2027 Black Cat Makerie : Weaving Wonder with Jessie Mordine Young

WEAVING WONDER WITH JESSIE MORDINE YOUNG

The heart of this retreat is to connect through craft. The experience is about cultivating curiosity and discovering new possibilities through material and process in a woven form

Together we’ll learn the fundamentals of tapestry weaving on a frame loom while exploring how to translate inspiration into thoughtful woven compositions. Through a material-driven practice, we’ll look closely at the landscape around us — its colors, textures, forms, and natural materials — and consider how these observations can inform what we create.

Throughout three beautiful days, Jessie will cover the basics of frame loom weaving: from warping the loom, to drafting a design, to learning a variety of tapestry techniques. We will look at structure, image building, and materiality, inviting students to incorporate a variety of fibers and intentionally sourced objects from Black Cat Farm, such as botanicals, small stones, and other nature bits, as part of a process referred to as “tactile collage.” In a series of two workshops within spread across the three days, students will create a three-dimensional piece in the form of a woven shoulder bag or market tote on the first day, and a family of smaller weavings incorporating all the techniques on the second and third days. This retreat experience is perfect for beginners and weaving enthusiasts alike — a chance to create or expand your personal weaving practice, with variations as far as your imagination can take you.

BLACK CAT FARM

Black Cat Farm ~ a place where all are welcome and the seeds of hope surround you. Nestled among the rolling fields just outside Boulder, Colorado, this rustic working farm is home to our Black Cat Makerie retreats. Tucked away from the rush of the world, time stands still. The beauty here isn’t curated, but rather defined by the ever-changing seasons and the pulse of growth and possibility at every turn. No matter where you are coming from or which season of life you find yourself in, you’ll feel the embrace of something so grounding and deeply authentic you might not ever forget it.

Using Black Cat’s Certified Organic farm as a source of creativity, Chef Eric Skokan creates an award-winning cuisine vibrant with seasonality. The kitchen draws heavily from the farm’s more than 250 varieties of organic vegetables, legumes, grains, herbs and flowers, as well as its large flock of heritage sheep and its robust population of heritage pigs, paving the way for a limitless palette of flavors, colors, and textures from which to build each food experience. The farm team devotes hours every day to harvesting ingredients, and then crafting them into outstanding dishes that mirror what is thriving in the fields. We can’t wait for you to experience it all for yourself!