Instructors

Michele Lee Bernstein

Michele Lee Bernstein, PDXKnitterati, designs and teaches from her home base in Portland, Oregon. She loves designing accessories, especially if they use one or two skeins of very special yarn. She’s fond of texture (brioche, lace, entrelac, elongated stitches, assigned pooling), and loves using interesting techniques to make small objects sing. Her patterns are available through Ravelry and Payhip.


Michele loves teaching knitters to be the boss of their knitting! She teaches at fiber festivals (Vogue Knitting Live, Red Alder Fiber Arts Festival, Oregon Flock and Fiber Festival), guild meetings, retreats, and local yarn shops. Her book, Brioche Knit Love: 21 Skill Building Projects from Simple to Sublime combines her love for teaching and designing, using simple accessories to take knitters from the easiest one color brioche through more complex brioche techniques.


Michele blogs about knitting, food, and music at PDXKnitterati.com. You can also find her on Instagram, Facebook, Ravelry, YouTube, and Twitter; she’s PDXKnitterati on all platforms.

Heavenly Bresser

Heavenly Bresser is an award-winning handspinner, spinning wheel restorer, and international fiber arts instructor. She is excited to share her love for fiber arts with the world. Heavenly actively teaches at a local art center in Illinois, where she is a faculty member. Heavenly has many years of teaching experience including a wide range of handspinning courses through various organizations and fiber events including the SOAR retreat, Wisconsin Sheep and Wool, New York Sheep and Wool, and Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival (online), Vogue Knitting Live and Stitches Events.

Some of her areas of passion include the love for working with color, working from fleece as well as researching historic information for antique spinning wheels. Her published works can be found in Spin Off, PLY, tinyStudio CreativeLife, and Surface Design Journal magazines. Heavenly has made it her mission to help fiber artists of all levels to expand their knowledge about their craft and to try new things.”

Beth Brown-Reinsel

Beth Brown-Reinsel has been teaching historic and traditional knitting workshops nationally, as well as internationally, for over 30 years. Her book Knitting Ganseys has been deemed a classic. She has created three DVDs as well as a Craftsy class. She continues to design for her own pattern line Knitting Traditions and holds two retreats in Vermont every year, as well as a cruise and a land tour annually, somewhere in the world.  She can be found on Patreon.com/BethBrownReinsel where she often teaches free classes to her patrons, and shares her knowledge of traditional knitting.   Beth’s website can be found at www.KnittingTraditions.com. She lives in Vermont and loves New England winters!

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Cecelia Campochiaro

Cecelia Campochiaro appeared on the knitting scene in 2015 with her debut book, Sequence Knitting.

Knitting was a casual pastime until she had an ah-ha moment in 2010 and realized that interesting textured fabrics could be created by the simple repetition of a sequence of stitches. This idea evolved and led to her writing Sequence Knitting, which is a reference book about this mindful approach to knitting.

In the years since Sequence Knitting debuted, she has continued to develop new ideas in knitting.

Sequence Knitting is about texture, and her second book, Making Marls, published in 2020, is about color.

In Making Marls, the technique of working multiple strands together as one is explored as a way to create a wide range of visual effects. She is currently working on her third book, a stitch dictionary of reversible patterns. Her next book, coming Fall 2024, is about reversible stitch patterns.

Cecelia lives in Silicon Valley, where for many years she developed specialized microscopes used in computer chip manufacturing. Textiles, photography and the arts have been a lifelong passion running in parallel with her technical life. In high school and college even though her main studies were in the sciences, she also studied drawing, printmaking, ceramics, and photography.

Not only is she interested in the arts and knitting, but also in books. Books have been the primary mechanism for knowledge transfer for over a thousand years. One of her missions is to honor that tradition and create books that are both informative, and also beautiful objects in and of themselves.

Makers love beautiful things, and Cecelia feels strongly that books should be as lovely as tools and yarns. Today she is fully dedicated to the fiber world and “unventing” new ways to make amazing knit fabrics.

Ana Campos

Ana Campos was born in São Paulo, Brazil, and now makes her home in the Witch City (Salem, Massachusetts). She is a founding member of Vogue Knitting’s Diversity Advisory Council and is committed to increasing equity and access in the fiber world. Ana brings more than 20 years of knitting experience to her yarn shop, Circle of Stitches, and to her workshops, which she teaches across the U.S.. As a teacher, her focus is on the technical aspects of knitting, and she strives to empower her students to create pieces they love.

Maggie Casey

Maggie Casey has been addicted to spinning since the last century and while some people are proud of their wine cellars, she much prefers her fleece basement.   She was co-owner of Shuttles Spindles & Skeins until it closed in 2020.  Besides teaching spinning at Shuttles, she also teaches at the Estes Park Wool Market, Maryland Sheep & Wool, the Ply Guild, SSK and SOAR.  She holds Part 1 of HGA’s COE in Handspinning is the author of START SPINNING, EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW TO MAKE GREAT YARN and several LongThread downloads and writes for Ply magazine.

Kaysie Culbertson

Kaysie Culbertson lives in Gig Harbor, WA and has lived in the PNW her whole life. She has been playing with yarn since childhood and loves to design easy-to-follow projects that are versatile, easy to modify, and relaxing to work on. When she’s not crafting, she’s working hard project managing for a sign company, and reading through every book on her TBR shelf!

Dawn Edwards

Dawn Edwards is a felt artist/tutor based in Plainwell, Michigan. She sells her work under the label ‘Felt So Right’ and teaches within the USA and internationally. Dawn’s felt art has appeared in exhibitions, magazines and books, including: Ellen Bakker’s book Worldwide Colours of Felt, several issues of the Australian ‘FELT’ Magazine, International Feltmakers Association ‘Felt Matters’ journal, HGA’s ‘Shuttle, Spindle & Dyepot’ journal, Danish GRIMA journal, and Fiber Art Now. Dawn is co-coordinator of the 8,000 member FELT UNITED, with the goal of uniting feltmakers from all around the world

Pamela Grossman

Pamela is passionate about the sanity-preserving magic of crochet projects and thrilled to teach at Red Alder. Pamela is an educator, parent and occasional knitwear designer (woolywonder.com) who spends her days directing the Rosen Family Early Childhood School at the Hearing, Speech and Deaf Center in Seattle. You can also find her baking challah, promoting American Sign Language, marveling at the brilliance of young children, drawing flowers and dabbling in watercolors. Pamela lives in Redmond with her doting husband and two tiny dogs.

Sivia Harding

Sivia Harding has worked with fiber and art since she can remember. Obsessed since youth, by adulthood she had dabbled in weaving, spinning, and dyeing among other activities, and came to knitting in the year 2000. Almost immediately, she began to design. She is known for exceptional designs including lace, garments, accessories, and imaginative Moebius creations. She has been widely published in books, collections, and magazines, including Jared Flood’s Wool People series, Spin Off, and on Ravelry as Sivia Harding Knit Design.

Michael Kelson

Michael Kelson (https://spinpossible.com/) teaches spinning classes all over the country. His methodical, sample-based approach to spinning resonates with students of all levels. Michael is the coordinator for the annual Seattle-area Men’s Fall Knitting Retreat and the Seattle Men Who Knit meet-up. By day he is a software professional, but on weekends he’s usually out and about with his eSpinner in tow.

Catherine Lowe

Catherine is known for elegant design that pairs her original and unique construction techniques with knitted fabric that is manipulated to produce characteristics akin to those found in woven textiles. By rethinking traditional technical and design vocabularies, she has developed a couture method for handknitting, a body of techniques that offers the means to realize in a handknit garment a level of craftsmanship and refined detail analogous to couture dressmaking.

Catherine teaches widely and her designs have appeared in Vogue Knitting, in Interweave Knits, and in knit.wear. She is the author of The Ravell’d Sleeve; her articles on couture knitting technique have been featured in Vogue Knitting; and she has been profiled in Interweave Knits, in Knitting Lessons by Lela Nargi, in KnitKnit: Profiles + Projects from Knitting’s New Wave by Sabrina Gschwandtner, and in knit.
wear. For more information, visit http://www.catherine-lowe.com and http://www.knittingwithcompany.com.

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Annie MacHale

At the age of seventeen, Annie MacHale first discovered the inkle loom, sparking a lifelong love affair. She built her first loom in 1976 with the help of her dad and a library book. Since then she’s woven miles of bands including over 1,200 guitar straps. She loves to play with color and pattern and finds the inkle loom a very satisfying way to do this.

Annie is known to many through her blog, ASpinnerWeaver.com. The popularity of her patterns shared there has led to the 2019 publication of a book, “In Celebration of Plain Weave: Color and Design Inspiration for Inkle Weavers”. This was followed by another book in 2021, “Three-Color Pickup for Inkle Weavers: A Modern Look at an Ancient Baltic-Style Technique” in which she shares a rare, older Lithuanian technique which has fallen out of use.

In her workshops she shares her decades of experience as a weaver working exclusively on inkle looms, her unique insight into working with color, and her discovery of three-color pickup.

Nancy Marchant

Nancy Marchant, a.k.a. the Queen Mother of Brioche, was born in Indiana but the Netherlands has been her home for more than 45 years. Her first published pattern was in 1974. She’s seen knitting styles and techniques change over the years and has built up quite a collection of knitwear designs. Nancy has studied the nuances of the brioche stitch and developed new and exciting stitch patterns and techniques for achieving beautiful brioche and tuck stitch results. She is the author of Knitting Brioche, Knitting Fresh Brioche, Leafy Brioche, Tuck Stitches, Knitting Brioche Lace, Brioche Knitting and the ebook Woven Knitting. She has recently started creating woven patterns using intarsia and stranded knitting.

Jillian Moreno

Jillian Moreno is the author of the best-selling book Yarnitecture: A Knitter’s Guide to Spinning: Building Exactly the Yarn You Want.

She is passionate about investigating the structure of yarn and color, and using them in intentional ways in knitting, stitching and weaving. She explores, questions and plays with fiber and wants to take as many people as possible along for the ride.

She believes all yarn is beautiful and useful and enthusiastically encourages her students to feel joy making and using their handspun.

Jillian believes in making yarn you like and want to use, she throws ‘must’ and ‘should’ out the window, though does enjoy the fun that comes from answering questions with ‘it depends’.

Combining technical and intuitive approaches to spinning, her students gain confidence as well as solid skills to build any yarn they can dream of. In her classes Jillian shows there is never only one way to make a yarn. Knowing and seeing the outcomes of a variety of spinning skills frees students to build unique and useful yarns to use with any project they have in mind.

In her classes Jillian’s students play and experiment with fibers and color, gain an enthusiasm for sampling, and come to see that their own definition of beautiful, consistent, or perfect yarn is the only one that matters.

Xandy Peters

Xandy Peters is a knitting designer and teacher, best known as the innovator of the stacked stitch technique and for the Fox Paws pattern. Starting out as a footwear and product designer, he turned to knitting as a way to explore textiles and surfaces without using factory production and has since made a career out of publishing new patterns and teaching workshops. Xandy has been published in magazines such as Vogue Knitting, Twist Collective, Knitscene, Knitty, and Pom Pom Quarterly, has a Craftsy class teaching the stacked stitch technique and continues to self publish patterns on a regular basis.

Alasdair Post-Quinn

Alasdair Post-Quinn is the author of the critically acclaimed books “Extreme Double-Knitting” and
“Double or Nothing” and a smattering of other patterns, mostly also double-knitted. He has been working to push the boundaries of double-knitting since 2003.

Alasdair lives in Cambridge, MA and works in computer repair when he’s not traveling around North America to teach. He has a burgeoning business in self-published knitting books, patterns, online video tutorials and in-person or live virtual workshops for all levels of double-knitting experience. For more info, please visit double-knitting.com

Charan Sachar

Charan Sachar is an artist whose work reflects his passion for the fiber arts, like knitting, spinning, weaving, quilting and he uses it as an inspiration for his clay work. In all the fields that he works in, he loves to accept challenges and approach the making with a “what if..” attitude. Charan specializes in creating art yarns with textures, using traditional spinning techniques and pushing them an extra step to create unique yarns. As a teacher, he shares his preferences and his learnings along his journey, but also encourages his students to try techniques/materials by themselves and then decide for themselves.https://creativewithclay.com

Amy Snell

Amy Snell is a knitting instructor and designer with an eye for the unusual or unusually captivating. She enjoys teaching techniques and stitch patterns that introduce color, contrast, and texture into knitting in new or interesting ways.

Whether teaching in the San Francisco Bay area or at national and international knitting events, Amy loves to help other knitters expand the way they think about their knitting. Her goal is to make complex concepts approachable for all knitters, while sharing tips that improve your process whether you’ve been knitting for several weeks or several decades.

Amy’s work has appeared in numerous books and periodicals including Cast On, Interweave Knits, Knotions, I Love Knitting and numerous pattern collections. She shares tips and tricks on her website www.DeviousKnitter.com and can be found as @DeviousKnitter on social media.