Instructors at Taproot Video

Marilyn Romatka has a passion for Folk Art. She has been teaching spinning, weaving, and many other ethnic crafts to both children and adults throughout the Pacific Northwest, as well as national Crafting Conferences, for many years. Marilyn's passion is to kindle the love for the beauty that we can create with just our hands and a few simple tools. Her lessons include detailed and clear instructions as well as cultural and/or historical background, and in so doing provide context and a frame of reference for the skill. Marilyn's videos are not only a perfect way to learn the skill yourself, but also a wonderful resource if you plan to teach the skill to a group of children or young adults, whether it's in a school class, at a birthday party, to your boy- or girl-scout troop, or any other occasion. Her background in science makes her teaching style organized and clear; her style gives the class zing.

Learn more about Marilyn and the folk arts she teaches at her website or her facebook page.

Kris Leet has been tablet weaving and teaching for over 40 years. Her current research and weaving obsession is the Iron Age and Medieval tablet woven bands, techniques, and tools. She is co-author, with Linda Malan, of the book The Willful Pursuit of Complexity, and author of Tablet Weaving at the Dawn of the Iron Age: The Verucchio Twist Patterned Bands, In Praise of Complexity: A Comparison of Modern and Medieval Tablet Weaving, Decoding Archaeological Textiles, One Loom or Two: An Foundational Myth Explored, and A Reconstruction of a Late-14th Century Tablet Woven Tubular Band. She holds a Master of Social Work degree from the University of South Florida, and was a child and family therapist for many years.

Kris says: "Like my grandmother, I came to art late in life. Although I learned to weave in 1971, I was a fine arts student (painting, metalwork, clay) in the mid-seventies, and had my first art show (textiles and mixed media) in the late seventies, I did not come to understand art as my vocation until my fifties. I choose to work with my hands. I am touched by everything that I manipulate; the work and I exchange energy, and we are both changed by the process."

Kris works in several mediums: fiber, gourds, coiled basketry, leather, bookbinding, embroidery, applique, and metal.

Laverne Waddington has been learning to weave on simple looms with indigenous teachers in South America since 1996. In her home in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, she draws on ethnic design influences from around the world to create pieces on a backstrap loom using the various techniques and structures she has studied in South America.

In 2010 she published her first book on one of her favorite warp-faced patterning techniques, Andean Pebble Weave, which was followed by More Adventures in Warp-faced Pick-up Patterns in 2012.

Her articles on backstrap weaving and indigenous textiles have appeared in Handwoven and Shuttle, Spindle & Dyepot.

She has shared her skills and experiences with many visitors to Bolivia over the years and now reaches a global audience with her weaving tutorials and travel tales on her blog. She provides online advice and support to weavers through forums such as Ravelry and teaches and speaks at guilds and textile conferences around the world.

Spinning cotton has been a decades-long passion for me, and I am so glad that you have come to explore more about this exciting fiber.

For millenia, humans have had a close and vital association with cotton, but during the 20th century much of the knowledge about hand spinning cotton fell from general use and cotton became a fiber that spinners shied away from. "Cotton has too a staple length," they would say, "that must mean it's hard to spin!" But they would be wrong. With the tips and techniques I teach, I'll have you spinning this wonderful fiber in a jiffy. Nothing feels better on your body than hand-spun cotton garments!

I have a variety of articles on many aspects of working with cotton on my website.

After years of working in the communications field, Linda took her first weaving lesson at Ruthie’s Weaving Studio in Portland on November 1, 1984, a date that “truly changed my life”. She started teaching tablet weaving in 1992, and became interested in ply-split braiding after taking a workshop with Peter Collingwood in 1993. All the years since then, she has focused steadfastly on these two rather obscure fiber techniques.

She has self-published several instruction books, written dozens of articles for fiber-related publications, taught workshops for conferences and guilds across North America and in England, and exhibited her work internationally.

To learn more about Linda Hendrickson visit her website.

Internationally-recognized teacher John Mullarkey has been tablet weaving for over a decade. His work has been displayed in the Missouri History Museum, and garments using his card woven bands have been featured in international fashion shows. His designs are featured frequently in Handwoven. John is the primary author of A Tablet Weaver's Pattern Book, and has produced two DVDs for Interweave Press:Tablet Weaving Made Easy and Double-Faced Tablet Weaving. He is the developer of the Schacht Zoom Loom.

To learn more about John Mullarkey, visit his website at malarkycrafts.com.

Classes with John Mullarkey will become available in the first half of 2017.

Carol James has always been interested in playing with strings and is of the opinion that anywhere is a good place to weave. She was introduced to fingerweaving by a Québecois in 1981, and it was love at first sight. Her passion for the technique had earned her the name ‘SashWeaver’. Seeing the name, military re-enactors asked her for reproduction sashes … sprang sashes, and she had to explore that technique as well.

To better understand these items, she maps out the patterns, and has made replicas of some of these items for clients including George Washington’s Mount Vernon, the German Archaeological Institute, and the Norwegian Army Museum.

Happy to share her knowledge, and hoping to provide an easier learning-curve for others, she agreed to teach. Her students encouraged her to publish the handouts she created for them. A very patient teacher of students in Canada, the US, New Zealand, and Europe, she is the author of numerous articles and three books: Fingerweaving Untangled and Sprang Unsprung and a new book of Sprang Lace Patterns.

Carol plans to release a video teaching sprang with Taproot Video in 2017.

John Marshall has been sharing his interest in Japan for over fifty years. After developing an inter-curriculum unit on Japanese culture while still in Junior High School, John went on to apprentice under traditional artists in Japan. His passion is sharing his love for this culture through traditional crafts and cultural attitudes. John has exhibited his artwork around the world, teaches regularly at home and abroad for museums, guilds, universities, and museums. John is very much looking forward to sharing with an even broader audience through Taproot Video.

John plans to release videos on Japanese textile techniques with Taproot Video in 2017.

Connie is a licensed designer for the McCall Pattern Company under the Butterick label and is President and CEO of Fashion Patterns by Coni that specializes in patterns for mature figures in sizes 8-20 and 1X to 6X.

She is a nationally and internationally recognized lecturer, fashion specialist, educator and author of sewing DVDs, sewing and pattern textbooks. These include A Guide to Fashion Sewing, The Art of Fashion Draping, and Patternmaking Made Easy. In 2016 the Association of Sewing and Design Professionals recognized Connie for the Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2009 the American Sewing Guild awarded her with the selection for the Sewing Hall of Fame. nominated for a 2013 Golden Pen Award.

She is a former instructor at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising (FIDM) in Los Angeles, California. Her professional experience includes positions as a designer, design consultant, patternmaker, and grader in the Los Angeles garment industry.

Connie earned her degree in Fashion Design from Los Angeles Trade Tech and received her teaching credentials from the University of California Los Angeles.

Lucy has been an adventurous knitter since she was 17. She is originally from the UK, where she was a navigating officer in the Merchant Navy. She now lives in Nova Scotia. The Fleece Artist in Halifax, her LYS, gave her the opportunity to teach some classes, and she discovered her passion for sharing the engineering marvels of knitting. She has not stopped spreading the joy of Happy Stitches in the 25 years since, finding ingenious and intriguing ways to expand traditional techniques.

She is known for her colourful appearance and her friendly, detailed, technique-rich knitting patterns, and her particular fondness for double-layer knitting. She has written three books; Cool Socks Warm Feet, Cool Knitters Finish in Style and A Little Book of BIG Holes for Hand-knitters! and has filmed 16 DVD titles, all of which will become available on Taproot Video. She has five on-line classes with Craftsy.com: Foundations of Double Knitting, My First Socks, Fearless Knitting, Next Steps in Socks and Sock Knitalong 2016.

She also annually offers an unusual knitting camp either on Tancook Island off Nova Scotia, or sometimes much further afield. Neatby enjoys trying to dispel the myth that only sedentary, quiet people in rocking chairs knit: she loves cycling, down-hill skiing, quilting, colourful home improvement and narrow-boating on the historic UK canal system. Visit Lucy at LucyNeatby.com