Welcome to the TextileX resource guide—a growing effort created to map out and connect the vibrant textile community and resources in the Portland metro area and beyond. The foundation of this guide was built from the diversity of organizations that participate in the Portland TextileX Month festival every October.
Development of and funding for this guide have been provided by Textile Hive with additional funding from a RACC catalyst grant in 2019.
We encourage you to contribute additional resources through this form and consider becoming a member of TextileX to help further develop this resource guide as well as Portland TextileX Month.
Organizations
Conservation through Poverty Alleviation (www.cpali.org) and SEPALI Madagascar
At CPALI, we work with rural farmers to develop sustainable livelihoods that support both people and ecosystems. In our approach, we focus on existing resources, local leadership, community ownership and linking partners to global markets.
Studios
Ivy Stovall
Ivy Stovall delights in the abundance, patterns, and chaos of the natural world and of humanity. So it makes sense that three years into a Biology degree, she flipped majors and earned a BA in Interdisciplinary Humanities at the University of West Florida. Her broad education prepared her perfectly for her work in outdoor education, which she began as a 4H camp naturalist, teaching outdoor skills and elementary and middle school science curriculum in the field. Since then she has taught high and low ropes challenge courses, ESL at all grade levels, and developed a North Portland homeschool co-op and independent art, adventure, and theater camps for kids in her community. These days she lives and works at The MudHut Kulturhaus, her St. Johns urban permaculture homestead, where she shares her enthusiasm for outdoor living and hosts camps, workshops, skillshares, music and theater, women’s groups, and community celebrations and ritual. She likes to always be harvesting and keeps her hands busy making herbal medicines, homebrews and fermentations, botanical inks, dyes and pigments, wild foods, basketry, and natural building. Always a student and always a teacher, Ivy enjoys contributing to and learning from the passionate people of the Rewild Portland community. Many Rewild kids have learned fire and knife skills around The MudHut fire pit and know Ivy as the Echoes in Time kids’ camp coordinator. Ivy loves the creativity, curiosity, and wildness of young people and is dedicated to the work of building healthy intergenerational communities connected to and through the natural world. Nursery Director & Youth Program Instructor at Rewild Portland.
Studios
Judilee Fitzhugh
Judilee Fitzhugh is a textile artisan who specializes in natural plant dyes and couture sewing. A tour of duty in Japan with the U.S. Navy led to a profound Japanese influence and a lifelong affection for indigo and plant fibers. She gained her Certificate in Craft at the Oregon College of Art and Craft in 2002, and taught in the BFA and Studio School programs until the school’s closure in 2019. Her finely crafted work combines natural objects with vintage fabric remnants, hand weaving, and surface design to portray a single moment in history.
Studios
Julie Beeler
https://mushroomcoloratlas.com
Julie Beeler is an acclaimed designer, artist, and educator with a deep love and curiosity for the natural world. Her work has been featured by The New York Times, Popular Science, The Smithsonian Institution and The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, among others. She created the Mushroom Color Atlas website to honor and celebrate the universe of resplendent color that exists in the fungi kingdom, making it accessible to people around the world. Her book The Mushroom Color Atlas, recently published by Chronicle Books, is a comprehensive primer on the universe of colors lurking inside fungi. Julie’s work inspires new ways of thinking about the possibility and power of natural color and supports an important, scalable trend and innovation to the benefit of the greater good: moving people away from synthetic colorants to those readily available in nature. She is equally inspired to experiment, discover, and contribute to our expanding knowledge and appreciation of fungi.
Studios
Megan Mesloh
Megan Mesloh is a textile artist and educator living in Hood River, Oregon. She has taught craft curriculum for ten years, with a focus on plant foraging, natural dyes, and weaving. She received a BFA in Textiles from Oregon College of Art and Craft in 2014. Through place-based exploration (foraging plants specific to a region, terrain or season) and a deep curiosity for the natural world, Megan has built a relationship with dye plants and natural fibers as a way to re-connect to where things come from and how they are made.
Studios
R.A.W. Textiles
R A W Textiles is a production dye studio in Portland, Oregon, that specializes in natural dyed, shibori, and rusted textiles.
Schools
Variegated Places
Cydni Carter Lopez is a place-based artist and designer based in SE Portland. Recently graduated with her MFA in Applied Craft & Design from the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Cydni has a passion for working with her hands and the slow processes that come with traditional craft work. Raised in the Pacific Northwest Cydni comes alive in nature; it is where she feels most grounded and finds infinite joys and curiosities. Her work uses the crafts of natural dyeing and foraging as methods of connecting deeper with the self and the world that we inhabit. Deepening connections between people and place Variegated Places invites you to reimagine the potential of our interconnected worlds through a color based collaboration with a plant. The website serves as a place based color catalogue and growing educational resource including instructions, demonstrations, material resource lists, and someday lesson plans designed to facilitate interconnection between our human selves and the places, spaces, and worlds all around us.