To be a ballet dancer, one must also be a seamstress.
Once graduated to pointe shoes, a ballerina also takes on the routine task of preparing her shoes, a responsibility given only to the most dedicated dancers. The breaking of the hard, wooden shank, the crushing of the stiff toe box and, of course, the sewing of elastic and ribbon into the perfectly pastel pink satin of the shoe.
Kimber Follevaag had an advantage back when she graduated from flat to pointe shoes as her mother ran a fabric store right next to her ballet studio. After growing up alongside fabric and sewing, Follevaag's transition from dancer to business student to fiber artist came naturally over the years.
"I still needed a creative lifestyle after ballet ended," she says. "I just transitioned to what I knew: fabric, fibers and things of that nature."
After moving to Coeur d'Alene in 1999 and eventually making her way to Spokane after her husband retired, Follevaag began taking art seriously, yet it took her some trial and error to discover her preferred medium.
"I used to poke holes through photographs and embroider those," she says. "That turned into these acrylics that I did for a long time and then that went into punching holes through paper for a while. It was a process."
"What people are doing with fiber now has really taken off, and it's really becoming recognized as an art form rather than your grandmother's knitting and crocheting."
tweet this
Over the years, she's developed a signature style of fiber art that involves wrapping and weaving thread or yarn around a metal or wooden frame to create bold patterns. She winds and weaves the fiber around and through itself, making entirely unique colorblocked fiber patterns. No two are alike because Follevaag lets her hands and mind take over.
"It's a very intuitive process," she says. "I get my muscle memory going, feel confident and just take off."
Follevaag, who shares her work on Instagram, @kimber_follevaag, continues to use her environment as artistic inspiration, pulling from the clean lines and details of the midcentury modern house she lives in. She's also dabbled in old-style cottage patterns, checkered patterns and more. To her, fiber presents endless possibilities.
"The fiber scene is getting some momentum," Follevaag says. "I think people back in the day would regard it as craft rather than art. What people are doing with fiber now has really taken off, and it's really becoming recognized as an art form rather than your grandmother's knitting and crocheting. I think we're really going to see it explode as an art form because of what you can do with it and how you can manipulate it."
Follevaag's creations make age-old materials feel fresh, new and exciting again.
"It's something at your core," she says. "People gravitate to textiles or painting or ballet or gardening. Mine just happened to be fiber, and it's what I love." ♦
