Peggy Osterkamp

Peggy Osterkamp, author of the widely acclaimed book, Weaving for Beginners and over 100 Weaving Tips (on her website), provides her readers with the information they need to weave in a clear and enjoyable Step-by-Step way. Her special skill is making the richness of her training and experience accessible to students. Peggy created her newest publication –a booklet on Hemstitching—in response to her most viewed tip on her website which has over 33,600 views at the time of publication.

She has published four books and a DVD about the techniques of weaving. Her website, www.peggyosterkamp.com is comprehensive including a gallery of her art, travel journals, frequent blogs of her current work, as well as her popular weaving tips.

Having her flat, spiral-bound books at your loom is like having a patient, knowledgeable teacher at your side.

Her most popular book Weaving for Beginners provides beginners with the information they need to weave with 400 pages and over 600 illustrations. It is the book students wish for and for everyone who wants to teach new weavers.

In the three-book series Peggy Osterkamp’s New Guide to Weaving, she presents a wealth of weaving knowledge and research, much of it never available before in the United States.

Based on centuries-old European handweaving techniques, the methods Peggy describes in words and pictures are easy to understand and use. As her many students have discovered, she inspires confidence in every project.

Teaching is an integral part of Osterkamp’s work in textiles. She taught weaving at City College of San Francisco for many years. She has lectured at museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Winterthur, and the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C. In semester-length courses and workshops across the country, Osterkamp has introduced hundreds of students to weaving theory and practice. Her special skill is making the richness of her training and experience accessible.

In addition to her art and teaching, Osterkamp was a textile scholar. She researched 14th through 17th century European textiles at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Design. She was one of 17 artists selected out of 700 applicants for the international exhibition by the Textile society of America showing the most innovative textile artists in 2014.

Osterkamp’s art is in in private collections and has been shown in galleries across the United States and the world.

As a public service she created the website www.ahrensloms.com celebrating the looms that Jim Ahrens built in the 1940’s through the 1980’s.

Her home base and studio are in Greenbrae, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area.