Within the past few months, posters and announcements have sprung into existence, dotting the Bloomington North hallway walls. “Come!” they say. “Join us! We’re going to crochet!” For some, fiber arts such as crocheting is a normal, fun part of life, a hobby that is enjoyable to pick up from time to time. For others, they may not know what in the world they are doing. “I wanted to create an environment that I knew could promote learning more about it,” said Ms. Olivia Jordan, the creator of the recently developed “Crochet, Knit, and Vibe” tutorial.

This tutorial, which has now combined with the previously existing crochet club, was created in an attempt to make a space for students to come together and share their knowledge of these fiber arts, especially crocheting, with one another. “It
takes a lot of patience and practice,” Jordan said, “and I think just with any new hobby, you just wish you could go right into it and just be amazing at it, but it does take a lot of repetition, a lot of patience.”

Yet these tutorials and clubs are not the first instances where fiber arts have appeared at North. In fact, for several decades now, a fiber arts class has been in existence, teaching students skills from beadwork to papermaking. The class was established in the mid-1990s, when Dr. Smith—former art department chair and mother of North’s current ceramics and jewelry teacher, Ms. Daria Smith, noticed the growing popularity of beadwork in the world of art. “She was noticing that beads were becoming a…viable fine art form,” said Ms. Smith. “Not just something that you string together….It was showing up in major shows across the country.”

The class’s original primary focus was on beadwork. However, in 2006, Dr. Smith left the school and Ms. Smith herself took over the class, teaching fiber arts for 16 years and expanding the curriculum to other areas, such as book arts and dying arts. “I wanted to make it a little bit broader in that beginning class,” Smith explained, referencing the taught skill sets. “But then in the advanced class it was…beadwork, mostly.”

As of late, the fiber arts class has had a new teacher, Ms. Stephanie Bruce. who is entering her third year of teaching the class. In her class, each student is given a paper as an overview of what is taught in the class, the three focuses of which are hand stitching, beadwork, and dying fiber.

Amia Johnson, an advanced fiber arts student, said, “Outside of school, I do like working with beads, but this is like a new way of doing it. I’ve never really done it before, so I’m happy to learn about it in school.”

In class, students are given target dates, and otherwise work at their own pace, meaning at any given time, students at the same level may be working on different projects. “It’s a little bit challenging for the teacher, because you usually have lots of different things going on at the same time, so it’s hard to keep up with,” Bruce admits. “I still struggle with that.”

However, new techniques are not the only thing students study in the class. “It’s also kind of important because you learn about different cultures,” beginning fiber arts student Carly Naylor explained. During the unit on batik, students not only learned how to dye the fabric, but they also learned about how it was applied in other countries and continents. Teachers have also stressed that the class strengthens skills that can be used in day-to-day life. “I think the arts are one of the most critical classes that we can have for those problem-solving and critical thinking skills,” Smith said. “Because it’s like, how do you apply things? And the other thing is that the arts are an area where students make their own work. They develop their own work, they design their own work, they produce their own work. We’re here to help guide them….But, it’s really student driven.”

“You can take so much pride in getting to know that you created something with your own two hands out of essentially a long piece of string or yarn,” said Jordan. “Like, that’s really really cool, and to be able to share that I think is my goal and my vision.”

In these classes and tutorials, that’s just what students are getting to do. They help one another with the class and learn skills with the potential to help others in the future. “I just always loved being able to take materials and put them together to make something useful or something beautiful,” said Bruce. And essentially, that’s what fiber arts is.