“I don’t think you can cut fabric wrong when you’re improvising. It’s just a process.”
Stephanie Z. Ruyle says this with the calm certainty of someone who has made peace with not knowing. Someone who has, in fact, built an entire creative practice around it. She’s talking about improv quilting, but she might as well be describing her philosophy of life. Make a move. See what happens. Trust that the wrong cut will lead somewhere better than the right one would have.
It’s a disposition that Bianca Springer, standing on the other side of the same philosophy, knows well—even as she approaches creativity from a different direction. Where Stephanie follows the thread without a destination, Bianca builds the map. Where Stephanie reads the pattern and then ignores it, Bianca reads it twice and teaches her students why that second read changes everything.
This is precisely why their upcoming retreat at the Estelle Center for Creative Arts works.

The Garment Speaks

Bianca came to sewing through a different door. A complicated pregnancy pulled her out of a demanding academic career—and somewhere in the space that opened up, she started sewing clothes for her daughter. Then for herself. Then people kept stopping her on the street.
“Thanks, I made them,” became her constant reply—and eventually, the name of her business. Thanks! I made them, sew can you. became the rest of her mission.
She began teaching the way most great teachers do: organically, out of necessity. She stood up at a mom’s group meeting and told anyone who wanted to learn how to sew to come to her kitchen table. Five women showed up. They put their kids in the living room and sewed periodically for weeks.
What distinguishes Bianca in a classroom is her ability to remove the fear without removing the rigor. Garment construction has real rules—seam allowances matter, pattern markings mean something—and students who’ve sewn for years can still get stuck in their own anxiety about those rules. Bianca’s response is to slow them down in exactly the right place.
At a workshop on Madeline Island last year, she started the week by having every student read the pattern instructions in full, silently, from start to finish. It felt rudimentary. One experienced sewer told her afterward it changed the course of her entire week—she’d spotted something she would have skipped right past and gotten wrong.
“Being willing to be in the student mode,” Bianca says, “is really important. Even for the expert.”

Permission to Not Know

What Stephanie and Bianca share—across their different approaches, different backgrounds, and different personalities—is a commitment to giving students permission. Permission to make a mistake and keep going. Permission to choose the unexpected fabric combination. Permission to not know where something is headed and find that exciting rather than frightening.
Stephanie tells the story of cutting her mother’s Liberty of London fabric for a shirt—beautiful, expensive fabric—and slicing the collar and cuffs upside down with no remaining fabric to cut them again. She sat with it, MacGyvered a solution, and ended up with a shirt that had a center-back seam on the collar and details nobody could have guessed weren’t intentional. “People feel so proud of resolving the mistake,” she says. “They’ll say, ‘I can’t believe I figured this out.’”
Bianca makes a dress from a double-knit polyester quilt top she found at an estate sale and people stop her in the street. “I can’t believe you did that,” they say. She takes that as the highest compliment—not because she defied the rules, but because she let the material tell her what it wanted to be.
“Pulling the creative thread and seeing where it leads,” she calls it.

What You'll Take Home

By the end of the week at the Estelle Center, each participant will leave with one or two finished wearable pieces—designed, pieced, and constructed entirely by their own hands, from fabric they made themselves. But the more lasting thing they’ll take home is harder to hold: the understanding that not knowing where something is going is not a problem to be solved. It’s the point.
“I want them to feel proud of themselves for what they’ve done,” Bianca says. “And inspired by what other people have done. And invigorated to go and make more.”
Stephanie adds, simply: “I want to hear on the last day that I can’t wait to get home and do that again.”
Bianca Springer and Stephanie Ruyle’s “Make the Fabric, Make the Garment” retreat runs July 13–17, 2026, at the Estelle Center for Creative Arts in La Veta, Colorado. The retreat is open to confident beginners through intermediate sewers.
Visit Bianca’s Instagram page here.Visit Stephanie’s Instagram page here.