Workshop Teachers
Jane Atkinson
Jane Atkinson is an artist in contemporary bobbin lace. She is a founding partner in The Adventurous Lacemakers, teaching the design of Diamond Mesh laces via Patreon.
She has had two solo shows, Pinned in Place and Ebb’n’Flow, and exhibited in ‘Lace not Lace’, New Jersey; Fils Comuns, Spain (with Denise Watts) and in numerous shows around the UK with the Lace Guild and the 89 Lace Group, Make Southwest, Making Dorset, Bournemouth Arts Club and Dorset Craft Guild.
Sasha Baskin
Sasha Baskin holds a BFA in Drawing from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in Craft/Material Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University. Baskin was a 2018-2019 Artist in Residence at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts and a 2020 and 2022 Penland Winter Resident. She was a member of the American Craft Council’s Emerging Artist Cohort (2024). Her teaching record includes bobbin lace workshops at Penland School of Craft, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, John C Campbell Folk School, and the Baltimore Jewelry Center. She has taught undergraduate coursework in drawing and fibers at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Stevenson University, Virginia Commonwealth University and currently teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore Maryland.
Linda Kay Benning
Linda Kay Benning has been on a fiber journey her entire life exploring work done primarily by women. She believes their fiber work enriched their lives with color and beauty. Often their skills provided supplementary income for the family, regardless of which continent they resided on. “I am an inch deep and a mile wide in the realm of fiber arts, focusing primarily on the heritage skills,” she recently explained. “My understanding and appreciation grows every time I try something new, often laughing when I examine my first attempt.” She is an active member of the EGA, Chesapeake Region Lace Guild, the International Organization of Lace, Inc., the Bobbin and Needle Lace Organization, and Smocking Arts of America.
Claire Bonito
Claire Bonito has almost 30 years of experience in making and designing lace, learning her craft from Pat Read MBE and later from Jacquie Tinch in the UK. She has been teaching regularly for over 15 years. She teaches a range of laces but specializes in Modern Milanese and has become well known for her contemporary designs using both Milanese and Withof lace techniques.
Claire teaches in a range of settings across the UK. She is talented both as a lacemaker and designer, and is a very good communicator with all levels of lacemaking. Her students say that she has an easy manner and friendly nature; her classes are popular with both new and continuing students alike. Claire was awarded both the Individual’s and the Visitor’s Choice Trophies in the Lace Guild’s “Contrasts” Exhibition, and was awarded a Medal for Excellence for her “Waterlily Mat” in the “Movement” exhibition.
Joan Brash
Joan Brash has been making bobbin, needle, tatted and other laces for about 40 years. She is a founding member of the 33-year-old Heritage Village Lace Guild in Western New York, and is an eternal board member and lace day chairman. She has recently specialized in Sol laces, combining classic features of Teneriffe and nanduti into contemporary designs.
Eva Brauer
Eva Brauer is a professional embroiderer. She has a small atelier in Kiel, Germany, where she runs workshops, carries out commissioned work and works on her own embroideries. Eva is fascinated by the great variety of embroidery techniques in particular and textile techniques in general. She is constantly working on expanding her knowledge. Since completing her apprenticeship in 1993 she has been teaching various embroidery techniques, for example whitework, goldwork and ribbon embroidery. She enjoys passing on her knowledge and is delighted to exchange ideas with others who share her passion for embroidery.
Lucy Cadwallader
https://www.lucyshairwork.com/
Lucy Cadwallader has been Civil War Reenacting since 1992. While researching her hobby, Lucy expanded her interest in Victorian hair art and mourning customs, which has led to perfecting the art of hair jewelry. Human hair is intricately woven into bracelets, earrings, rings and necklaces. Hair flowers were created into wreaths and proudly displayed in Victorian parlors. Lucy has lectured and conducted workshops on hair wreath repair and construction.
Cat Candow
A seamstress by trade and passionate textile arts educator, Cat has nurtured a passion for all fiber crafts from a young age. Over the last few years her daily art practice has zeroed in on bobbin lace making, learning online with teachers from all over the world as well as researching regional traditions and creating her own designs. Her style is modern, colorful and exploratory, combining her favorite parts from each type of bobbin lace, learning from the past and pushing the craft into the future.
Louise Colgan
http://www.colganlacestudio.com/
Louise Colgan is a lacemaker, designer, and teacher with experience in a broad range of Bobbin Lace techniques. She began making lace in 1985 and has been teaching for over 35 years. Louise is an Honorary Member and Past President of I.O.L.I., now currently serving as the Proficiency Program Chair. She has taught classes at I.O.L.I. Conventions for many years, plus workshops for U.S. members of O.I.D.F.A. Overseas events include the Australian Lace Guild’s National Conference and classes for New Zealand’s Bridge Lace Group. She also travels regularly to teach workshops for numerous guilds throughout the U.S. In her capacity as a lacemaker and designer, Louise has exhibited her work both locally and internationally, including as a participant in the renowned International Poppy Project. Her designs have been featured in the I.O.L.I. Bulletin and Lace Express magazine. Louise was recently featured in an interview for the Bolilleras magazine and the Hilando Historia podcast. Additionally, she has published three books of original patterns and made an instructional video on Milanese Lace through Hensel Productions.
Kim Davis
Kim Davis is a lace historian, maker, and educator specializing in early bobbin lace. She is the Managing Director of The Lace Museum in Fremont, California, where her work focuses on research, preservation, and public education. Her research interests include the structural history of bobbin lace, early pattern books, metal and wire lace, and the relationships between lace, passementerie, braiding and other thread-based traditions. Kim teaches internationally and is committed to connecting hands-on practice with historical sources and current scholarship.
Bobbi Donnelly
Bobbi has been making lace since 1991 and has studied with teachers across the world. She started to focus on Tønder lace in 2005 and has taught that since 2007. She continually works on reconstructions of old Danish laces from personal photos taken at the Tønder Museum in Denmark for her classes. She has taught at IOLI Conventions, Lace at Sweet Briar in Virginia, Winter Lace Conference in California and a number of other smaller venues throughout the States. Bobbi has published several books with Michael Giusiana on Tønder Lace: Spiderwebs and Dreams in 2013, A Study in Tønder Lace in 2014, Point Ground and Picots in 2016, Tallies and Pin Chains in 2019.
Nicole Gammie
https://www.instagram.com/nickygammie/
Nicole Gammie is an Australian textile artist who combines handmade and designed bobbin lace with hand embroidery. Learning and experimenting with lace and stitching began at an early age with numerous informal opportunities at school and in the community through classes and attending craft groups. Living around much of south-eastern Australia provided chances to investigate a range of lace and embroidery techniques in greater detail and opened up possibilities. Moving allowed Nicole to explore local areas and inspired her love of bright colours, geometry and nature. In more recent times Nicole began to explore the possibilities of combining bobbin lace and embroidery. Numerous experiments followed and they continue to allow the embellished lace to evolve with new ideas and possibilities, often assisted and inspired by exhibition guidelines/criteria and nature.
Carol James
Carol James has been exploring sprang for more than 25 years, examining items in collections across North American and Europe, and making replicas. She has developed a pattern-writing system to accommodate the variety of designs encountered in her sprang explorations. She is the author of numerous articles, two DVDs and four books: Fingerweaving Untangled, Sprang Unsprung and two books of Sprang Lace Patterns. Carol is spending her Covid lockdown time reviewing her collection of sprang lace images and writing patterns and instruction sheets in order to make the technique accessible to others.
Fiona Harrington
Fiona Harrington is a visual artist and lacemaker who has been working as an artist and educator for over two decades. In 2012, she completed a period of training at the Kenmare Lace and Design Centre in Co Kerry, where she learned Kenmare Needlepoint Lace, Bobbin lace and Carrickmacross Lace.
She went on to complete a Bachelor of Design in Textile Studies where she specialized in Lacemaking. Since then, she has dedicated her time to making, reading, writing, teaching, learning and talking about lace. Her work has been exhibited extensively and she has been invited to demonstrate Irish lacemaking skills and present her arts practice in the US, Canada and Europe. In 2021 she completed an MA in Art and Research Collaboration where she focused on lacemaking for both studio and academic research.
Loretta Holzberger
Loretta has been doing some form of needlework since she was a small child. Sewing, embroidery, crochet and knitting were all learned at an early age. Needle lace came much later, in the 1970’s. She has been teaching needlework since the 1970’s too, at her needlework guild, a shop, and later at her lacemakers guild. Loretta enjoys opportunities to share what she has learned with others.
Kathy Kauffmann
Kathy Kauffmann has been a lacemaker for more than 40 years with more than 35 years of teaching experience. She has taught for IOLI as well as many guilds throughout the US. She began her studies in Paris at Le Centre d’Enseignement de la Dentelle. She has studied many types of lace with her favorites being Withof, Flanders and Binche. Kathy is the co-author of “Withof in North America” along with Susie Johnson and Carol Watson. She also co-authored “Flanders” with Michael Giusiana and Marianne Stang. Kathy is past president of OIDFA and an active member in several guilds.
Theresa Kelly
Having grown up with threads and discovering Carrickmacross Lace in the 1980’s Theresa Kelly carries on a tradition of lace making that evolved in the Carrickmacross area in the 1800s. Pushing the boundaries of the technique, Theresa has explored many new possibilities, creating her own distinctive style and ensuring she is one of the most influential lacemakers in Ireland. Theresa has participated in many solo and group exhibitions and craft competitions throughout the world. Her work has been exhibited at the OIDFA International Lace Festival in Finland where she won the Sally Johanson Award. She has won the Muriel Gahan Award for Lace Innovation at the RDS Crafts Competition in Dublin.
Elizabeth Kurella
lacemerchant.com and LaceCurator.info
Elizabeth Kurella has studied the history, identification, and evaluation of lace throughout Europe and the US. for over forty years, and has evaluated and identified lace collections for several museums as well as private collections. She has studied bobbin and needle lacemaking in the US and in Europe. She is the author of Guide to Lace and Linens, The Secrets of Real Lace, Anybody Can Mend Lace and Linens, as well as assorted other books and articles on antique lace.
Dawn Lovig
Dawn Lovig is a fiber artist and arts educator who spent over two decades teaching in international schools overseas. Dawn specializes in ñandutí, a Paraguayan lace-making tradition, which she learned while living in Asunción. Although her materials and techniques can be traced back to Paraguay, her art encompasses recollections from her time and travels across the five continents where she established homes. Weaving together the domestic, decorative, and fine arts, her work celebrates environmental details which are often overlooked. Some of Dawn’s artwork was recently included in the “Folklore” exhibition with The Snips fiber arts collective.
Susan Lowman
Susan Lowman is a crochet designer, technical editor and teacher who enjoys creating and learning new skills all the time. She has been crocheting for over 40 years and gravitates to the more complex, challenging crochet techniques, especially those involving crochet thread. Susan is a certified crochet Teacher/Instructor with the Craft Yarn Council and has been teaching crochet classes since 2006. She is a patient, encouraging teacher and a Master crocheter with the Crochet Guild of America. Susan enjoys sharing her skills, knowledge and enthusiasm with others through her classes. She loves seeing the light bulb go off in her students’ heads when they “get it”!
Susan has taught 4 online crochet classes with Annie’s. On her website she shares her crochet knowledge through blogging, crochet tutorials and her self-published crochet patterns. Susan started a YouTube crochet channel (The Crochet Architect) in 2020 and enjoys teaching through her YouTube videos, as well!
Mary Mangan
Mary Mangan is a fan of many textile crafts and of American history. She came to lace through volunteer work at an American Revolutionary War site in her hometown of Somerville, MA. When she grasped the important role of lace in fashion and in the economy in that era, she was determined to learn how it was made. A beginner class with NELG in 2019 opened up many opportunities to learn new skills and unearth new stories of lace history, and a class with Ipswich lace expert Karen Thompson began her training in Ipswich lace. She also received a grant in 2024 from the Wikimedia Foundation to improve the quality of lace information in Wikipedia. In 2025 Mary was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant as a “culture bearer” for lace history in the state.
Anna McDowell
Textiles and social history are two of my main interests, and it was during my twenty years working in the museum industry that I discovered Dorset buttons. I am now in the lucky position of being able to combine both my love of textiles with the inspiration from this heritage craft, once a major cottage industry in Dorset. I have researched the history of this industry, including visits to museums to examine original Dorset Buttons in their collections. I now use the original methods to work my buttons using contemporary materials and vintage and ethically sourced yarns. I also try out new designs and ways to use the skills of the original buttoners who made these buttons for their livelihood over 200 year ago. Over the years, I have been lucky enough to work on commissions including film, stage and contemporary fashion and have received awards for my buttons. My most treasured award is the Dorset Shield for traditional Dorset Crafts, and I enjoyed making buttons for Carey Mulligan’s costumes in the film Far from the Madding Crowd.
Bevan O’Daly
Bevan O’Daly is a freelance Textile Conservator based in Scotland. She is a postgraduate of the Centre for Textile Conservation at the University of Glasgow and undergraduate in Fine Art from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. She has acquired a wide range of museum curation, exhibition design, collection care and conservation knowledge in her career to date. She has worked on world class textile collections in places including The National Trust, The National Trust for Scotland, The Burrell Collection (Glasgow Museums), Paisley Museum as well as doing work placements at the Victoria and Albert Museum London, Chester Beatty Library, Office of Public Works and the National Museum of Ireland.
While preparing for her postgraduate degree, Bevan took up bobbin lace under both Ann Keller (Ireland) and Jean Leader (Scotland) for a number of years and subsequently wrote her postgraduate dissertation on the Conservation of Lace. When not working in conservation, Bevan is busy running her fabric shop, Bawn Textiles, in Glasgow.
Victoria Ong
Victoria Ong is an emerging fiber artist from Chicago, IL, who is known for teaching and writing about Turkish needle lace flowers. She has published three books, “Flowers in Threads: Needle Lace for Beginners,” “Intermediate and Advanced Patterns for Needle Lace” and “Needle Lace Edgings.” These books, additional patterns, and supplies are available on her website.
Meenal Palashikar
Meenal Palashikar is a dedicated fiber artist specializing in tatting—a timeless lace-making craft using just two knots to create intricate patterns. Having revived her passion a decade ago, she now explores advanced techniques and shares them globally through live, interactive Zoom workshops with real-time video and audio instruction. Her step-by-step teaching style makes this delicate art accessible and engaging for all. Meenal’s sessions foster creativity, connection, and a deep appreciation for handcrafted beauty. Beyond tatting, she also practices quilting and crochet, celebrating the richness of textile arts with every piece she creates and teaches.
Josée Poupart
Josée Poupart is French Canadian, fluent in both French and English. She received diplomas in biology and interior design. Her interests cover a wide range, including women’s handiwork, photography, and travel. She started learning bobbin lace in 1990, following a trip to Bruges. Back home, she made her first pillow and bobbins, and religiously followed every exercise from the Kantcentrum’s “Technique of Bobbin Lace.” With time, she became passionate for the unique texture leaves and tallies bring to lace. Her teaching career started informally with the Ottawa Guild of Lacemakers. She feels privileged being able to share her passion, and techniques collected over the years.
Elizabeth Peterson
Elizabeth Peterson started making lace in 1985 and teaching in 1995. She teaches weekly, and some of the laces include Torchon, Beds, Bucks, Brugge, Russian, Flanders and Binche. She has expansive experience with numerous laces but has studied Bedfordshire extensively with Christine Springett for several years. She has won several awards for her lace at the local, state and international levels.
Hanka Robertson
Handcrafts are Hanka Robertson’s preferred occupation. She especially likes embroidery (in particular all forms of counted work), lace-making (i.e. knotted laces, needle lace, crochet lace, etc.), and beading. She is interested in unusual or little-known embroidery techniques, Puncetto Valsesiano™ being a perfect example. She has an extensive library and has traveled to get specific instruction.
Hanka has been embroidering since her early teens and is mostly self-taught. She is a member of EGA, the American Needlework Guild, the New England Lace Group and other informal stitching groups in her area. The ladies in those stitching groups are often intrigued by the odd forms of embroidery she works on so it is thanks to their interest and requests that she has enjoyed creating and teaching projects for at least the past 30 years. “My personal philosophy is to share what I know.”
Eva Ryley
Eva Ryley is lacemaker, designer and teacher. She was trained in the Limerick lace tradition by Toni O’Malley, who learned the craft by attending weekly classes in the Good Shepherd Convent in Limerick as a teenager in the 1960s. Eva has been making Limerick lace for almost 10 years, and started teaching in 2023. She has been teaching Limerick lace in various locations around Ireland. In 2024, based on her teaching experience, she redesigned the Friends of Lace Limerick Beginner Kit and recorded a series of videos that accompany the kit. She is also a passionate Shetland lace knitter and designer.
Ziggy Rytka
Ziggy Rytka first encountered the Lucet in a museum in Coventry in the early nineties. Within six months he had developed a fast grab method of lucetting and redesigned a lucet to match the technique making it ten times faster. He invented a lucet bobbin to carry a skein and lock the lucet, then developed the “Ziggy Stitch Technique” whereby you can manipulate 2, 3 or multiple bobbins to create 2- and 3-dimensional shapes. He produced the ‘Advanced Lucetting’ booklet in 1999 and in 2004 the ‘Advanced Lucetting’ DVD. Ziggy has taught and lectured in various countries for 30 years.
Sally Schoenberg
Sally is retired and lives in Bellingham in Washington State. She learned Flanders and Binche at the KantCentrum in Bruges in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. She also studied with Annie Noben when Annie was making her epic trips across the US. Sally has taught Binche at IOLI conventions and in the Pacific Northwest, and has made videos for beginners in Flanders and Binche. Binche is her favorite lace to make; it is beautiful, plus analyzing diagrams that look like spaghetti to identify their meaningful elements shares an uncanny resemblance to plotting and analyzing the weather maps she used as a working meteorologist.
Kelli Slack
Kelli Slack is a teacher for her shop, A Twisted Picot, and teaches tatting, knitting, lace knitting, spinning, pattern design, Mediterranean Knotted Lace, seaming, and many other classes. She teaches lace knitting & tatting regularly for the International Organization of Lace, Inc. (IOLI) Convention, tatting at the Shuttlebirds Workshop and Palmetto Tat Days, and many different crafting classes at the Ozark Fiber Fling (Steelville, MO), Fiber U (Lebanon, MO), Hoosier Hills Fiber Festival (Franklin, IN). She is constantly designing and her samples and patterns are usually to be found at A Twisted Picot & Ravelry.
Karen Smock
Karen Smock was born with a love of textile arts, which was fostered by both grandmothers, who were amazing fiber artists. She started bobbin lace 10 years ago, after seeing it at a reenactment, and she started button making in 2015 while making reenacting clothes for her family. Karen specializes in historical needlework and enjoys passing on her knowledge to help keep the heritage crafts alive. Every summer, you can find her at French and Indian War reenactments teaching about lace and button history.
Máire Treanor
Máire Treanor was born and educated in Armagh in the North of Ireland, completing a degree in Irish Studies at the University of Ulster at Coleraine. She came to Clones in 1988 and fell in love with its local crochet lace, which was at this time part of the rich past of Clones. She revived and has taught the technique of Clones lace in Ireland, Brittany France, and many parts of the United States since the 1990s. She has also researched how Irish Crochet travelled to many parts of the World including Umbria Italy, Kiev Ukraine and Budapest Hungary. Máire has written a book on Clones Lace Mercier 2002, Lacis 2010 and a dvd in 2012. She is a regular contributor to Piecework Magazine.
Karen Thompson
Karen learned to do many types of handcrafts from an early age while growing up in Denmark. Bobbin lace was added in 1974 when she learned the basics from her mother, including how to draft patterns. Since then she has studied bobbin lace in the US and abroad. She has taught at IOLI Conventions and for local guilds, as well as being actively involved in several lace guilds in the US and internationally. In 2017 she published a book on The Lace Samples from Ipswich, Massachusetts, 1789-1790. A 12-Hour Introduction to Bobbin Lace booklet was added in 2020 in collaboration with Kim Davis and Linda Kay Benning.
Holly Van Sciver
Holly has been a student and teacher of lacemaking for over 47 years. Originally trained in England, she teaches a wide variety of bobbin laces, but specializes in 19th century English laces. Her most recent work features Lester and Floral Bucks designs as well as interpretive lacemaking of non-traditional designs. She has taught and lectured in the United States, Canada and Europe for the International Old Lacers, regional lace guilds, national lace conferences, museums, historical societies, universities and professional organizations. Holly is a leader in teaching the fundamentals underlying lacemaking theory and design. She is the founder of the Finger Lakes Lace Guild and owner of Van Sciver Bobbin Lace, which has served to promote lacemaking worldwide since 1981.
Carol Wang
Inspired by a crafty mother, Carol has been a lifelong maker. She fell in love with Chinese knotting during a trip to Taiwan in the 70’s and has been tying knots ever since. Carol’s particular joy lies with finding or forging connections between disparate things. Whether that might be exploring the use of the same knot in mizuhiki, net making, and boondoggling; turning theoretical mathematical objects into physical knots; or tying knots with fiber optic cables. She also experiments with technology like CNC and laser cutters, usually to make tools to assist with other crafts.
Martina Wolter-Kampmann
Martina Wolter-Kampmann studied textile design for the teaching profession in Dortmund Germany and then trained as a lace teacher in Belgium at the Kantcentrum. Her preferences are the classic Flemish fine laces but also contemporary, sophisticated solutions for beginnings and finishes, jewelry and all tricky problems on the bobbin lace pillow. She looks back on over 33 years of professional experience.
Louise West
Louise is based in Ilkeston, Derbyshire, UK and she designs, makes and teaches bobbin lacemaking, both at home and internationally. She specializes in the English laces of Bedfordshire and Bucks Point, but is always learning other laces for her own enjoyment. Her aim in life is to infect everyone with the passion and enthusiasm for bobbin lace and to pass on her knowledge to keep lace alive for the future.