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.
Studios
Amy Reader
Amy Reader is a fiber and installation artist based in Portland, OR. Her primary interest is in using fibers and textiles to create sculptural forms. In 2015, Amy facilitated a large-scale, collaborative crochet installation that received international acclaim. In 2016, Amy traveled to Peru for an artist residency in the Amazon Rainforest where she built a permanent sculpture in the jungle. From 2016-2018, Amy was a Display Artist at Anthropologie where she created large scale installations and window displays. Currently, Amy splits her time between sewing her own artwork, teaching workshops, and writing educational blogs. Amy is a member of the Society for Embroidered Work - an international honor society promoting the best stitched art worldwide. She has been featured on local news segments like Wilson’s World on WCCB and on the art blog Brown Paper Bag.
Studios
Charlie Wilcox
Charlie Wilcox is a designer, animator, embroiderist, musician, artist, collaborator, and friend who hails from Lindstrom, Minnesota, also known as “America’s Little Sweden.” Charlie’s social practice involves exploring what it means to turn the creation of animation into a hands-on event that can focalize and generate community. By developing animation into a collaborative act that integrates qualities from textile craftwork and participatory art, Charlie explores new situations and purposes for animation as a method for collective expression and visioning. His work creates methodologies for representations of social design and collaboration that favor embodied realities beyond sheer logicism and consensus. Charlie makes his own embroidered animations, curates and organizes the Frombelow Microcinema, helps organize Portland Textile Month, works in the performing arts departments at Reed College, and plays tuba in the punk band Horsebag.
Studios
Jenny Wilde
Jenny Wilde is an artist, writer, and herbalist currently living in Portland, OR. She has a BFA in Sculpture from California College of the Arts (2010) and an MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art (2022). She uses a plurality of mediums such as writing, painting, film, and embroidery to explore from multiple vantage points the nature of memory, absence, and dislocation, and the stories we tell to fill in the gaps; she currently hosts an online Death Cafe. Her work has been shown in the San Francisco Bay Area and Portland, OR.
Studios
Limei Lai
Limei Lai enjoys working with paint, fabric and clay. She is curious about how memories and experience work with objects to create cultural value and aesthetic value in spaces, thus addressing and commenting past and present to encourage good changes. Her interactive community engagement installation focuses on creating spaces and voices for intergenerational communication. Art as an experience not only visually critiques, questions, reflects, but also celebrates. Limei is the artist member at Blackfish Gallery. She was the founder and curator of Playground Gallery and the vice-president of Oregon Chinese Artist Association. Her works were shown in Local 14 Art Show, The Arts Center at Corvallis, Ashland Fiber Arts Collective, Newport Visual Arts Center, Paragon Gallery, Lansu Garden, The Place, PNCA, Red E Cafe Gallery, Playground Gallery. Her murals were in north Portland and Chinatown Portland.
Studios
Liz Borowski
Liz Borowski is an artist living and working in Portland, Oregon. With a BFA from the University of Arizona, her work has been featured in exhibitions throughout the Pacific Northwest. She has taught felting classes at Naked Sheep & Twisted yarn stores. Teaching beginning watercolor classes in her home studio in NE Portland, Liz says her creative process is akin to a magical practice - "When I paint, I get out of the way and let the work flow through me. The alchemy of mark-making and mapping generates a search for meaning, a tool for learning, and a way to find my place in the world. Each painting is made of layers of watercolor, gouache and wax pastels. The final step to my paintings is stitching embroidery thread. I find the application of mending the painting to be healing, and a reflective process that speaks to a time-honored hand arts tradition.”
Studios
Orquidia Violeta
Orquidia Violeta is a Salvadoran-American textile artist. Growing up in a dirt-floored farmhouse in Central America. Orquidia crossed the US border as a six-year-old refugee and went on to earn an Associate of the Arts degree from the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising. Living in Oregon, Orquidia continues to challenge herself as a salvage textile artist, exploring new methods and mediums, such as machine and hand embroidery, knitting, weaving, appliqué, soft-sculpture, fiber-collage, drawing, painting and eco-fabric dyeing to tell colorful stories on the diversity of people.
cooperative embroidery fashion sculpture textile art wearable art
Organizations
SWANA Stitch
https://www.instagram.com/swanastitchpdx/
Portland SWANA Stitch is a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic community event. We gather monthly to practice ancestral fiber arts and organize within the Southwest Asian and North African community. Our members practice traditional regional fiber arts like Palestinian Tatreez, mending, knitting, crocheting, Armenian Janyak, Marash, and quilting. We also organize classes and events, both for our members and the public. Portland SWANA Stitch is housed at SWANA Rose Culture and Community Center and organized by its members. Homelands Within is curated by Amirra Malak, Ali Leeds and Milla Prince
Studios
Tiny Pricks Project
www.instagram.com/tinypricksproject
Tiny Pricks is a public art project created and curated by Diana Weymar. Contributors from around the world are stitching Donald Trump’s words into textiles, creating the material record of his presidency and of the movement against it. Tiny Pricks Project holds a creative space in a tumultuous political climate. The collection counterbalances the impermanence of Twitter and other social media, and Trump’s statements as president through the use of textiles that embody warmth, craft, permanence, civility, and a shared history. The daintiness and integrity of each piece stand in stark contrast to his presidency.
Businesses
Wrenbird Arts
Hi there! Thanks for stopping by wrenbirdarts! I'm Erin Eggenburg, sometimes called "wrenbird", hence the name of my business. I have always been "crafty" and in 2011, I dabbled my way over to hand embroidery, and fell deeply in love with it. I decided to add a few hankies to what was then my fabric wallet shop on Etsy, and the wallets soon became a thing of the past. For the next few years, I would go on to hand embroider more than 15,000 hankies! Then in 2018, while working at a local creative reuse non-profit, I found a way to blend embroidery and upcycling/reuse, called visible mending. I was able to salvage my favorite pair of jeans with a few patches and some embroidery. As I shared my projects locally and on social media, there was an enormous positive response. I began teaching mending workshops and created my own mending and embroidery patterns. When COVID hit, I took my workshops online, and started Mending Club for fellow stitchers looking to connect during a very stressful and scary time. Mending Club has taken a different form, but still meets online once a month, and continues to grow in membership today. Wrenbirdarts, like many handmade businesses started out on Etsy, and though wrenbirdarts.com has so many more resources, I continue to maintain a shop on Etsy for mending and embroidery patterns and my book. If you'd like to read the reviews from my customers, please click here. Every month, I donate to various local and national non-profits in support of social justice, civil and human rights. I am an ardent supporter of reproductive rights, BIPOC and LGBTQI rights for equality. My book, The Mending Directory, was released in November of 2021. It's a book of 52 mending patterns that includes detailed instructions, and some mending transfer designs too! Order a copy here or from your local bookstore! I've lived in lots of different places in the United States over the years. About 10 years ago, I moved to the Pacific Northwest, and it felt like home. I currently live in Portland, Oregon with my adorable cats, and sweet partner. When I'm not teaching workshops, or working on a mending project, you'll find me attending local events, gardening, thrift shopping or playing pinball.