Beginning at a young age craft-making helped me manage my high anxiety and fears. As an adult, weaving is a meditative and therapeutic practice that helps me manage stress and process grief.
I have been a local textile artist here in the Kansas City area for the past 16 years. As a weaver, I get to see and be a part of the transformation of a white cone of yarn into a colorful and delicate piece of fabric. I create one-of-a-kind, custom-colored, hand-woven textiles and prints for the home, business, places of worship, and hospitals that inspire harmony, hope, and healing.
In 2016, I began to envision my "Healing with Weaving" initiative, to highlight the importance of how art, specifically weaving, can be a therapeutic tool for healing. While my work has been placed in hospitals and places or worship, providing solace and reflection for visitors, I have wanted to find ways to teach people in these spaces how to weave themselves, giving them direct experience of the healing powers of the process.
I am currently pursuing my MFA at the University of Kansas and during this Spring semester, I am teaching a remote Introduction to Weaving class where I am able to teach my students how to weave portably on laser cut frame looms. For their second project, I asked them to focus while weaving on something or someone they have lost recently. This turned out to be an incredibly meaningful and healing project for both my students and myself. (Click here for testimonials.) Throughout the class, I kept on thinking about what I spoke in front of hundreds of people as a featured artist, during an ArtsKC Inspiration Breakfast years ago: wanting to help people heal through weaving.
This summer with the help from Arts KC’s Inspiration Grant funds and supporters like you will be launching my first Healing with Weaving Community Outreach Program’s pilot project at Children’s Mercy Hospital Adele Hall Campus in Kansas City, MO. The project will be providing 200 Healing with Weaving Frame Loom Kits with instructions to be used by patients, family members, and staff to explore the meditative and therapeutic benefits of weaving. Designed to make weaving accessible, these kits provide tools and a creative process that can help anyone experiencing anxiety, stress, grief, and loss. These funds will also help pay for professional videography services for a weaving video tutorial that can be viewed on www.healingwithweaving.org Healing with Weavings’ mission is to not stop with this summer’s pilot project but to continue making and donating these weaving loom kits to other local Kansas City hospitals, medical and counseling facilities and provide community weaving workshops.
During the month of June Debbie Barrett-Jones Textiles will be fundraising for Healing with Weaving with proceeds from all woven scarves and artwork going towards the Healing with Weaving Community Outreach Programs. Shop and support by going online to www.debbiebarrettjones.com or in-person at the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center Shop in the Crossroads located in Kansas City, MO. Make sure to Stop by Friday, June 4, 2021, for First Friday Opening Day from 11am-8pm to be the first to choose from all the newest woven scarves made by Debbie Barrett-Jones during her first year at KU. For more information, join the FB Event.
For more information and to find out how you help, please continue to visit www.healingwithweaving.com. And feel free to message me with any questions.
Much joy and creativity to you all!
~Debbie Barrett-Jones Healing with Weaving Creative Director
Make a donation today.
If you want to support the Healing with Weaving Community Outreach Project that will help educate the community about the healing benefits of weaving through workshops and having Frame Loom and Paper Weaving Kits available to the public, please make your donation support here….