Focus on Workshop Instructor, Amy Tyler

Amy Tyler lives and explores the fiber arts in beautiful Benzie County, Michigan.  She has been teaching spinning and knitting at the Michigan Fiber Festival since 2006.  In addition, she has traveled far and wide to teach for fiber guilds, at retreats, at fiber festivals, and at weaving conferences.  Her teaching destinations include New York, Vermont, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and – of course – Michigan!

Amy trained for 20 years as a dancer, followed by many years of graduate and post-doctoral work in the movement sciences and then 9 years as a professor in physical therapy education in Iowa and Nebraska.

Her teaching experience is as broad as her educational experience:  she has taught modern dance and ballet, exercise physiology, neuromuscular physiology, motor learning, motor control, statistics and research methods, and evidence-based practice in physical therapy.  As a consequence, she has a deep understanding of the process of learning skilled movements (such as spinning and knitting).  And she has honed her skills at sharing that knowledge with her students.

In 2004, Amy left the world of academia to devote herself full-time to the fiber arts.  She now spins, knits, teaches, writes, designs, and has even begun to weave.  Her fiber arts work is influenced by her fine arts training and her science training:  common to both is an appreciation for movement skills, composition, pattern recognition, and systematic exploration.  The result is her focus on spinning techniques, yarn and knitting texture, three-dimensional structure, and knit designs that exploit hand spinning techniques.  Central to her philosophy is the notion of spinning as a dance between the spinner and the spinning wheel.

You can find her work published in Spin-Off Magazine, as well as in their recent special issue, Interweave Knit & Spin.

Do visit her blog, www.stonesockblog.blogspot.com, where she writes regularly about her fiber endeavors, including the creative process, spinning and knitting techniques, her occasional forays into the world of weaving, fiber animals, fiber travels, and sometimes the weather!

 

And you can see pictures of her fiber work and lists of her past and future fiber activities on her website, www.stonesockfibers.com.

Amy will be teaching the following classes at MFF this year:

            #103:  Blending Colors at the Wheel, Wednesday all day

            #223:  Plying for Texture, Thursday morning

            #231:  Plying Balanced Yarns, Thursday afternoon

            #321:  Mechanics of Your Wheel, Friday morning

            #330:  Spinning Marl Yarns, Friday afternoon