Bethany Garner discusses the development of the Textile Program at St. Lawrence College and workshops

Bethany Garner discusses the development of the Textile Program at St. Lawrence College and workshops

July 29, 2021

© Kingston Handloom Weavers and Spinners

Shaelagh Cull

Bethany Garner

Because I have a Masters in Education as well as healthcare administration, I decided to take my roadshow to St. Lawrence College here in Kingston and worked with them for about four years occasionally, doing some classes at the college in fiber arts, and finally presented to the St. Lawrence Board to ask to design a Textile Arts Program at the College and they had never had one before. It was accepted. I taught for 23 years at St. Lawrence College, graduated about 85 students from our program. There were a lot of Kingston area folks that came just for the fun, but the majority of them were pretty serious. Several of them have gone on into professional careers in the fiber arts. But the longer I worked at St. Lawrence College as an instructor, obviously my students were looking to me for inspiration, so I brought my dyeing, printing, painting, fiber manipulation, hand stitching, so many different aspects of the fiber arts into our classroom play. I taught at the Weavers and Spinners Guild for a couple of years, just back and forth from time to time when they were looking for classroom instructors for the Guild. I started out with just the introduction of my own skills, and I taught some of the same things I taught at the College: felting, dyeing. I suggested 'First Fridays Dye Day' and that started in about 2017 in the Weavers Guild and carried on until just before the pandemic when everything sort of shut down. But first Friday, every month, I knew I was going to be in the studio dyeing something and invited anybody from the Guild to come. And those were the good old days when we could have 8 or 10 or 12 people in the studio together before, you know, masks on and two people at a time, stay far apart. We had a lot of fun.