In this immersive workshop with renowned textile artist Luke Haynes, students will explore quilting as a dynamic medium for storytelling, image-making, and personal expression. Throughout the week, Luke will guide students through a series of hands-on demonstrations, exercises, and conversations designed to expand both their technical skills and their creative thinking.
The workshop will begin with short, focused exercises that help students loosen up and build momentum. These may include improvisational piecing, working with found or recycled textiles, exploring color and contrast through fabric selection, building simple compositions from scraps, and experimenting with scale, repetition, rhythm, and negative space. Students will also look at how traditional quilt structures can be used, interrupted, stretched, or reimagined to support more personal or contemporary ideas.
Luke will demonstrate techniques related to piecing, composition, raw-edge appliqué, fabric layering, surface design, and the translation of images or ideas into quilt form. Students may experiment with building abstract compositions, developing symbolic imagery, incorporating text or personal materials, and using fabric as a way to create depth, movement, and meaning. These exercises are intended to give students a toolkit they can carry into their own projects, whether they are working figuratively, abstractly, traditionally, or somewhere between.
As the week progresses, students will move into more self-directed work. Each participant will have time to develop an individual project or series of studies, with Luke offering personalized guidance, constructive critique, and thoughtful support along the way. The class will make space for experimentation, problem-solving, revision, and discovery. Students will be encouraged to follow unexpected directions, take creative risks, and consider how their choices of material, pattern, image, and construction can deepen the story their work is telling.
This is a class about making. It is about trying, failing, cutting things apart, sewing them back together, finding the image inside the material, and allowing the process to teach you something. Students are invited to bring their full creative selves into the room and to use quilting as a way to investigate personal narrative, visual rhythm, memory, place, identity, and material experimentation.
Whether you are developing a new body of work, beginning a more personal studio practice, or refining an existing one, this workshop is designed to deepen both your technical fluency and your artistic voice. All experience levels are welcome, though some comfort using a sewing machine will be helpful.
About Luke Haynes
Luke Haynes is an internationally acclaimed textile artist who has redefined quilting as a contemporary fine art form. Raised in poverty across the American South and diagnosed as autistic, Haynes turned to creative problem-solving as a way to build comfort, structure, and identity in a world that often felt unpredictable. Quilting became his language of survival—first as a self-taught teenager, and later as a lifelong practice of transformation.
He earned a full scholarship to study architecture at The Cooper Union in New York City, where he deepened his understanding of spatial design, material systems, and the built environment. Although he ultimately returned to textiles as his primary medium, the influence of architecture remains central to his practice—most notably in his large-scale quilted structures and public art installations. Haynes has created quilted houses, suspended fabric environments, and shade-giving architectural textiles for cities including Los Angeles, Seattle, and Phoenix. His most recent public work, SOMBRA: The Celebration of Shade, was commissioned through a major city art grant and serves as a gathering space made entirely from recycled fabric panels.
Over the past 20 years, Haynes has developed a groundbreaking approach to textile portraiture, blending architecture, photography, and reclaimed materials into quilted compositions that challenge the boundary between craft and fine art. He created his signature portrait method in his early twenties—an innovation that has since been widely emulated—and has gone on to teach hundreds of students across the globe. Every one of his pieces is made entirely from salvaged textiles, a practice rooted in both his upbringing and his commitment to sustainability; to date, his work has diverted more than 100 tons of clothing and fabric from landfills.
Haynes’ quilts have been exhibited in over 200 museums and galleries worldwide, and are held in the permanent collections of institutions including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Quilt Museum, the Asheville Art Museum, the Newark Museum, the American Folk Art Museum, and many others. He is widely recognized by the media and fine art institutions as a pillar of the modern quilting movement, and is celebrated for expanding the possibilities of what quilts can be—sculptural, narrative, architectural, and profoundly human.
At its core, Haynes’ work is about making order from chaos, building systems of care, and honoring the quiet power of comfort objects. Through every stitch, he asks: what does it mean to create a home when you never had one? And what might healing look like when sewn from the scraps?
Rates & Enrollment
Day Student Tuition: $1,190.00
Full 5-Day Package*: $3,043.28 (double occupancy pp) or $3,232.12 (single occupancy)
*5-Day Workshop Package includes: Tuition for 5 full class days, 6 nights of dinner, lodging, breakfast, daily cookie and fruit breaks, unlimited coffee and tea, and welcoming wine and cheese reception. Your choice between a room to yourself (single occupancy) or bring a friend and split a room (double occupancy).
Get more information about your options to enroll here.