Liz Schott is a retired educational leader who has found joy in writing the biography of renowned textile designer and weaver, Dorothy Wright Liebes.
In June, 2025, Liz received the Biographers International Organization’s Hazel Rowley Prize for her proposal for Useful and Beautiful: The Life of Dorothy Wright Liebes.
Liz lives in Sebastopol, California, with her husband of 38 years – Perry – and their rescued cattle dog Roxy. Their daughter Francesca lives with her husband Jason near Sacramento and their son Augie is in New York.
The number of veterans with physical and psychological injuries returning from World War II quickly overwhelmed the V. A.’s professional occupational therapists, so the Red Cross established its Arts & Skills programs in 126 hospitals across the country in the 1940s.
In her role as National Art Director of the program, Dorothy Liebes assembled a corps of professional artists and craftspeople who taught volunteers how to instruct injured servicemen and women in 28 disciplines, including sculpture, bookbinding, plant grafting, and photography.
At the center of the weaving efforts was the small but mighty Structo loom. Ten-thousand Structos were donated by Sears, and 10,000 more were purchased for the project. Liebes’s genius lay not in complicated weave patterns but rather in the way she used color and texture, an approach that perfectly suited four shaft looms like the Structo. Guild member Liz Schott will tell the story of Liebes’s involvement in the Arts & Skills program, and Peggy Osterkamp will teach an optional workshop – Weave Like Dorothy Liebes- in the afternoon
April 1st, 2026
9:30am Pacific Time: Visiting
10:00am Pacific Time: Lecture
11:00am Pacific Time: Meeting
This will be a hybrid guild meeting.
Peggy Osterkamp grew up outside Akron, Ohio and got her teaching degree at Ohio State University. After graduation she moved to California and taught in a junior high school in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
She learned to weave while on sabbatical leave at Pacific Basin School of Textiles in Berkeley, California where she became passionate about the craft. She apprenticed with Jim Ahrens, the “A” in AVL at the Atelier at Pacific Basin.
Osterkamp moved to Washington DC and found weavers excited to learn the production weaving techniques she practiced with Jim Ahrens. Then her teaching and weaving lives collided and her national career as a weaving teacher and author began. In Washington she volunteered at the Textile Museum which became her “home away from home”.
For seven years while living in New York City she taught weaving in the surrounding area and around the country and began writing her New Guide to Weaving Series. Working at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum with Milton Sonday was an exceptional experience because of her love for weave structures and complex weaves. She researched 14th and 17thcentury silk lampas fabrics with Mr. Sonday as well as other complex textiles.
Osterkamp has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for the last 35 years where she taught semester-length weaving classes at City College of San Francisco, wrote the 3-volume New Guide to Weaving and the comprehensive book, “Weaving for Beginners”. After her retirement she continued weaving her own art pieces.
Artist/weaver, Peggy Osterkamp has been known nationally for her teaching and instructional books about the art and techniques of weaving for over 40 years.
Few people knew that she was creating art pieces during this long period of time. Now she feels it is time to share her creations with art lovers and she exhibits in the Bay Area.
As she notes, “I don’t make anything “useful.”
April 1st, 2026
1:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Workshop: Weave Like Dorothy Liebes: Exploring Materials and Experimenting with the 4-Shaft Loom
Guild Members $60
Non Members $95
There is no materials fee.
Minimum enrollment: 10 people
Maximum enrollment: 14 people
Dorothy Liebes experimented with unexpected materials for weft – feathers, leather, Christmas ribbons, rickrack, metallic gimp, wood strips – using a 4-shaft loom as she created her handwoven pieces.
Participants will bring:
• 4-shaft floor loom (capable of making tie-up changes is highly desired), already warped with 3 yards of cotton, 5-6” wide, in a point (1 2 3 4 3 2 1) threading. A specific tie-up will be needed if at all possible.
• Your most colorful and textured yarns and other unusual materials to use as weft to share – be creative! Whatever could be used as weft is embraced – paper bags, wire, shoelaces, plastic bags, raffia – your imagination is the limit! A good chance to de-stash! Some will be provided.
• Stick shuttles for spontaneity to use with the weft materials. Bring several if you have them. Some will be provided.
• Two narrow sticks, no wider than the cloth beam and at least 2” wider than the warp width
• Note-taking materials, scissors, weaving tools, etc.
In the first part of the workshop, we’ll share these materials and see how spontaneous it is to use the 4-shaft loom. The ease of changing the treadling and structure on a 4-shaft loom invites spontaneity – to experiment and try a different weaving structure.
In the second part of the workshop, we’ll learn and practice production techniques to increase efficiency – as Dorothy Liebes would have needed to do when her studio was handweaving for architects and interior designers. The production techniques are ones that Jim Ahrens taught (he was the A part of AVL Looms). These are techniques that European weavers used before there were power looms. They are in Peggy’s red books and some even in the book Weaving for Beginners.