Iris Verhoeven

Hi everyone! I'm Iris, born in 1993 and raised in the beautiful Noord-Brabant village of Cuijk. As a child, I couldn't keep away from a piece of paper and a pencil. This later manifested itself in the Media Design study in Nijmegen. In the third year, I found out that I felt the study was too commercial, because it wasn't quite my passion. Nevertheless, I finished the study and graduated. I now work at the secretariat at a social housing association.

As of June 2015, I share my life together with my boyfriend Ruud Kroon. As a result, he often helps me think up and improve projects. A real partner in crime!

Re-enactment and the love of historical textiles

Since the beginning of our relationship in 2015, we started the hobby of reenactment together. Reenactment is recreating a period of our history as historically as possible. We depict the 15th century. Together with the association the Graven van Holland, we regularly perform at medieval festivals or events.

Through re-enactment, I came into contact with card weaving. I didn't know what it was, how it worked or what it was called. But that's what I wanted to learn! After quite a bit of self-education with a lot of trial and error, I taught myself card weaving. How cool was that! After about six years, my fingers started itching for more. The love for textiles was born.

A year after that, I took the plunge and bought a loom with shafts. Weaving with shafts is completely different from card weaving! But working with thread is a passion so I was very curious to see if I could manage to learn it.

Soon I managed to set up and weave the first warps. Meanwhile, I took a short course in basic weaving in Tilburg, and mostly learned a lot myself by reading books. My interest has grown enormously towards archaeological textiles. Imitating fabrics from the distant past, researching old customs and habits to manufacture these fabrics and sharing my acquired knowledge of them has become an occupation I deeply love.