Weaving Club

Over the course of eight workshops, participants will be invited to engage in the ancient craft of handweaving as a practice in embodiment — as a way to participate and respond to life, to our environment, to pay attention, engage our senses and connect in community.

We will use the loom, playing with its many forms, as a site of exploration. A site that allows us to consider our relationship to place through the materials we weave that come from the lands we inhabit, to our ancestral lands and textile traditions, as well as to our plant, animal, elemental, and spirit kin that also weave in many forms. It also allows us to consider our relationship to both time and deep-time through rhythm, repetition, pattern, and structure.

The overarching inquiry and exploration of the workshop series is – What is a weaving? What is a Loom? This will be explored conceptually, technically, historically, and poetically, each week through making a variety of looms and also weaving on frame, table top, and floor looms that will be set up for different classes. We will be using a variety of materials from locally-sourced raw wool and yarn, to clay, fabric, rope, wire, foraged plant material, and other unusual weaving materials.

Each workshop will explore a different type of loom and a variety of materials, building upon each week and creating a continuous narrative through the series. We encourage participants to attend all 8 workshops or as many as you are able to. Workshops are completely free for the public; you must register ahead of time for each week. Registration link is below!

Workshops will take place every other Saturday from June-September 2024, 2-5pm at Bushel Collective in Delhi, New York. Dates are: June 15, June 29, July 13, July 27, Aug 10, Aug 24, Sept 14, and Sept 28 (this Saturday will be 10am-1pm).

There will be a culminating final exhibition on display from September 27th-30th, 2024 at Bushel Collective that will be interactive and invite the community to also participate and engage in the exploration of weaving as practice.

About Isabella Amstrup

The practice of weaving has and continues to offer me a space of personal exploration and inquiry–one that has challenged my ideas around creativity, artistic practice, and the role of art and the artist.

I learned to weave in graduate school at Philadelphia University where I received an M.S. in Textile Design with a focus in weaving. My training was heavily mechanistic and industry oriented, and I found myself being driven to innovate for innovation’s sake. After several years of working in the textile industry as a designer and production weaver, I have slowly been reshaping my relationship to weaving, cultivating a personal practice, and growing increasingly curious about my body and psyche’s initial familiarity with the ancient craft of weaving.

Alongside this, I have been teaching beginner and intermediate weaving workshops at Weaver House in Philadelphia for close to three years and studying consciousness-based modalities such as SourcePoint Therapy and BreakThrough at Succurro. These experiences have allowed me to set aside the mechanistic training and drive to innovate, to return to and explore the basic principles of weaving in their simplicity and depth. I have been exploring the origins of weaving, my own ancestral textile heritages, as well as the textile and farming context of the land I inhabit through learning to farm and through building relationships with local fibers farmers in Delaware County.

I am very curious about the power of craft and using one’s hands to better understand our place in the network of all things. I am eager to share this exploration of weaving with others through Weaving Club as a way to connect, create, and see what is truly possible in collaboration.