Tutors
The tutors who provide our workshops come from a wide and varied background, but all have bags of enthusiasm and experience, whether they are professional artists and teachers or brilliant amateurs and hobbyists. (More details will be added soon). This season’s tutors are highlighted in pink.
- Helen Agarwal
Helen!
Helen fell in love with textiles when, as a young BBC reporter, she was sent to cover an embroidery exhibition. What she found there rocked her world! Her work is rooted in the textures of the Pennine landscape she loves so well, and her passion for colour. Helen has taught workshops of various kinds in the local area for many years and now is a firm believer in having fun! You can find out more about her at www.dixonhill.net.
- Clare Alderson
- Carol Coleman
Claire Alderson brings the joy of feltmaking to Texere Tribe. She currently teaches at South Notts College and has a studio in the centre of Nottingham. Her courses are full of practical advice and she encourages students to develop their own unique style.
- Diane Colover
Diane!
- Diane is a lovely local knitter who specialises in working with lots of colours and patterns. She has taught the Kaffe Fasset style of free knitting to create a picture in colour. Follow her thoughts and tips in her blog: dc-knits.blogspot.com
- Kay Greenlees
- Kirsty Hopkins
- Sandra Inskip
- Claire Ketteman
- Ann Kingstone
- Alysn Midgelow-Marsden
- Janet Nash
- Pat Osborne
- Gail Pickles
- David Shackleton
- Irene Sharman
- Pete & Carol Leonard
- Kari Stanley-Smith
- Susan Wilkinson
- Ruth Gilbert
Kirsty Hopkins is a textile artist living and working in the Yorkshire Dales and specialising in felting techniques. She has exhibited around the UK and unusually, in Seoul, South Korea. She has just established a permanent base at the King Street Workshops in Pateley Bridge. Kirsty has work in private collections throughout the U.S.A., Cypress, South Korea, Australia and the U.K.
Sandra is a qualified and experienced tutor, who enjoys sharing her love of textiles, particularly knitting and crochet. Her calm and patient approach to learning a practical subject has won praise and enthusiasm from her pupils. Sandra’s work has been exhibited in galleries around Yorkshire
Claire brings her love of many textile crafts to Texere. She transforms scraps from your stash into gorgeous, wearable creations and combines knitting, felting, machine embroidery and embellishment in her workshops.
Ann is a prolific knitwear designer based in Yorkshire. Her designs are generally inspired by the history, literature, and traditions of her native country and its neighbours. A love of the technology of the knitting process leads her to interpret these using the most up-to-date hand-knitting techniques. This summer she spent a week at Knit Camp and was commissioned to design a vest for the event!
Alysn works in mixed-media textiles, incorporating many unusual materials into her such as metal, wire, paper and Angelina fibre. She has published three books: Between the Sheets with Angelina (a workbook for fusible fibres), This Lustr’ed Cloth (a textile artists workbook for metals) and The Continuous Thread of Revelation.
Alysn exhibits in galleries, tutors workshops and runs a contemporary art gallery called ‘The Beetroot Tree’ in Draycott. She is a regular exhibitor at the Knitting and Stitching Show in London & Harrogate.
Janet has been teaching many types of mixed media textiles for many years. She is an expert in machine embroidery and can make your machine do unthinkable things! She is also a whizz with dissolvable fabrics, plus melting, burning and bonding techniques that take textiles to a really creative level!
Pat teaches various styles of decorative painting, weaving, folk art and different types of rugmaking, both here and abroad (often in remote parts of Africa). For Texere Tribe, she is indulging her main passion which is making rag rugs.
David began tablet weaving as a result of joining a re-enactment group. He has built up a reputation for quality, authenticity and complexity in reconstructing historical textiles.
Recent highlights include a show at Bamburgh castle which was filmed for Channel 4’s “Coast”, a request for advice on costume design on the forthcoming film “The Last Airbender” and teaching a Serbian archaeologist, how to reconstruct an iron age textile for a museum exhibition.
Pete & Carol!
Carol and Pete are both obsessed with spinning, knitting – all things fibre in fact, which led them into teaching various yarn related workshops & to the inescapable conclusion that they should teach their greatest passion, spindle spinning, together! They survive this and so too do the workshop participants. They have the good fortune to live in a gritstone cottage in West Yorkshire with their three cats and more wheels, spindles and fibres than will comfortably fit within the walls! Details of workshops, may be found on their web site www.spindlers2.com or follow Carol’s blog at www.carollsblog.blogspot.com.
After graduating from Huddersfield University, Kari has worked as a Textile Designer in Huddersfield and Bradford. She now works as a freelance textile designer and textile artist running workshops in primary and secondary schools across Kirklees and Calderdale.
Susan graduated from Bradford College with a diploma in Art & Design, specialising in textile and fashion. She trained as a pattern designer with Hayfield and continued to freelance design for some of the biggest names in knitting including Sirdar, King Cole and Twilleys. She brings her knowledge and years of experience to the Texere Tribe programme to teach all the tricks of the trade for designing your own unique knitting pattern.
Ruth is a local hand weaver and textile historian, making both modern work and replicas of historic cloth. She enjoys sharing her enthusiasm for the potential of simple structures and techniques and is keen to show us that expensive equipment isn’t always needed to produce beautiful pieces of work.