Kathryn Roe’s fiber art pays homage to the work women have done throughout the centuries – the often anonymous work created using needle and thread, yarns, and fibers.  Roe’s work features skills she was taught as a very young child by her mother and grandmother.  Along the way she learned to appreciate the way these often ignored skills create beauty out of nothing.

“It is both exciting and sad to rummage through a thrift store and find embroidered, crocheted, and stitched items someone spent hours on,” Roe said.  “These were used to clothe a family or to make a home more beautiful.  We usually do not know who made these items, and they are often dismissed as ‘busy work’ or ‘craft’.  I want to honor those anonymous women of the past, and I want to tell today’s stories with fiber.”

Ms. Roe works with wool, silk, and cotton fabrics recycled from thrift store finds.  She layers wool fibers and adds thread sketching and hand embroidery to build fiber “paintings”.  Much of Roe’s work merges needle-felting, applique, machine thread-sketching, hand embroidery, and crochet in both representational and non-representational work.  The landscapes Roe crafts show glimpses of Iowa’s highways and back roads.  Other pieces represent dreams and personal stories.  She also creates more whimsical pieces that are based on her sense of humor and imagination.