Slow Stitching August
August 17-23, 2026
MEDOMAK RETREAT CENTER, WASHINGTON, MAINE
with Carson Converse, Ekta Kaul & Cait Nolan
A small group of just thirty-six Makers will spend five full days in exploration of line, color, and stitch at a contemplative pace. Surrounded by the woods, on the edge of a lake, with the rustic beauty and charm of Maine as the backdrop. Small groups, individual pacing, natural inspiration-this will be a week for unwinding and exploring....
• Single cabin, $2,250.
• Double Cabin, $2,050.
• Triple Cabin, $1,850.
Registration will open for all on Sunday March 1st at 3:00PM EST
IMPORTANT NOTE: For the best experience of all involved, I will continue to engage Covid protocols. While the danger of contracting the virus is less, it still holds risks for many. I will require first time Campers to provide vaccine records that show up-to-date vaccinations prior to the current CDC administration for participation. (That means records that show vaccines from the inception 2021 to 2025 recommendations.) If you have participated in the past I will not require new records, though will be happy to know that you have gotten them if you choose to share. I will also ask that all Campers take precautions in the week leading up to their visit. More details will be shared once you have registered.
Are you seeking the time and space to slow down and connect with your skills, your agency, your creative practice in community? In these challenging chaotic, isolating digital days, we crave connection and community with other Makers. Maine is a good place to retreat, step back from the daily pace, and spend some time with your peers with needle, thread, dyepots, and cloth. This August, I invite you to join Carson Converse, Ekta Kaul, and Cait Nolan to make that time and space for yourself.
Join Carson, Ekta, Cait, and me at the Medomak Retreat Center in Washington, ME where you can relax, unwind, and dive into your stitching practice. You will sleep in a modern yet rustic cabin, eat three meals a day with the community, and spend as much time as you like with color, needle, thread. Each day will be spent with Carson, Ekta, and Cait learning their techniques and tips, and practicing new skills or sharpening old ones. In addition there are two days of time for musings, wanderings, exploration, and epiphany, both of the textile and human variety. The emphasis here is on settling into your Making practice and letting the rest of it float away....
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:
~Carson joins us for the first time with her rich knowledge of machine quilting and color in her workshop, Experimenting with Thread Color.
Explore the fundamentals of edge-to-edge straight-line quilting while experimenting with how thread color influences quilt design. Students will learn practical techniques for basting, marking, and guiding quilts through a domestic machine, with a focus on achieving straight, evenly spaced lines. The class covers strategies for handling imperfect piecing, avoiding unwanted swooping curves, and reducing drag and puckers. Through hands-on practice, students will explore how thread choice and stitch density influence the appearance of fabric. We’ll discuss color theory as it applies to quilting and create color-swatch mini quilts to test the impact of contrasting and coordinating thread colors. When it comes to choosing thread, the “right” choice isn’t always the most predictable one.
~Ekta is jumping the pond to share her Botanical Embroidery with us in the woods of Maine. Join artist Ekta Kaul for an immersive, hands-on workshop that explores botanical embroidery as a way of responding to place. Drawing inspiration from botanicals foraged from the surrounding landscape, this workshop invites you to slow down, observe closely, and translate the natural world into stitch. You will learn how to interpret leaves, stems, and plant forms through hand embroidery, using stitches that build shape, texture, rhythm, and pattern. Ekta will guide you through her own approach to working with botanicals—showing how careful observation, mark-making, and stitch choices can evoke both the physical presence and the spirit of a place. This workshop is suitable for all levels, from beginners to experienced stitchers, and offers space for both learning and quiet making. You will leave with new techniques, fresh ways of seeing the landscape around you, and a deeper understanding of how stitch can become a personal language for place-based storytelling.
~Cait joins us for the first time to share her prodigious knowledge of truly locally sourced color. Grounded Color: Exploring a natural dye palette using foraged dyestuffs and home-grown indigo. What does a natural dye practice look like when one only uses materials that can be grown or foraged locally? This workshop will explore natural dyeing through an approach rooted in nurturing a connection with the land where you live. We will discuss ethical foraging practices, experiment with processing techniques, and dye fabric with a variety of plants that grow in the local environment. This workshop has a special focus on dyeing with tannin-rich dyestuffs and without the use of metal salt mordants. As a complement to the foraged color palette, we will build and dye in an organic indigo vat made solely with materials grown at and foraged near Cait’s farm in New Jersey. Embrace the natural color that surrounds you and embody the ecological ethos at the heart of modern natural dyeing.
OTHER FUN STUFF:
You will spend a day with each teacher, with plenty of time for inspirational wanderings. Two back-to-back, then a break. On the third day we will make a small field trip to the coast and a fabulous local fabric store. Or if you prefer, you can go for a swim, take a hike, do some stitching, some reading, or whatever your heart desires. The last day of instruction is on Friday. Then Saturday is entirely for you to do with as you please. Check in with one of the instructors on a technique you need clarification on, take a nap, sew with new friends, the day is yours!
We will have a fabric swap, so bring any fabrics, patterns, notions, yarns, threads, or other craft supplies that aren’t singing to you any more. I like the idea of moving goods through the universe free of the capitalist system. The swap nights are always tons of fun!
The primary focus for the week will be on slowing down, taking time, connecting to your practice, the community, and your inner voice. Evenings will be open for more stitching, conversing, knitting, star gazing, cricket concerts, Loon appreciation, and anything else you might like to do in Maine in August....
INSTRUCTORS:
Carson Converse
Carson Converse (b. 1978, Massachusetts, USA) is a visual artist with a textile-based practice that merges traditional quilt-making techniques with fine art processes to create reductionist abstract works. Using a specialized computerized sewing machine, she sews lines of stitches in dense patterns to sculpt the fabric and build layered fields of color.
Converse holds a BFA from Boston University and a MA in Interior Design from Suffolk University. She has participated in exhibitions at Salon Art + Design (New York, NY); Quilt National (Athens, OH); the New England Quilt Museum (Lowell, MA); the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles (San Jose, CA); the International Quilt Museum (Lincoln, NE); and Salone del Mobile in Milan—part of her collaborations with the luxury brand Hermès. Her work has been featured in international print and online publications including Architectural Digest, Wallpaper, Designboom, Whitewall, Patchwork Professional, and Verve Magazine. She has received eleven awards at QuiltCon, including the Quilting Excellence Award in 2016. In 2023, she was recognized as a Rising Star by Quilting Daily. Her work is held in the collection of the International Quilt Museum and in numerous private collections. She currently lives and works near her childhood home in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts.
Ekta Kaul
Ekta Kaul is an India-born, London-based artist whose practice explores narratives of place, memory and history through a cartographic lens, expressed in thread drawings and abstract paintings. Her work is held in notable collections including the Crafts Council (UK), Morgan Stanley (India), the London Museum, the Gunnersbury Museum, and the Tatter Blue Library (USA). She has exhibited widely, including at the Saatchi Gallery and Collect in London.
She trained at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, and earned her masters degree in the UK. Her practice has been featured on BBC Radio 4 and in publications such as Vogue, Living Etc, Financial Times, Selvedge, and Embroidery magazine. She has received awards from the Crafts Council and was the recipient of the 2021 Cockpit Arts Textile Prize.
In 2024, she authored Kantha: Sustainable Textiles and Mindful Making, published by Bloomsbury (UK), was selected as one of three finalists for the 2025 R. L. Shep Memorial Book Award, recognizing the most outstanding book of 2024 in the field of global cultural heritage textile studies. She was the featured artist at the Victoria and Albert Museum during London Craft Week 2025. She is the recipient of the Cockpit Arts Textile Prize (2021), Charles Wallace Scholarship (2005) and now serves on its Board of Trustees—the first Asian woman, as well as past scholar, to do so. Ekta lives and works in London.
Cait Nolan
Cait Nolan is an artist, educator, and farmer based in New Jersey, USA. The farm where Cait and her partner subsistence–garden with their flock of chickens and two cats is part of Lenapehoking, the ancestral unceded land of the Lenni-Lenape.
Cait studied art education and received her Masters of Art in Printmaking at Ohio University in 2011. She then taught high school art abroad for five years in Venezuela and Japan before returning to the US and starting a small farm with her partner in North Carolina.
In 2017, somewhat inevitably, her lifelong love of both gardening and art collided when her partner got her Japanese indigo seeds as a birthday present. A full blown obsession with natural dyeing commenced. She has been learning, experimenting, and sharing about plant-based color ever since.
In her most recent artistic work, she creates heirloom quilts using fabric that she dyes with plants she grows or forages locally. Her work embraces seasonality and creativity borne from limitation.
These days Cait is working as a Programming Coordinator at a local public library. From May to October she hosts indigo and dye foraging workshops at her farm-side dye studio.
LOGISTICS:
Registration includes lodging in a cabin (shared, or otherwise), all meals, and all instruction for six days. The cabins are rustic and spare, but modern and comfortable. Please do note that many of the cabins are in the woods, and require an uphill walk. If mobility is an issue for you, please contact me when you register. We can accommodate most dietary restrictions within reason, just alert us to your needs in advance.
There are ten private cabins available. You can make this choice at registration. However if you do not get a private cabin, I can assure you there is plenty of room in each cabin for two or three adults.
A supply list will be sent out at least a month in advance of your arrival in Maine.
Otherwise, all you have to do is get yourself here, I'll take care of the rest. I will send out recommendations for what to wear and bring in advance. I send very detailed emails about how to get here, what to bring, how to prepare. Read them when they show up, most everything you could need will be in there…
The food at camp is fresh, simple, wholesome, and satisfying. Please notify me of food allergies, or if you are Vegetarian (specify if you do/do not eat dairy, eggs, fish, etc…) , but we suggest that unless you have a specific medical condition, you will find plenty to nourish you during your time at camp.
Medomak Retreat Center is in Washington, Maine, about 80 minutes from the Portland airport, 3 hours drive from Boston, 7 hours drive from NYC. Washington is only 30 minutes inland from Camden. The campus has 250 acres of blueberry fields and forest, with trails for hiking, tennis courts, and lakefront where canoes and kayaks are available. The cabins are clean and spare and perfectly comfortable.
After five years of working with Covid as a complication I continue to take it seriously. I require everyone to be vaccinated as recommended by the CDC in the Fall of 2024. I do not hold any stock in the current DHHS/CDC guidelines. If you have attended in previous years I know you have been responsible up to the last valid recommendation. I will not ask for your records this year. For anyone attending for the first time this year (’26) I will need to see your records from the inception of the vaccines in 2021 to the last reliable advice from the CDC in Fall of 2024. There are no exceptions to this policy. Please be sure you know where your records are before you register. If you have chosen to be vaxxed in the Fall of 2025 I will be extra happy, and we will be that much safer as a community.
I will ask all who are traveling to be diligent in their masking protocol. All should be extra careful a week in advance of Camp. These measures are taken to keep us all safe, and allow us to relax into our Making practice. I will have protocols in place in case of a positive test. That protocol will be shared in advance of gathering.
In order to give you some time to check, and double check, your schedule, and confer with partners, bosses, children, parents, and pets, to make sure this will work for you, I delay the opening of registration. This year registration will open Sunday March 1st at 3:00pm EST. I will send an email to my newsletter group when registration opens. If you want to be notified when registration is open, you should sign up for the newsletter, spots have gone quickly in the past….. You will need to pay a non-refundable deposit of $400 to register, and then arrangements can be made for how to pay your balance.
[Deposits are non refundable, but registrations are transferable. All efforts will be taken to accommodate Covid changes, but the virus moves in mysterious ways, and is good at outmaneuvering me. I ask for your patience and forbearance in dealing with these changes.]