About — Tabby Weaving Studio

Tabby Weaving Studio is an open-ended, education-focused weaving residency nestled in the valleys of southern Appalachia.

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2027 Applications

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tabby
/TAH-bee/ • noun

Tabby or plain weave is the simplest, most fundamental textile weave structure. Warp and weft threads cross at right angles in an alternating one-up-one-down pattern. This ubiquitous, over and under structure serves the most basic techniques yet finds extensive, complex uses.

The residency adopts its name as ethos: simplicity, slowness, and a return to weaving's most foundational structure.

Founded in 2024, Tabby Weaving Studio was built around the belief that a practice, much like cloth, gets stronger through interdependence: with other makers, with tradition as a jumping-off point, and with the exchange of working in relationship to place.

TWS is an experiment in how craft and community are woven together through relationships with one another. The residency is operated out of a studio space/apartment located on Kimberly and her husband,Ryan’s property.

Kimberly English
Founder & Director

Kimberly English (b. 1994) studied textiles at the Savannah College of Art and Design before earning her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was the 2024–25 Emerging Artist Fellow in Fiber at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Her residencies include McColl Center, Woodstock Byrdcliffe Artist Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Penland School of Craft, Berea College, The Gibbes Museum, The Bascom Center for the Visual Arts, Praxis Digital Weaving Lab, and University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, Burnaway, and Design Milk, and exhibited widely, including at the Spartanburg Art Museum, New Bedford Art Museum, Asheville Art Museum, the Delaware Contemporary, the Ackland Museum, Vox Populi, CICA Museum, and the Museum of Craft and Design.

Ryan Sullivan
Facilities, Finance, & Fun

Ryan McCoy Sullivan has called the mountains of Western North Carolina home since earning his degree in Sustainable Development at Appalachian State University. He works in production at East Fork Pottery while tending to projects and the Tabby Weaving Studio property. Ask him about the Dead, secular Buddhism, or Kneecap.

Please reach out with any residency inquires, application questions, concerns, or collaborations.

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