The third annual Texas Freestyle Textile Retreat will be held this fall at the Wimberley Community Center. Hosted by the Wimberley Valley Saori weaving studio, the three-day retreat from November 1 through 4 will offer classes, workshops and a maker’s market for participants. The retreat is organized by weaver Kathy Utts of Wimberley Valley Saori; weaver Debra Lambert, owner of Picasso’s Moon of Sarasota, FL; and Kathy Rothstein, a Wimberley textile enthusiast.
Workshops include Saori weaving, spinning, felting, basket weaving, art journaling, fabric collage, rug hooking, Japanese-inspired mending and spirit doll construction. Classes are designed to inspire and teach beginners as well as creative crafters and artists who have years of experience in the fiber medium.
Instructors include well-known fiber artists Q Wirtz, Karen Smith, Cindy Pauchey, Stacey Budge-Kamison, Lyn Belisle, Jenifer Kulick, Sandra Doak, Barbara Attwell and organizers Kathy Utts and Debra Lambert.
Cognizant of the tremendous interest in fiber arts, organizers Utts and Lambert expect upwards of 60 participants at this year’s retreat. The first workshop in 2021 drew 25 participants, despite its timing during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the second drew 52. Students came from all over — Seattle, Santa Fe, Florida, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio — and from a number of points in between.
Wimberley Saori weaver Utts began her journey in the fiber arts “about 15 years ago” when her son came home from school with a knitting project. As a teen, she had knitted and sewn, but her interests were replaced by the demands of her early years. Her son’s knitting project rekindled her interest in textiles, and not long afterwards, she attended a weaving convention in Houston. There she met internationally known weaver and fiber artist Anita Luvera Mayer, aged 90 at the time, who became an informal mentor. Mayer has since passed away, but her work remains in museum collections in the US and beyond.
“Fiber artists,” Utts said, “are people who fall somewhere between two ends of a spectrum. Some want to follow a pattern and achieve perfection by creating an object without flaws. Others want to follow their creative imagination for the sheer pleasure of expressing themselves. I fall into the latter category.”
For her, Saori weaving fit her creative profile perfectly. Pronounced Sah-Ory, the Japanese word is the combination of “sai,” meaning everything has its own innate dignity, and “ori,” the word for weaving. It is a contemporary hand weaving method founded by Misao Jo in 1969. A radical departure from traditional weaving, the goal of Saori isn’t perfection but imperfection. The approach is often described as “freeing” for its practitioners.
Utts met Saori founder Misao Jo twice in Japan - once in 2015 when she was 102 years old and again in 2016 and still working at the loom. Misao died in 2018 at the age of 104.
Local crafters might recall that Utts owned the Ply fiber store on the Wimberley square from 2013 to 2018. Now she owns the only registered, full-service Saori weaving studio in Texas.
“The studio,” she says, “is a place to become comfortable with the Saori loom, to learn weaving techniques, gain inspiration and to share ideas or simply to get into a zone where you can work on a piece of art.”
For newcomers to the practice, she shares the following observation: “I’ve never had a student who pulled their item off the loom who wasn’t flabbergasted at what they’d created.”
Besides multiple looms in her studio, there is an entire wall of colorful cones of cotton yarn, bamboo, fine merino wool, silk, alpaca and other special fibers in a dazzling range of colors.
For people interested in learning more about Saori weaving and attending the retreat in November, go to wimberleyvalleysaori. com for details.
