VISIBLE MENDING: Mother’s Day Edition with Cal Patch + Katherine Ferrier

VISIBLE MENDING: Mother’s Day Edition 
Cal Patch + Katherine Ferrier
Sunday, May 12, 1-4pm  | $65

Celebrate Mother’s Day this year with a few hours of contemplative stitching. This workshop is an introduction to the practices of slow stitching, mending, and the art of enhancing the beauty of our textile repairs by making them intentionally visible. We’ll begin by learning the foundational stitches that make up most mends, including the running stitch, blanket stitch, and darning stitch. We’ll consider both woven (think denim) and knit items (think socks or sweaters) and the different mending techniques they require. After a little practice, we’ll each settle into mending an item we’ve brought. Along the way we’ll draw on the wisdom of our mothers and grandmothers as we contemplate what it means to repair, and how mending is a practice of being in right relationship not only to our clothes and the objects we use everyday, but to our planet, and to each other.
No experience necessary. 

Bring 2 items with holes to be patched, one woven and one knit. 
Scraps of woven and knit fabric for patches, if you have them. 
Yarn of a similar weight/thickness to your knit item, if you have some.
Needle, thread, scissors, and a selection of yarns and fabrics for patching will be provided. 

Cal Patch has been making, designing and teaching all things textile-related in New York City since 1991. She sews, crochets, embroiders, spins, prints, knits, dyes, and more. She designed clothing for Urban Outfitters, Free People, Gap, and Old Navy before developing her own line of one-off pieces called “hodge podge”, which she currently sells at craft fairs and in her Etsy shop. After owning a boutique for four years which showcased her own and other local indie designers’ work, she opened one of the nation’s first craft schools in 2002. She contributes to books and magazines such as Stitch N’ Bitch: The Happy Hooker, Mend It Better, Applique Your Way, Made by Hand, Crochet Today and Sew Stylish. In 2009 Cal relocated to upstate New York where she is learning to be a crafty farmer. She offers classes in the Hudson Valley, and travels to teach at retreats and events like Squam Art Workshops, the Makerie, and Lucky Star Art Camp. Her first book, Design-It-Yourself Clothes: Patternmaking Simplified, was published by Potter Craft.

Katherine Ferrier is a queer poet, dancer, textile artist, teacher, and community organizer based in Rockland, Maine. Her research grows out of a deep practice of paying poetic attention to the world, and lives in the intersecting communities of movers, makers, writers and activists. Since 2018, Katherine has directed the Medomak Fiberarts Retreat in Washington, ME, a nationally recognized gathering of fiber artists from around the world, where she teaches improvisational patchwork, slow stitching, wet felting, and writing for makers. Her work has been featured in Uppercase Magazine, The Knot, Contact Quarterly, and several poetry anthologies, including A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis, and a self-published collection of photographs and poems about making, called Thread Says Stay. She has recently shown her textile work at Speedwell Projects in Portland and at The Ice House Gallery on North Haven. She earned her B.A. in Dance/Women’s Studies from Middlebury, and M.F.A. in Dance from Sarah Lawrence. She regularly teaches and performs throughout the US and abroad, and believes in patchwork as the radical practice of being patient, saying yes, and making space for everyone at the table.