Description

As a sponsor member of Franquemont University, your support is essential in enabling us to develop new content, paying a fair wage to Andean textile experts for their help in teaching alongside Abby to produce educational content that is normally not available outside of Peru, for an English speaking audience. Some of these classes may be broadcast live, others (especially those from remote areas with no cell signal) will be recorded and made available later. All sessions will be available for sponsor members to watch on demand.

As well as this extra benefit for your help in making this content come to be, your membership gives you access to our entire spinning and weaving libraries, literally hundreds of hours of content.

Spinning Library

This package contains years worth of content, everything you need to take you from a beginner to an expert spinner. A total of 78 class sessions, each of approximately an hour, on a wide variety of spinning topics, as well as an enormous 123 recorded Office Hours sessions with Abby, community discussions on Discord, and once monthly live Office Hours.

Starting off with Spinning I-IV, you will be taken from never having spun anything, to planning for your first project. This content is designed to be worked on over 4 months (or longer if your project is very ambitious) giving you a really strong foundation not only in how to spin, but in why twist works the way it does and what sort of decisions you should be making to get a yarn that works perfectly for the job you intend it for. While this course is suitable for beginners, many experienced spinners have taken it and been surprised at how much it improves their understanding of working with twist. You don’t need any expensive equipment to get started here, just some fibre and a stick. Later class sessions discuss finding a spindle, spinning wheel, or e-spinner that is right for you.

Once you have completed these lessons, you’ll have all the pre-requisites and understand all the terminology you need to be able to move on to any of the other classes. For new spinners we recommend:

• Plying Structures
• Blended Fibres
• Drafting Methods

Once you have worked through these, just go where your interest takes you! We have classes available on:

• Comfort Spinning
• Luxury Fibres
• Advanced plying structures
• Mastering longdraw
• Mastering short draw
• Problem solving
• Spinning for large projects
• Spinning for socks
• Spinning with colour
• Spin Textured Yarns
• Make Textured Batts
• Colour and Texture
• Pimmie’s Tailed Yarn
• Organisation
• Tour of Louët
• Photography for fibre artists
• Spinning Flax
• Intro to cellulose
• Acadian cotton
• Cotton spinning
• Focus on Fleece
• Spindle Focus: Cops
• Drafting methods: Spinning from the fold
• Spindle Focus: Spindle Ergonomics
• Fibre Prep: Handcarding
• Spinning for Socks
• Teaching Spinning
• Andean backstrap check-in and spinning for weaving
• Spinning Thick
• Spinning Fine

Also available are several interviews with fibre artists and fibre business owners, and many hours of Office Hours with Abby answering all sorts of fibre-related questions.

Each class has its own dedicated channel on our private Discord server, allowing you to share your work with your classmates, go back and see the work of previous students, and ask any questions you may have.

Andean Weaving Library

We are proud to offer for the first time to new subscribers, our entire Andean Backstrap weaving class library. Having grown up between Peru and the US and being a skilled weaver and teacher, Abby is in a unique position to be able to teach this style of weaving to English speakers in an authentic Peruvian way, the way you would be taught if you were a child in the Andes. Students learn the techniques as they were meant to be taught, on the equipment that is meant to be used, no cultural appropriation and taking patterns and weaving them on western looms here! This approach allows students to fully understand the techniques and work from their own knowledge and memory rather than using charts, instead learning how to read the textiles themselves.

We are aware that this approach is different to all other teachers out there as it requires more effort on the part of the student, but the results are so worthwhile. Lifelong Andean weavers have been impressed that Abby has managed to get so many English-speaking adult learners to the level of proficiency that she has in such a short time with this series of classes. As different people have different learning styles, we have two versions of the first sets of classes, one taught by Abby in the traditional way complete with cultural context, and one taught by co-teacher Cat Ellen in a different step-by-step manner, allowing students to pick which set of classes most gels with their learning style.

In the Andean weaving tradition, learning is always begun on a warp made by someone else; only once you know how to weave and understand what the warp should feel like do you go on to making your own warps. To make this experience as authentic as possible, we have warps available for you to buy. These are made in Peru from khaitu (handspun yarn especially designed for weaving) and are by the the best option to get you started. You can find the warps in the shop here, along with details about what you need to buy to get going.

Class sessions included in this membership:

• Andean Weaving introductory demonstration
• Andean Weaving 101 (getting started, 3 pair patterns, basic warping)
• Andean Weaving 110 (4 pair patterns)
• Andean Weaving 120 (working wider, new warping methods)
• Andean Weaving – multiple illawas
• Andean Weaving – ley pallay
• Andean Weaving 160 (finishing techniques – fancy edging and seaming)
• Andean Weaving – 3 colour technique
• Andean Braiding
• Feral Courtyard (continuing learning and project planning outside of the classroom structure)

These sessions cover 22 classes (each of around an hour) with Abby, 13 with Cat, 10 Office hours sessions, and some longer live weaving sessions where a local weaver visits and shows her work. If you were to complete the work at the pace expected in the Andes, these sessions cover 5-10 years worth of learning.

Each class has its own dedicated channel on our private Discord server, allowing you to share your work with your classmates, go back and see the work of previous students, and ask any questions you may have.

This membership also gives you access to a once a month Office Hours session with Abby, live on Zoom, where you can ask any questions you have on the content, or anything else!