2022 Shenandoah Valley Fiber Festival

M Theresa Brown is a professional portrait artist, printmaker and fiber artist whose long career embraces many areas of the Arts. Her years of printmaking and color work led her to explore the fiber arts. Using many similar skills and accumulated knowledge, she has evolved as a hand painter and ecoprinter on natural fibers. She uses natural dyes and low impact synthetic dyes and merges them into unique, beautiful designs on silk, wool and leather. She then transforms the hand dyed or ecoprinted fabric into artisanal clothing, accessories and art. Her ecoprinted fiber work has appeared in international publications such as

Peggy grew up outside of San Francisco, CA and learned the art of knitting and crochet from her grandmother. She relocated to the East coast and now Peggy lives in NVA with her husband and children. She knits daily and works with other creative fiber avenues. After getting her Masters at Austin Peay in Tennesse, she taught in the classroom in the late 90s but family/work life balance took the wheel. She is coming back this season to teach a fun knitting style that also takes a bit of concentration: Double knitting. You can find her on Ravelry as Pegdog.

Dixie Faries lives in Northern Virginia with her husband, Efrain, two spoiled cats and four squawking birds. She has been as been knitting and crocheting for more than 50 years. The real turning point in her skills came about once she discovered knitting conferences, taking classes at every opportunity both in the U.S. and overseas. This broadened both her understanding of the craft and her abilities to tackle new and unique projects and techniques. Currently Dixie has both Knitting I and Knitting II Instructor Certification from the Craft Yarn Council.

Melissa Weaver Dunning is a hand-weaver, spinner and knitter with nearly 40 years of experience working on antique equipment to recreate 18th and 19th century home produced textiles. She began her textile study with Scottish master weaver Norman Kennedy in 1980, and carries on this rich tradition in her own teaching. Melissa is an avid tartan and linen weaver, a compulsive knitter and a lover of wool who enjoys sharing her passion for weaving and spinning with students. She is also a ballad singer, specializing in the ballads and songs of Ireland, Scotland and England from before Napoleon's time.

Kim Garver, educator knitting techniques/restorer of vintage sock knitting machines – fifteen years dedicated to teaching others in the fiber community. Qualifications: Fostering skills to enrich lives and learning, through the fiber arts community, is a continuing and integral part of my business. I am an internationally known sock knitting instructor and have a long history of teaching in the Fiber Arts field. I have been conducting workshops and teaching various “olden way” methods for 15 years. My successes in the Fiber community are the success of my students, it is a gift God gave me and one I fully embrace. I’ve taught workshops throughout the mid-west and eastern regions of the United Sates for different organizations and fairs relegated to the fiber community. I have conducted live international webinars for the last three years and have a number of students who have travelled from Japan, Germany and England to attend my in-person workshops. I am flattered to be a world-renowned educator for vintage style techniques and machines.

A native San Franciscan, Mary Gildersleeve began designing shortly after teaching herself to knit at the age of 8. Knitting and designing were her constant activities throughout undergrad (BA Journalism), grad school (MBA Marketing) and family life until, in 1997, she went “professional” and established By Hand, With Heart…traditional hand-knit designs with a modern twist. Gildersleeve’s designs have been published in Knitters, Cast On, Interweave Knits and a lace design was featured on the cover of the Second Unofficial Downton Abbey Knits. She has two books published: Great Yarns for the Close-Knit Family: over two dozen hand-knit designs inspired by a dozen fantastic family read-alouds and In His Image: Nurturing Creativity in the Heart of Your Home. She is still designing, teaching knitting, and generally loving her (albeit hectic) life in Northern Virginia, 50+ years after first learning to knit.

TJ, aka the Peahen, is part of the dynamic spinning and spindle making duo The Spanish Peacock. She has been spinning for over 18 years and finds true joy inspiring and teaching others about the art of spinning with a supported spindle. When she's not spinning she's creating content for her blog, vlog, and podcast.

Jen is a knitwear designer, coach & teacher, and grading consultant. She believes every knitter deserves patterns that fit perfectly, reflect our identities, and never hit the closet floor. Jen's designs are size inclusive and focused on fine-finishing, so that you can create the bespoke, heirloom knits of your dreams.

Dorothea Pierce has been knitting for over fifty years and spinning for over thirty. Her absolute favorite thing to do, EVER, is teach people how to spin and knit. She has taught 3 days spinning workshops, five-minute knitting tutorials, and everything in between. She owns a yarn store in Hardy Virginia (near Roanoke) and hosts the Skein Away Fiber Retreat at Smith Mountain Lake in the spring and fall of each year. IN her spare time, oh wait, she doesn’t have any! But she sure does have fun!!

My name is Felicia White I’m 35 and I’ve been crocheting for 25 years and knitting for 11 years. I’ve taught crochet classes before at the Romney Co-Op and I’ve taught a couple of my friends to knit.

The Foldout Cat is a multi-creative fiber business, run by Liza Q. Wirtz (aka Q, aka the Chief Feline) with the frequent and welcome assistance of partners Fiber J and Maker J. All three of us are fiber polyartists and teachers (Q's an estate-planning attorney on the side, because she's multibrained like that ). We believe that everyone's an artist and that giving people access to fiber-arts tools, supplies, and knowledge lets them prove it to themselves. We make and sell uniquely beautiful art batts using our one-of-a-kind Batt Buffet, featuring wool, Angelina, bamboo, and more. We also weave in the SAORI tradition, spin on various wheels, teach freespirited weaving and spinning, and sell our finished items, including handspun yarn, woven artwork and clothing, and simple needle-felting kits and tools. The Foldout Cat is a dealer for Akerworks, Ashford, and Strauch, and a reseller of Foxglove Fiber’s Merino wool.