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.