From thrifted fabrics to runway dreams, Qristy Kurtz has always used fashion as a way to belong, speak up, and build confidence. In this interview, she shares how sewing became her lifeline, why she calls herself a fashion facilitator, and how Fashion Workshop is opening creative doors for everyone.
What first drew you into fashion and creative making?
I remember loving going to the mall and going shopping as young as seven years old. I asked for a peasant top for my eighth birthday (an off-the-shoulder knit top) and received three! I had the best LA Gear acid-washed denim jumpsuit for my ninth birthday.
In middle school, I would draw fake tattoos on my body in marker and wear stickers on my face like jewelry.
It wasn’t until high school that I discovered Vogue.com and my grandmother’s sewing machine. I was self-taught until I took Mrs. Smith’s sewing class at Mountain View High School in Bend, OR.
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Was there one moment when you knew fashion wasn’t just a hobby — it was your path?
In high school, sewing and making my own clothes became my identity and built my self-esteem.
I didn’t have to feel bad about not fitting in – I was my own creation. I was obsessed. I worked at JoAnn Fabrics, I mentored in the apparel department at Fred Meyer, and I worked for a fiber artist, Ellen Gienger, who took me to NYC at 18 years old for a show.
Ellen arranged a tour of the Fashion Institute of Technology and their archive storage. I did every possible thing I could do in rural Oregon that had to do with Fashion. I would stay up at night and sew my outfit to wear the next day.
What is “Fashion Workshop” and when did that idea first begin to take shape?
Fashion Workshop is a creative non-profit whose mission is to make “Fashion for Everyone” and we try to make that EVERYWHERE in Central Oregon with a mobile classroom.
The mobile classroom and FW volunteers provide free and low cost design and sewing classes and community. Fashion Workshop has been a dream of mine for decades, continuing to morph and evolve and finally taking shape in July of 2025.
The mission and the vision for Fashion Workshop really coalesced after my two years teaching fashion design and construction at Redmond Proficiency Academy.
I have always had a passion for working with teenagers, informed by my own experience in school. Fashion is such a powerful tool to find identity, belonging, and communicate with the world around us.
Teenagers are especially vulnerable to lacking confidence or feeling self-conscious about their own creativity and ideas. Fashion Workshop facilitates an inclusive and low-stakes entry into what Fashion really means and how powerful having a lifelong hobby or career in sewing and design can be.
How have your early experiences shaped the way you think about fashion today?
My personal art practice really addresses the contradictions that exist in the fashion industry, and frankly, should be in conflict within any modern fashion-lover.
The fashion industry is incredibly harmful to the environment. Issues like overconsumption, unrealistic body image, shopaholism, and pollution are in direct conflict with the absolute love and obsession that I have with textiles, trims, brands, shopping, design, and the art for art’s sake of couture.
I owned a luxury resale boutique in Portland, OR, that really helped me reconcile these conflicting realities. By selling “pre-owned” fashion items it felt…. better.
One of my first art sculptures is a box with a heart box in the middle filled with hangers. It’s titled “The Heart Wants What the Heart Wants.” I think that perfectly answers the question.
What’s been the biggest surprise in your creative journey so far?
I never made it to fashion school. It was one of the hardest disappointments of my life. But you know what? I wasn’t destined to be a fashion designer. I was born to be a fashion FACILITATOR.
I excelled at business school. I am from a family of entrepreneurs. And I absolutely love to teach. In 2023, I went to Copenhagen, Denmark, and did three weeks of adult fashion design school at the Mode Design Skolen right before I turned 40 years old.
And you know what, I was F***ing good at it. I was amazing. I was an ARTIST. I was FREE…. It took nearly 40 years for me to embrace those titles. Have regrets? It is NEVER too late to live your dream. My dream took forever to show up, but being free of the what-ifs is really what got me to a place to start Fashion Workshop.
Who or what inspires you most — designers, artists, moments, or places?
I try to go to a new major city each year and hit up ALL the art museums and go resale shopping.
I am really inspired by modern artists of all media. I still review all the high fashion runway shows each season on voguerunway.com. I have been following the shows since the internet was invented – just kidding – but I have used it as a direct lifeline to the world of fashion for nearly thirty years.
I am very inspired by textiles. The fabric is more important to me than the silhouette. I am a fan of the couture made men – Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, Thom Browne, Viktor & Rolf, Rick Owens, Iris Van Helpern, and Robert Wun.
My two true loves of all time are Dr. Martens and Betsey Johnson. I recommend Betsey’s memoir that came out recently. She fills this world with LOVE and JOY!
How do you organize your creative space so ideas can breathe?
In my professional life (I have degrees in Accounting and Human Resources and earn money as a Business Manager), I am incredibly organized, detail-oriented, and interpersonal, and I spend a lot of time in spreadsheets.
My creative spaces tend to be …. chaos? I have always used a bin system for organizing notions, fabrics, and projects. But to be honest, I have four half-finished shirts, illustration homework (COCC digital illustration certificate), trash fashion designs, a TV, an old boombox with hundreds of CDs, dog toys, boots that need painting, and about a million other things strewn around a bedroom that I use as my main work space.
I love a good cave with colorful, dark walls, lamps, and rugs. I think it is a subconscious return to my childhood bedroom and having everything I needed in the world in a ten by ten space.
I like not having to clean up or worry about anyone stepping on sewing pins. There are times when I am really in a work groove, and I move my sewing to the living room so I can be with my family and watch the same shows and be close. I am unique in that I sew standing up. I work off a Husky toolbox full of all the consumables I need.
What do you hope your makers and students take away from your creative process?
I am very honest and vulnerable with them.
We do a lot of problem-solving, and sometimes, things just don’t work out. I hope they accept that no one is an expert. That we are all learning all the time. That they just have to START.
My creative process has never been about perfection or even craft, to be honest. I am not a perfectionist when it comes to sewing or even my own art. More than anything, I hope they take away that fashion is for everyone, ESPECIALLY them!
This younger generation is already very into personalization and thrifting. They don’t seem to follow brands the same way my generation did. But the tradeoff is they are deluged by online perfection and ideas. It is paralyzing to even start when there is so much content to compare yourself to. I hope I can change that narrative.
How do you see your role evolving in the next few years?
What a great question! I have always been a live-in-the-future kind of gal, and with Fashion Workshop and my current art practice, I want to just live in this moment forever. I don’t think I care if my role evolves.
I am content being the facilitator. I am very excited to see the students I work with today become the teachers, the professionals, and the fashionistas who believe Fashion is for Everyone. I am excited to see how they transform and save the soul of the fashion industry for future generations.
Why does community matter in fashion and making?
It recently dawned on me that the value of fashion and the value of the making is when it’s SEEN.
We can all learn a crapload of skills from YouTube, but who is ever really going to appreciate what you know if you don’t have a community to share it with? Social media doesn’t count.
I think I get like three likes on Instagram these days. It hits completely different when FIVE people stop me in the grocery store to ask about my yellow furry boots. Or I bring that New Year’s joy on the airplane with my Skeleton rhinestone earrings and electric pink snow boots. Or when I wear something I made and I tell the coffee shop girls, yes I made this! And now you can too – here’s my card. Come join the workshop!
What’s the most meaningful story you’ve heard from someone in your programs?
Oh man, I had six Seniors graduate at RPA last year, and they wrote me letters that I will treasure for the rest of my life. Every time I see a student wearing something I helped them make, I swell with pride. And when I see them wear their designs every day for an entire school year, I am like DONE. Mic Drop.
What advice would you give someone who’s just starting to sew or design?
You have to leave your sewing machine set up in your living space. There were times when I had no dining room – I had a sewing room.
You have to make it as easy as possible to sit down and just DO SOMETHING, even if you only have fifteen minutes. I guarantee, your fifteen minutes will turn into sixty and then ninety, and then it will be midnight, and you will be like CRAP! I have to work tomorrow! But it is worth it.
Put the dang thing on your coffee table! And I bet your family will be proud of you, not annoyed. It sets a wonderful example for kids.
I also recommend a repetitive project, so you improve your skills while making progress towards completion. Quilting is awesome for this. In order to make a quilt, you have to do the same process over and over again. it becomes mindless and something that you can do while watching (okay, listening) to a TV show.
Where can people see your work?
Instagram @qristyart and @fashion.work.shop and our website www.fashionforeveryone.org
Rapid-Fire Fun
Fabric you can’t resist: UMMM – all of it?? Thrifted fabric. Walmart $4 knit rolls (that is probably uncouth to say, but hey – I have a lot of Walmart fabric!) Designer deadstock, artist screen-printed towels, Dutch wax cotton, shiny metallics
One word to describe your creative superpower: Polyanna
Best advice you ever received: “You will worry less about what someone thinks about you when you realize how seldom they do” – My Mother
What makes you smile during a long work day: Text Messages from my best friend and Fashion Workshop Board Member, Rachel North.
Interview posted January 2026
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