Fall 2010 Instructors
Meet the Incredible Instructors of the
Vashon Island Sewing Retreat.
Several have been teaching all 26 years.
Meet our newest Retreat Instructor
Wendy Hallet
Wendy learned to knit from her neighbor as a child and has been casting on and binding off ever since. She was introduced to the Retreat by her mother-in-law Muriel Sprague and is excited to be the first knitting instructor.
Wendy enjoys the knit textures of Aran and Gansey sweaters and knitted lace. Her particular passion of the moment is knitting socks. She knits them cuff down or toe up, and on double pointed or one or two circular needles. Socks are a wonderful portable project!
Wendy loves to try new techniques, and has many tips and tricks to share with you. Finishing your knitted garment can be a daunting task and Wendy can help you complete that final step as well.
Barb Trenary
Barb is a natural born teacher. Anything she can sew, she loves to teach to others. Her teaching resume increases with each new project she undertakes. Having taught many classes at Lorraine Kimmel’s fabric store on Vashon Island, Barb was immediately recruited as one of the original teachers for Lorraine’s first Vashon Island Sewing Retreat and has been teaching here every year since. She is currently teaching at Island Quilter.
Some of Barb’s many and varied classes have been: Jeans that Fit; Machine Embroidery, Designer Sweatshirts, and Seminole Pieced Corduroy Jackets. She teaches quilting of all kinds from bed quilts, to wall quilts, to placemats and table runners, to wearable art clothing using block piecing, strip piecing, stack and whack, and paper piecing. And she is a very skilled soft sculpture artist who makes amazing dolls and bears of all descriptions and materials. You name it, she can do it. And she can teach you how to do it too!
Carolyn Cavanaugh
Carolyn started teaching for the Vashon Island Sewing Retreat in 1993 and has become the very popular Master of the Quilt Clinic. With 30 years of quilting behind her, she brings an experienced eye for color and planning plus a passel of tips, techniques, shortcuts and quilting know-how to her students. Carolyn thrives on the excitement and challenge of each project her students bring to her classes. Over the years she has taught quilting for Hancock Fabrics, Ben Franklin and the YMCA. This very talented and capable lady has also taught knitting, crocheting, macramé, and cake decorating. Some winters she has toured the country in her motor home, but summers find her at home near Eatonville, remodeling her lake cabin. When in Eatonville she also teaches quilt classes at the local fabric store, for the quilt group, and even at the elementary school where she was named volunteer of the year for playing with the kindergarteners.
Cheryl Tolbert
Cheryl was born into a sewing family, learning from her Grandma and Aunt Ethel June. She has been learning and sewing ever since. Cheryl earned a degree in Home Economics Education from the University of Washington and taught home economics for several years before focusing solely on sewing education. For 20 years, she was a District Home Economist for Hancock Fabrics. Currently you can find her at Pacific Fabrics, continuing to give numerous in-store sewing demonstrations, creating original projects, and advising on all sewing programs.
Prior to the first Vashon Island Sewing Retreat in 1984, Cheryl was the Administrator of the Seattle Chapter of the American Sewing Guild. She was then, and continues to be today, very instrumental in locating instructors for the Retreat. She herself is one of our founding Instructors.
Janice Gow
Janice started making dolls as a little girl and never stopped. In 1996 she became a founding member of the Talking Threads Doll Club, where each member would take turns teaching a class. She relishes the challenge of learning new techniques. Janice also did the newsletter for the club from 97 to 03. She started attending the Vashon Island Sewing Retreat in 1991 and her dolls were such a hit at our Bring and Brag evenings, that she was recruited to become an Instructor by popular demand in 2003. She works at Pacific Fabrics 4th Ave South where she is assistant manager.
Janice loves making bags almost as much as she loves making dolls and animals. Her knowledge of doll making and her creative genius is amazing. She likes nothing better than to lock herself, her sewing machine and her cats in a room full of fabric, ribbons and trims and let her imagination soar. Second best is sharing her love and skills with other sewers.
Judy Dohm
Judy Dohm taught in the public school system for over 32 years -- high school and middle school on Vashon and community college classes for South Seattle Community College. She started quilting in the late 70's right around the Bicentennial, piecing quilts both by hand and machine. Judy found hand piecing a practical method while boating with my husband and friends. She discovered needle turn applique about ten years ago, attending classes at a small quilt shop in Tacoma and adapting these techniques for my students. Judy believes everyone can be successful with hand applique given straight forward techniques.
Judy Dohm
The Traditional Hand Applique Class
Peggy Garber
Peggy Garber is another of the Vashon Island Sewing Retreat’s founding teachers. She had been the Kitsap County representative on Seattle’s American Sewing Guild board where she met both Cheryl Tolbert and Lorraine Kimmel. With her Fashion Design for Apparel Manufacture degree from the University of Washington, her experience in the design rooms of Sportcaster of Seattle, her fitting expertise from Fantastic Fit of California, and her years of teaching in adult education programs, community colleges, and fabric stores, she is the Retreat’s primo apparel expert. Over the Retreat’s 26 years she has taught everything from the simple bog coat to tailored Ultrasuede jackets; from swimsuits to silk blouses, to prom and wedding dresses; from making patterns from existing garments to designing original patterns. Never satisfied with the mundane, she even embellishes the fabric she uses in her garments. Her classes are full of tips and techniques gained from her many years of sewing for herself and teaching others.
Peggy is also a computer wiz and the Pe_gy part of Pengy Productions, who created this web site and the 20 year Sewing Retreat History DVD/Video. She is also Treasurer of
the Stitching Girls Society.
Penny Kimmel
Penny Kimmel is the Director of the Vashon Island Sewing Retreat, taking over from its founder, Lorraine Kimmel, her mother. She is also the first ever President of the
Stitching Girls Society.
Penny has been attending the retreat since 1988. With her Apparel Design Program training from Seattle Central Community College, she is also a well qualified instructor when needed. She has taught sweatshirt appliqué, purses and bags, adaptable aprons, and then for several years she became the Retreat’s polar fleece guru, known for the mounds of Polar Fleece scraps she always brought to classes.
Before attending the Apparel Design Program, Penny was working full time in television production. She has combined her 2 loves on a number of sewing videos for Jinni’s Personal Patterns, Kathy Ruddy Live Guide Series, Unique Measuring video, Clotilde, and Creative Feet. Her professional video abilities also make her the important Pen_y part of Pengy Productions, who has created this web site as well as the 20 year Retreat History DVD/Video.
About our wonderful, retired Retreat Teachers
Muriel Sprague
Muriel started teaching at the Retreat in 1988 with a class on Machine Embroidery, drawing on her early experience as an Elna Specialist. She has been the Retreat’s machine specialist ever since, teaching a variety of specialty techniques for handling lingerie, heirloom sewing, ribbon embellishments, and other challenging fabrics. She brings the organization of a former science and math teacher and the down home humor of her mid west upbringing to every class and every Retreat she attends. She's a real "hoot!" Be sure to ask her to sing some of her favorite songs for you.
Muriel Sprague
Jinni Nastiuk
Jinni is a retired founding Retreat Instructor and founding Board Member of the Stitching Girls Society.
She has focused her entire career on fitting and flattering the human figure. For many years she was regularly featured in Fredrick & Nelson sewing programs. In the 1960s she ran her own original design dress factory. Over the years she drafted individual patterns for thousands of bodies, extensively researched the intricacies of fitting the human shape and developed her own fitting philosophy. She shares her comprehensive knowledge of pattern fitting and design in a series of books under the titles “Personal Patterns by Jinni” and has taught fitting and design internationally. She also reflects her fitting philosophy in her line of personal sewing patterns fashioned for specific body shapes. Currently, she is working on computerizing her methods for home sewing.
Lorraine Kimmel
Lorraine started the Vashon Island Sewing Retreat. Having a passion for sewing all her life and having owned the Plaza Fabrics store on Vashon Island, she became a founding board member of the Seattle Chapter of the American Sewing Guild. She talked the Sewing Guild into sponsoring a sewing retreat on Vashon Island, but before the first retreat in 1984, a change in the Guild’s national policy caused the Seattle Chapter to disband. Lorraine kept the retreat alive by personally taking over the project. Shortly there after, Lorraine brought Camp Burton in as a co-sponsor. Over the years since then, many retreat instructors and attendees have pitched in to make the retreat the cooperative effort it is today. Gradually Lorraine handed the directorship over to her daughter Penny. We will miss her greatly.
Lorraine had a flare for colors and styles, sewing her own clothes from an early age. Later, she concentrated on crafts, dolls and quilt projects, combining flashy new fabrics with the colorful stash left over from the closing of her fabric store, which she owned with her sister-in-law Sally. She was an active member of both the doll and quilting clubs on Vashon, plus part of a small group of island sewers who make hundreds of lap quilts for Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center patients. She will always be known for her unusual soft sculptures which she sold on consignment and her colorful, indivudual sweatshirt jackets, that she wore everywhere.
