuable directions. I’ve learned to manipulate physical properties like rhythm and line in order to inject a feeling of motion into an otherwise static image. But it is the unique qualities synonymous with the kaleidoscope personality that I’m always trying to get to know better. Surprise. Magic. Change. Chance. In order to conjure an instant of luminous and fleeting spontaneity, I’ve got to trust in symmetry, rely on detail, commit both random and staged acts of color and understand that the whole will always be greater than the sum of its parts.

March 9th – Susan Lenz

April 13th –Wendy Osterweil in-person at Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church and via Zoom

Pattern in Process: Art on the Body: Associate Professor, Art Education and Community Arts Practices Department, Tyler School of Art/Temple University (retired). She is now a full-time artist with a studio at Herman Street Studios in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. A printmaker/fiber artist who exhibits her artwork nationally, Wendy makes “slow clothes.” She considers each piece of wearable art by Left Hand Print Studio Clothesline as a one-of-a-kind three-dimensional collage worn on a human body that moves in space.

Wendy has taught art for over 30 years in a variety of venues including: schools, universities, artist residencies, workshops, community arts and after school programs. She teaches professional arts education professional development and studio workshops, includingArrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Tennessee, among many others. She has given numerous presentations at the National and the Pennsylvania Art Education Association Conferences. In 2009, she co-founded Prints Link Philadelphia, a coalition of community arts organizations, art centers, museums, schools, and teaching artists who develop curriculum and projects to educate, promote and exhibit printmaking for children and teens in the Philadelphia region. Wendy has community arts administration experience at Fleisher Art Memorial and Prints in Progress in Philadelphia. From 2009-2016, she served on the Board of the Stockton Rush Bartol Foundation whose mission is to make the arts accessible by giving grants to high quality arts programs in the Philadelphia and by providing teaching artists workshops.

I am an artist, hiker, gardener, explorer, gatherer, surface designer, seamstress, maker, questioner, learner and teacher. I work by hand, by touch, by tactile and visual interactions with the physical world. I make art quilts, prints, papercuts, and clothing.

As a textile artist, I print with dyes on natural fiber fabric. I am interested in the improvisational layering of images, the interplay of light and shadow, and the complex interactions between color, texture and pattern that printing permits. My methodology for surface design on cloth often begins with a papercut or a relief print, either woodcuts or linocuts. I then make photo silkscreens, print the images, and then over print many times with multiple screens and stencils, adding textures and patterns with dye pastes.

May 12th – Judy Donovan in-person at Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church and via Zoom

Take a walk on the WILD side! How a girl who ‘couldn’t draw’ grew up to be a textile artist. A humorous and inspirational illustrated lecture plus some live garments) about self-discovery as an artist, Judy traces her development from a child fascinated with leopard print pants to the non-drawing artist she is today.