Sara Flynn
Quilter - Speaker - Designer - Teacher
Sara Flynn is a prolific maker with many skills and interests. As a busy mother of three young children, she finds time to create by adhering to her values of acceptance and self-compassion. Flynn is primarily a textile artist but is also known as a resourceful mixed-media piece creator. She completed a 2-year apprenticeship in the fiber arts at the Golden Fleece in Santa Cruz, CA, where she learned natural dyeing techniques, spinning yarn, weaving, paper making, knitting, and teaching introduction to fiber arts classes. After the apprenticeship was completed she joined the Navy, serving as an explosives technician and using sewing during downtime as her mental respite. Flynn completed a bachelors of arts degree from Portland State University (PSU) in the spring of 2009. While in college at PSU she worked in the costume shop of the theater as a seamstress to earn tuition financial aid.
All About Me
Flynn is a self professed speed sewer, pushing her machine as fast as it can go while embracing mistakes in the finished pieces rather than turning back to change them. The work created embraces the imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. There are mistakes and imperfections in every piece she makes, left intentionally there, so the piece can breathe. Flynn sources free and older forgotten materials to create new textile pieces forcing herself to use what she has on hand instead of buying more. She can be seen collecting free scraps locally in Portland, Oregon wrangling her three small children with her at odd places as she collects supplies. While creating in the small bits of time she can carve out from the day mistakes do happen in her work, but she does not count them as failures and keeps moving forward, this lends her pieces to be a bit messy but always original. This is part of the beauty of her work and her life.
Sara uses traditional quilt making techniques in a modern way to create textile artwork that is beautiful but also functional as a cozy quilt. Having been sewing for over 30 years she has learned classic quilting techniques and rules, using this knowledge base as a jumping off point to bend the rules in an effort to create new modern pieces that express her love of scooter riding, mechanics and making.
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