Visible Mending with Katrina Rodabaugh
Led By: Katrina Rodabaugh
Fee: $400 (Deposit: $100)
July 13- July 15, 2018
This Slow Textiles Retreat focuses on natural dyes, hand-stitching, mending, and various ways of incorporating sustainable, mindful, and holistic textile arts into creative work. Students will learn simple yet beautiful hand-stitching techniques to mend, darn, and repair garments or to add thoughtful embellishment to various fiber projects.
Katrina will share textile techniques; delve deeper into the conversation around slow textiles, slow fashion, and slow living; share favorite resources, tools, and materials; and foster an inclusive community that allows participants to engage with the rural atmosphere of the monastery gardens, walking trails, outdoor labyrinth, and seating for taking in the view of the Hudson River Valley.
Katrina Rodabaugh an artist, writer, and crafter working across disciplines to explore environmental and social issues through traditional craft techniques. Mostly, she rethinks the relationship between fiber art, sustainability, and slow fashion. Since August 2013 she been on a fashion fast, Make Thrift Mend, to focus on mending, plant dyes, and prioritizing handmade or secondhand garments instead of buying new clothing. She also grows, forages, and harvest dye plants near my farmhouse in the Hudson Valley.
Her work has appeared in galleries, magazines, theaters, books, juried craft fairs, and alternative arts venues like the tiny house her husband built out of reclaimed materials that she used as her art studio on the sidewalk of downtown San Francisco. She published her first book, The Paper Playhouse: Awesome Art Projects for Kids Using Paper, Boxes, and Books in January 2015. She received artist awards, grants, and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, Zellerbach Family Foundation, Puffin Foundation, Creative Capacity Fund, and InstarLodge among others. Her now-retired blog, Made by Katrina, won the Country Living Blue Ribbon Blogger Award.
She holds a BA in Environmental Studies and an MFA in Creative Writing but she has been working with arts organizations and making fiber arts her entire adult life. In 2013, shortly after the Rana Plaza garment factory collapsed in Dhaka Bangladesh, she finally combined her work and passions into one project, Make Thrift Mend, and she hasn’t looked back. This project allows her to use her various training in sustainability, creative thinking, fibers, and community organizing with a single focus on sustainable fashion. Of course, this also includes larger themes like feminism, gender, class, consumerism, globalization, labor practices, cross-disciplinary communication, social practice, social justice, and the inherent challenges of sustainable living. In her opinion, this is all about healing.
She originally from Horseheads, NY, then spent two decades between Brooklyn, NY; San Francisco, CA; and Oakland, CA before returning to Upstate NY in 2015. She now lives in the Hudson Valley, two hours north of Manhattan, with her artist husband and our two young sons. She and her husband are slowly renovating a 200-year-old farmhouse and converting the adjacent carriage barn into an art studio. The family has planting fruit trees, establishing gardens, tending dye plants, and preparing to welcome chickens and bees. Mostly, she tries to shorten the distance between her studio practice and the plants in her yard whenever possible. For more info about Katrina and her work click here.