We are excited to announce our annual exhibit, this year hosted by Art & Soul Gallery on State Street.
Please join us for opening night on Thursday, January 8th, from 5-8pm. We will have weaving, spinning, and knitting/crochet demonstrations.
And please mark your calendar for Sunday workshops, also at Art & Soul! Open to all Guild members and the public! Registration details to come.
Sunday, January 11, 1–3pm – Fiber Jewelry with Mary Stanley. Learn to make fabric beads using simple needle-and-thread techniques. All supplies are provided.
Sunday, January 18, 1–3pm – Workshop with Barry Dwayne Hollis – details to follow.
Sunday, January 25, 1–3pm – A Taste of Basketry with Cathy Molholm. Create a natural-material bookmark or bracelet using basic basketry techniques. All materials are included.
All guild members are invited to our holiday tea party! You should have received an email with invitation details, and a potluck sign up. We will be meeting on December 6th, at 2pm.
Exhibit Note: If you’d like input on any item you are planning to submit for the exhibit, either in regard to pricing or hanging, let’s take advantage of our gathering to bring the piece with you. A few of us will be on hand to advise.
Let Cari know if you are missing your invite. Looking forward to seeing you there!
Our gallery exhibit: LAYERING, at Art and Soul Gallery (1323 State Street, Santa Barbara) will open on January 8, 2026 and run through February 1, 2026. Artworks based on the theme Layering need to be ready for submission and/or progress photos by early December. If you are a guild member, you should have received an email with instructions on how to submit your piece(s).
Stay tuned for more information as it becomes available.
Not sure how to price that piece of art you plan to submit for our exhibition in January? Pricing artwork can be very personal and varied depending on many considerations. At our November guild meeting, come learn from those with experience assigning a price to a piece of art-Kim McIntyre, owner of Art and Soul Gallery, our treasured members Tim Cardy & Georganne Alex, and mixed media artist Karen Lehrer will join Laurie on a panel to advise how best to assess the value you wish to place on your work. We will talk about the basics and each panelist will share their own perspective of the process and considerations one might think about as a decision is made on pricing a work of art.
Important note: the November 1st guild meeting will take place at Art & Soul, not the Goleta Valley Community Center.
Guild member Lisa Barry presented a detailed walkthrough of Ravelry, a website with a database of patterns and yarns, and many other features. Lisa has been a Ravelry user for many years, and joined when the site was still in beta! We discussed how to use the site for projects like weaving and spinning, even though the site is intended mainly for knit and crochet.
Lisa walked us through the site, using her extensive pattern library, stash, and forums list as examples. We learned how to use the advanced search for not only patterns, but yarns and projects as well. (Did you know you can sort projects by helpfulness?). We talked about using tags in Ravelry to not only categorize our projects page, but to also help organize our physical yarn storage. And we learned how to plan a road trip with Ravelry to maximize souvenir yarn purchases!
Our next meeting will be in November. Not sure how to price that piece of art you plan to submit for our exhibition in January? Pricing artwork can be very personal and varied depending on many considerations. Come learn from those with experience assigning a price to a piece of art-Kim McIntyre, owner of Art and Soul Gallery, our treasured members Tim Cardy & Georganne Alex, and mixed media artist Karen Lehrer will join Laurie on a panel to advise how best to assess the value you wish to place on your work. We will talk about the basics and each panelist will share their own perspective of the process and considerations one might think about as a decision is made on pricing a work of art.
At our last guild meeting, we heard from Andrew Baker, a recent scholarship recipient. Andrew participated in “Collections and Cloth”, an online course offered through Fibre Arts Take Two.
Andrew spoke about the paper/fabric textile he created, as well as the inspiration behind his pieces. He also brought along samples of materials and prototypes for discussion.
We also invited members to bring and share finished projects from Dye Day!
Join us! We’re excited to host Kristal Hale from @LACMA Los Angeles County Museum of Art for our July Guild Meeting & Program: Textile Conservation, this Saturday, July 12, 2025 at 9:30 AM at the Goleta Valley Community Center, Room 7. Kristal will talk about the process and materials involved in the conservation needs of textiles, including storage and pest mitigation.
Join us from 9:30 a.m. to noon on June 7, 2025, at the Goleta Community Center! Visiting artist, Lucy Arai, will present a historical overview and share contemporary applications of the traditional art of Japanese Sashiko, including examples of her own works on paper. We’ve reserved the larger space at Goleta Community Center so we can extend a wide welcome to others in the community who wish to learn about sashiko. Feel free to invite your (non-member) friends.
The sashiko workshop Lucy Arai is conducting will reframe this popular Japanese stitching within its cultural, functional, and historical contexts that date back to 10,000 years ago in Japan and was practiced by commoners into the 20th century. The patterned stitching that is known as sashiko emerged 425 years ago during the final feudal era of Japan during the Edo Period (1600-1868) when high taxes impoverished families and laws imposed invasive restrictions on all aspects of life, including the fibers, colors, and styles each class of society were permitted to wear; violators were punished by death.
Stitching strengthens, reinforces and quilts material for durability, warmth, and protection. In Japan, indigenous plant material was the sole resource for making clothing and was extremely labor-intensive work make the cloth, dye it in indigo for the antibacterial and insect repellent properties, and stitch garments and utilitarian textiles that had to be done year-round. Japanese placed the highest value on cloth because it was essential for survival, consequently, it was imperative to retain and preserve the structural integrity of cloth.
In this workshop, we will learn that sashiko, the little stabs of a threaded needle, is a structural stitching tradition of Japan and apply it to Japanese indigo-dyed cotton cloth and Japanese handmade papers. The only skill needed is the ability to hold a threaded sewing needle and passing it through a piece of cloth. You will feel the how sashiko effectively reinforces, strengthens, and quilts cloth, and you will see how the patterns emerged in the stitching practice over the centuries and generations of stitching to extend the life and retain the integrity of cloth for survival.
Lucy Arai continues to practice the sashiko running-stitch tradition of Japan as it was transmitted to her from her uncle in Tokyo more than 54 years ago. She has formal studio training in western art and sculptural ceramics, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of South Carolina, and Master of Fine Arts degree and Certificate of Graduate Studies from the University of Michigan. Each of these three skill-sets have enabled Arai to learn through her hands, to create a new medium by applying the lessons she learned, and to be able to document, contextualize, and explain the process of development with the intent to educate and share. Her work is part of the U.S. Department of State Arts in Embassies Program and exhibited nationally and internationally.
Items participants need to bring for the workshop:
12” ruler, preferably clear with measurement lines
small scissors
white dressmaking pencil
graphite pencil
Member pricing is $90, non-member pricing is $110 (both prices include a $20 materials kit!). This price includes either the Saturday sessions, or the Sunday sessions — each with the option to add an extra Sunday afternoon session for $30. Additional sign-up details coming soon!
We will hear from Guild member, Agnes Petruska, who received a Guild scholarship to attend a weaving workshop in Hungary last summer. Agnes will share photos and samples from the work she did and talk about traditional Hungarian weaving and embroidery.
Goleta Community Center, 5679 Hollister Avenue, 9:30 am meeting, 10:00 am call to order.
