(upbeat music) >> Rebecca: Three Moons Fiberworks, we are located in downtown Chesterton at Fourth and Broadway.

We are set up so that we can handle everything from raw wool that's come off of an animal through to a finished project.

>> Suzzy: I mean, it's how we express ourselves.

Different cultures have different costumes that they've acquired over the years that they use to express sadness when a person dies, happiness when a person gets married and everything else in between.

>> Laura: If I can capture it the way I want to, when someone else sees that painting and they say, "Oh, this makes me feel so peaceful," then I feel like I've done the right thing.

Then I'm like, "Yes, I want other people to feel that way "when they see my art."

>> Chris: I know that for me, when I sat down in a loom and I threw a shuttle, I thought, "I am home, I have arrived."

This is it for me.

And if there's any way that I can share that with someone else, that's a huge win.

>> Narrator: Doing as much as you can, as quickly as you can is important to me.

Life is short and the earlier we get started helping our community the better off our community will be.

Family, home, work, self, of all the things you take care of, make sure you are near the top of the list.

NorthShore Health Centers offers many services to keep you balanced and healthy.

So take a moment, self-assess and put yourself first from medical to dental, vision, chiropractic and mental health.

NorthShore will help get you centered.

You help keep your world running, so make sure to take care of yourself.

NorthShore Health Centers building a healthy community, one patient at a time.

"Eye On The Arts" is made possible in part by, South Shore Arts, the John W. Anderson Foundation and the Indiana Arts Commission, making the arts happen.

Additional support for Lakeshore Public Media and local programming is made possible by viewers like you.

Thank you.

(gentle music) >> I'm Rebecca Riley-Vargas and I'm the owner of Three Moons Fiberworks.

Since I was knee-high, I have delved into many different types of fiber arts, a little bit of knitting.

A little bit of crochet.

Honestly, it wasn't until I found weaving that I found something that caught my attention a hundred percent.

And I have been weaving on floor looms well over a decade at this point, depending upon how you define weaving, since my 18 teenage years.

(gentle music) Three Moons Fibreworks, we are located in downtown Chesterton at Fourth and Broadway.

And the equipment is available for use in the studio if folks have their own projects that they wanna work on.

So, we are set up so that we can handle, everything from raw wool that's come off of an animal, through to a finished project.

You can wash wool here, you can dye it, you can spin it into yarn or felt it if you prefer.

You can weave, knit, crochet.

And this allows us to go ahead and bring together a group of fiber artists that support each other and help everybody do the fiber art that they excel at.

When most folks think about weaving, you think about going under over, under, over, under, over.

That process gets really tiresome very quickly if you're working on something that's very wide or very densely spaced.

So, almost every culture across the globe developed a loom to help speed that process up.

What the loom looks like depends in large part on the fiber that was available to that culture and the climate they were dealing with.

The yarn that is under tension on a loom is called your warp, W-A-R-P. And that's the case no matter what type of loom you are looking at.

To set up a loom to start, each piece of warp is individually handled at least twice, once to run it through the reed, which keeps the yarn at the density that you're looking for and once to run it through the center of these metal pieces, which are called heddles.

And the heddles are collected onto shafts.

On a floor loom, I can control the shafts with my feet, so I can raise or lower in this case, every one out of four threads.

And which ones I raise are lower is what dictates the pattern.

So, when I raise them, I create a space between the top threads and the bottom threads, which is referred to as your shed.

I can take the yarn that I'm weaving with through my shed and then move it into place and I can change which threads are raised or lowered with my feet and continue to develop the pattern.

(gentle music) I never get bored.

It's the combination of color and texture and pattern and fiber.

I could weave a different project every day for the rest of my life and never come close to repeating things.

Plus we have students in here all the time and they're doing their own projects and it's incredibly fun to take a look at what they're working on, because sometimes it's things that never would've dawned on me.

And it is a very creative environment.

(gentle music) Northwest Indiana has a tremendous number of fiber artists to begin with, but we're providing a central place.

So for instance, folks that raise fiber animals can go ahead and bring their fiber in here and the spinners are picking up that fiber and creating yarn.

And then the weavers are picking up that yarn and creating a finished project.

And it's all done within the confines of Northwest Indiana, which is very cool.

(gentle music) We want to continue building a strong fiber arts community in this neck of the woods.

We want to bring as many different types of classes as we can to folks and provide a place for people to come in, meet other fiber artists and enjoy what they do.

(gentle music) >> Even my before my mother taught me to knit, she taught me when I went into a store, think back Macy's and Higbee's and places like that, that don't exist anymore to touch the fabric, because that was gonna be next to your skin.

And the question was, how is that gonna feel?

And so she was always a person that was about the hand.

And she really taught me that.

That taught me it was okay to make mistakes.

And I knit for years.

I could not stand being in a college class or someplace like that and wasting my time just taking notes.

I had to have something to do with my hands that continues today.

That's how I can get through watching the news at night, I knit.

And then I learned how to felt.

Felting is very much like managing people.

When you have fibers that you've laid out and you put warm or hot soapy water on top of it, they get really nervous.

And the more you rub 'em, the more they try to hang together, just like people when they're afraid.

(gentle music) I've been experimenting ever since with all kinds of fiber.

I like to make paper, I like to make images with fiber.

I take fibers that have mostly been washed but I take them and I pull them apart very slowly and very carefully.

They look like wisps, thin as I can get 'em.

And you lay them in one direction across your table.

I put down a piece of fabric that most of us line kitchen drawers with.

It's got holes and it's sort of bubbly and that's what's gonna agitate the fiber eventually.

And then I lay slowly but surely this fiber on top of it and I continue to vary directions.

And I do it until I feel that the thickness is gonna be okay to support whatever it is I'm gonna do.

Once all of that is laid out, then I get to play.

And so I go over to where I've stored all my various and variety of pretty colors and things that turn me on and I choose and I come and I lay those out in whatever way I want.

And then I'm painting.

And I'm painting by using the colored fibers in different ways.

And then I go get some warm soapy water and I pour it all over the netting and pad it in so that all the fibers get nice and wet.

And I do it until I can pick up the netting off of the fiber and it won't stick.

Sometimes I'm done, sometimes I like to wad it up and throw it at the thing, keep doing it until it gets really agitated.

Everything that is done to that extent usually shrinks, about a third of the size of whatever it is I started out with.

That's how tight the fibers get and that's why you can wear it as clothing as you want.

And then I rinse it and then I dry it.

And then I frame it.

(gentle music) The inspiration and the opportunity to be free with my expression, with nobody telling me what I can and can't do.

I mean it's how we express ourselves.

Different cultures have different costumes that they've acquired over the years that they use to express sadness when a person dies, happiness when a person gets married and everything else in between.

I hope I inspire other people to take a chance and be who they really want to be in this world.

I've been saying for a while now that I'd like to be remembered as lighting other people's fires.

And that is true.

I'd like to be that person's permission slip.

How's that?

Permission to do what you love.

Because if you do what you love, the world's a better place.

(gentle music) >> I was a personal trainer for about 10 years.

I loved it 'cause I was working with people.

I was helping people.

I loved the interaction, I loved the science of it, but I got really burnt out, because I wasn't taking care of myself.

At the end of the day, I was just so exhausted.

I wasn't doing something to help myself.

And after about 10 years of that, multiple things happened, I lost my brother.

And that just kind of threw me through a loop.

And I needed to be home for a while.

And I found a craft called needle felting and just a little kit that I found at a craft store, 'cause I needed something to do with my hands.

I needed to, if I was gonna be home, I needed to be working on something that I felt would help me feel accomplished for the day.

So, I fell in love with it, 'cause I've always been a crafty person, but I had just shut it down for so long and it was really fun to bring that back.

And I completely became obsessed with it.

(gentle music) Not many people are two dimensionally, felting.

There's a lot of three dimensional where you're creating sculptures and things that stand up, but I've kind of adapted it into more flat things that can be framed or displayed that way.

So, my art is kind of like painting in a way, except instead of using paint, I'm using fibers, like different types of dyed colored fibers.

And I'm laying the fiber where I want it and using sharp needles to place the wool in very specific spots.

And I create pictures with the fiber that way.

Yeah, this is a simple process of lots of stabbing.

(Laura laughing) Yeah, sometimes I will just be in a fiber shop, like a local place and I'll see a blend or a color and I'll know exactly what I want that to be.

Like, a couple months ago, some lady had made this bat, a wool bat that just had all these beautiful blends in it.

And I was like, that is an ocean, you know?

And I just knew that that had to be the center of my painting.

And then I was going to put the clouds around it.

It all just comes together sometimes from the wool.

Other times it's a photo or a place I've been, something that really just kind of struck me as absolutely beautiful.

And it sometimes it's just the smallest little things.

And they're all moments that I found beautiful or peaceful and I want to recreate them.

When I recreate something that I've seen, I'm able to appreciate it even more.

I'm able to just sit quietly and feel that again.

And then what's amazing is that if I can capture it the way I want to, when someone else sees that painting and they say, "Oh, this makes me feel so peaceful," then I feel like I've done the right thing.

Then I'm like, "Yes, I want other people to feel that way "when they see my art."

Yeah, I want it to be something that they can just mentally escape to for as long as they want.

It's my way of sharing that with the world.

I hope that they can feel some kind of emotion that went into it.

I mean, I know that's kind of what we already said, but I guess they're just like, it can also be so simple that I hope it reminds people that art can be simple too.

It can just be this tiny little two by three inch thing that makes you feel a certain way.

Sometimes people see something in my work that I didn't see at first, or they see a different place that they've been.

I love when someone picks up on what I was feeling and I love creating calm places.

I know we're kind of, we're living in some stressful times, you know?

And there were so many times in the last few years where I knew I just had to make something that and even just give it to a person as a gift that they needed it in their office, in their workspace.

And that feeling for me is what I crave as an artist.

Like I want to help people in some way that I can.

It's a form of my own self-expression.

And I mean, maybe it is just my own feelings of peace and calm and the that's carrying on.

I feel like I'm finally doing something that is a hundred percent me.

(upbeat music) >> Hi, my name is Chris and I'm a weaver and beginning weaver instructor.

I grew up up in a family of very creative people.

My grandmother was a home make teacher and my mom was an elementary teacher.

My Aunt Laura owned a craft store.

So, I was always surrounded by really creative people.

Grew up really just always making things, always something with your hands, like craft was important.

We made Christmas gifts, all of that kind of stuff.

After college, I got a job in the corporate world, doing the design part of it.

The corporate job was fine, but I just didn't love it.

Like it just wasn't doing it for me.

So thought, well, I really just wanna make things, I just wanna make stuff with my hands.

And took a weaving class completely randomly.

I had tried other fiber things before, but it was the first time I had tried weaving and it was love at first sight.

It was really, I just remember sitting there at the loom thinking, "I could do this all day long."

And so a couple years after I took my first class, I jumped ship from the corporate world and I moved to Indiana in with family and been weaving ever since.

(upbeat music) So, today I am sitting at a floor loom.

This is a 36-inch wide, four-shaft floor loom.

These frames right in the middle here are shafts, and each one lifts and lowers and they have their own set of yarns assigned to it.

This piece here is the beater bar, which basically comes forward and back, just to squish all the yarns appropriately.

So, what's so fun is that down below then I have pedals, which are called treadles and each treadle is connected to the shafts.

So, that's part of how I'm always creating the pattern for whatever fabric that I'm working on.

So, today I have a crackle fabric that I am working on and I'm working with two shuttles.

I have, this is a boat shuttle, kinda looks like a canoe, right?

And then this is a rag shuttle and you'll notice that the yarn is wound directly onto this one versus this one has a little bobbin that just kind of unwinds from.

But between the two shuttles, then I can create this kind of complicated looking pattern.

Here's what it looks like.

(gentle music) I think what's so fun about weaving is that ultimately you're making fabric.

No matter what your project is, you're making fabric.

And I think that's just really magical.

The teaching has been so much fun, I have to say.

And I'm really, really loving it.

Every week I create a video in my library, it's called a "Handwoven Experience," is the whole series of videos.

And they're hardly ever more than seven, eight minutes.

So, it's a very short video.

I take one tiny little topic and I break it down so that basically anybody can follow it.

I try to really make sure that my beginners understand the terms and the techniques and all those kind of things.

Like for me, any video that starts with, "This is a loom" is a good video.

Like I really love that demographic working with that person who's just starting out and is so excited and they just wanna make all the things.

That's really who I love to speak to, because Weavers, when you think about it, they're almost always solo artists, because you just don't take a loom with you very easily.

So, when you think about someone who's a weaver, you're probably in your house by yourself.

You might be able to travel somewhere to take a class, but for the most part, so much of the learning that you're gonna do is gonna be in your own setting with your loom at your house.

So, this whole online vehicle has been just amazing, because that's a easy way for me to reach them and help them get to their goals as a weaver.

So, it's been a game changer.

What drives me is I know how weaving changed my life.

I know that for me, when I sat down at a loom and I threw a shuttle, I thought, I am home.

I have arrived.

This is it for me.

And if there's any way that I can share that with someone else and help them just be introduced to that is talk about a thrill, talk about an amazing opportunity.

If I can share a couple things that makes it easier for them to get into it that's a huge win.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Doing as much as you can, as quickly as you can is important to me.

Life is short and the earlier we get started helping our community, the better off our community will be.

Family, home, work, self, of all the things you take care of, make sure you are near the top of the list.

NorthShore Health Centers offers many services to keep you balanced and healthy.

So, take a moment, self-assess and put yourself first from medical to dental, vision, chiropractic and mental health, NorthShore will help get you centered.

You help keep your world running.

So, make sure to take care of yourself.

NorthShore Health Centers building a healthy community, one patient at a time.

"Eye On The Arts" is made possible in part by, South Shore Arts, the John W. Anderson Foundation and the Indiana Arts Commission, making the arts happen.

Additional support for Lake Shore Public Media and local programming is made possible by viewers like you.

Thank you.

>> You really have to think about how do you support a child, through all the developmental aspects of life.

>> When we have those positive relational experiences and we learn that we're worthy and it's a safe place to be and that there's hope in the world, we take that with us.

>> It is really a learning process between two people.

And that's what building a relationship is all about.

That's such a satisfying and bonding thing for you and your child.

You feel it and your child feels it too.

And if a child receives comfort, support, insurance, and protections, then they learn safety, security, trust and hope.

And think about what a world we would live in.

>> Narrator: A $100,000 matching grant, generously provided by the Legacy Foundation, will double your contribution today.

Building Blocks a community investment with everlasting returns.

Across Northwest Indiana stories are told, shared and sought after.

Tune into Lakeshore Public Media 89.1 FM to hear these stories about Northwest Indiana and your community, streaming online at lakeshorepublicmedia.org.

Did you know that you can find, all your favorite Lakeshore PBS shows online by visiting video.lakeshorepbs.org.

You can stream a large selection of shows, including "Eye On The Arts."

>> To me it's always about the music.

>> Narrator: In studio and friends and neighbors.

Lakeshore PBS has taken great care to bring you the best in local content.

Not sure how to find local content?

Click on Shows and sort by Only Lakeshore PBS Shows.

Not only will you find local content on Lakeshore PBS, but you can also stream live TV right to your computer.

Click on Live TV and get instant access to Lakeshore PBS Live wherever you are.

Lakeshore PBS is full of wonderful content, created just for you.

Miss last night's episode?

No problem.

Lakeshore PBS has got you covered.

Search for your show and find your episode ready to watch at any time.

Visit video.lakeshorepbs.org to stream your favorite local shows.

(upbeat music)