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Stay updated on workshops, events, and community projects from Border Loomers.
Get Involved
Join a workshop, volunteer, or partner with Border Loomers to help us share weaving skills and build community in Naco, Sonora.
Contact us at borderloomers@gmail.com
Sharing the knowledge
Preparing to host free, all‑ages monthly workshops in my hometown of Naco, Sonora, sharing skills, stories, and hands-on weaving experiences with the community
Border Loomers
Border Loomers is a community-rooted fiber arts initiative that centers traditional Mexican weaving, queer creativity, and cross-border collaboration. We exist to preserve ancestral knowledge, celebrate experimental making, and foster inclusive, hands-on learning spaces along the U.S.-Mexico border.
About
The Program
Border Loomers
In the summer of 2025, I returned to Mexico to immerse myself in the ancestral art of traditional rug weaving - a practice that has long called to me as both an artist and a queer Mexican-American reconnecting with my roots. This journey is deeply personal. It’s a way of honoring my mother, who raised me between the Sonoran desert and the Arizona border, and of affirming my own identity as a gay man carving space within traditions that haven’t always made room for people like me. Through Border Loomers, I aim to stitch together the past and the future - transforming the border from a line of separation into a thread of connection. By learning from master weavers and bringing that knowledge back to share with my community, I hope to create a space where culture is alive, inclusive, and evolving - one thread at a time.
About the Project
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Founded by: Fernando Serrano in 2025
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Location: Based in Bisbee, Arizona / Naco, Sonora
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Focus Areas: Weaving education, public art, community textile libraries, experimental fiber, intergenerational knowledge-sharing
Building Connections
A month-long immersive journey into traditional Mexican rug weaving. During July, I travel to Mexico to apprentice with master weavers, learning both the physical techniques and spiritual teachings embedded in the practice. This is a time of personal transformation and deep listening, where meals are shared, prayers are woven, and ancestral knowledge is passed from hands to heart. Where phase one of Border Loomers unfolds.
A month-long immersive journey into traditional Mexican rug weaving. During July, I travel to Mexico to apprentice with master weavers, learning both the physical techniques and spiritual teachings embedded in the practice. This is a time of personal transformation and deep listening, where meals are shared, prayers are woven, and ancestral knowledge is passed from hands to heart.
Eat, Pray, Weave
This is an evolving series of single-day pop-up workshops designed to engage our community in the meditative rhythm of weaving. Each session introduces a simple off-loom technique, encouraging participants of all ages to slow down and reconnect with the tactile world. No experience is necessary—just curiosity and a willingness to thread stories together.
One Day a Weave
Coming Soon
The Healing Loom
Workshops
Cardboard Loom Weaving
This low-cost, high-reward workshop teaches off-loom weaving using cardboard and yarn. It’s perfect for beginners or group settings, and introduces basic weaving vocabulary, rhythm, and design. Each participant leaves with a small woven piece and the knowledge to keep weaving anywhere, anytime.
Skills: warp/weft basics, color blocking, simple textures
Ideal for: all ages (especially kids!)
Materials provided: cardboard, scissors, yarn, tape
Build Your Own Frame Loom
Participants will collaborate to build simple wooden frame looms using basic hand tools and reclaimed materials. This workshop serves as both a skill-building session and a step toward self-sufficient weaving. Each participant will take home their own loom to continue exploring at home or bring to future Border Loomers events.
Skills: measuring, sawing, drilling, loom anatomy
Ideal for: youth & adults
Materials provided: wood, nails, glue, twine
Woven during a month-long study in San Miguel de Allende, Sin Fronteras is a personal meditation on identity, migration, and memory. Fernando Serrano uses the bold geometry of a traditional Mexican textile pattern as a foundation, then breaks and reinterprets it through color to speak to dual belonging.
Red and green reference his Mexican heritage; blue and yellow echo the American Southwest where he was born and raised. Black lines form visual borders across the piece, but are repeatedly broken by a soft bleeding of white into color - a gesture toward permeability, hybridity, and connection.
At the base of the rug, a bar of bright stacked color acts as both signature and offering - an index of the palette used, and a quiet assertion of authorship in a shared lineage of weavers.
Make a donation
Weaving connection across the border - one thread at a time.
Border Loomers is a community-based initiative grounded in the belief that weaving is more than craft - its memory, resistance, and care. From the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, we create spaces where youth, artists, and elders can come together to share traditional knowledge, experiment with fiber arts, and build meaningful relationships across generations and geographies.
Your donation helps us:
Provide free weaving workshops in both Mexico and USA
Build looms and supply materials for youth and adult learners
Invite master weavers from both sides of the border to share their stories and techniques
Create public installations and exhibitions that center local voices
Document and share oral histories from borderland fiber artists
Whether it’s $5 or $500, your support makes a difference.
We invite you to be part of our weaving - not just as a donor, but as a thread in the story. Thank you for believing in this work.
“Cada hilo cuenta. Every thread matters.”
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Border Loomers
Tel. 520-366-1068
borderloomers@gmail.com
PO Box 1360 Bisbee Arizona, 85603
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