Textile thinking,
at architectural scale.
A school for competent textile makers who are ready to scale their craft into architectural commissions. Project-driven, founder-led, science-informed.
Not another macramé tutorial.
You already know how to tie a knot. What most makers never learn is how to scale a personal practice into a commissioned one — how to price a hotel-lobby installation, specify fire-rated rope, rig a 12-foot span, or talk to an architect at a brief review. That's the curriculum.
Commission practice
Pricing, proposals, specifying materials at commercial scale, fire and structural code, working with architects on real briefs.
Architectural macramé
The flagship course. Eight modules taking a competent maker through a commission-scale installation from brief to install.
Live cohorts
Premium small-group programs on advanced topics. Cohort 1 — Crochet & Knit at Tensile Scale — opens three months after launch.
From the studio.
Be here for the first cohort.
Fifty founding-member seats open at launch. Join the waitlist for priority access and founding-member pricing.
Luisa Gil Fandindo
[Founder story — 4 to 6 paragraphs on the path from textile practice to built structural work. To be written.]
The thesis
Architecture's origins, Gottfried Semper argued in 1851, are in textile enclosure. The field has been waiting 175 years for someone to take that thread seriously as a modern, teachable practice. This school is an attempt.
The target is specific: competent textile makers — fiber artists, textile designers, hobbyists turned professional — who want their work to live at architectural scale. The curriculum is unusual because it teaches the part of that journey nobody else teaches. Not the knots, which you already know. The commissions.
The approach
Project-driven: every course ends in a built piece you can photograph, portfolio, and pitch. Video-led: the pedagogy is expected to be visual. Science-informed: fiber behaves the way it does for material reasons; structures hold because of mechanics. We name the why.
The Commission Practice Primer
The short course on the business of commissioned textile work. Free, account-gated, ~2 hours of video plus worked examples.
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Free forever — no card required.
Pricing your first piece
Four pricing models practitioners use for architectural commissions: day-rate, materials-plus-margin, square-foot, and value-based. Each fits a different project type. In this lesson I walk through how to pick one, how to defend the number to a client, and why most textile makers undercharge on their first commission by roughly 40%.
You'll learn: how to separate materials from labor in a quote, what a reasonable first-commission margin looks like, and the two questions to ask a client before you quote.
Architectural Macramé & Fiber Installation for Commission
The flagship. Take a commission-scale installation from first brief to final install, across eight modules of project-driven video. For competent makers ready to work at architectural scale.
What you'll build
By the end of the course, a commission-scale installation (roughly 2.5 m wide × 3 m tall) that stands up to a hospitality-grade install — rigging, code, photographable outcome, portfolio-ready.
Curriculum
The state of the art
Sally England, Windy Chien, MACRO MACRAMÉ — whose lineage are you working inside?
Scaling knotwork
From wall-hanging to 10-foot span. Anchor logic, pattern scaling, tension at scale.
Structural design
Load paths, balance, sag calculation, why a 3 m piece needs a different structural approach than a 1 m piece.
Rigging and hardware
Anchors, swivels, fall-arrest, weight ratings. The hardware a pro uses that Etsy doesn't stock.
Fire, code, and safety
Fire-rated rope, sprinkler clearances, commercial-code realities.
Sourcing at scale
Vendors who ship 200 kg of rope next week. The directory that saves a commission.
Client delivery
Install day. Tools, labor, time estimates, what not to say to a hotel facilities manager.
Portfolio and next commission
Shooting the piece, writing up the case study, routing the next lead.
Three downloadable references
Knot library PDF · Hardware and sourcing reference · Pricing worksheet. Gated to active subscribers.
Pay monthly, save with annual,
or invest in a cohort.
Every tier includes the Commission Practice Primer. Subscription unlocks the Flagship plus the Foundations guest series. Cohorts are reserved for live, critique-heavy work.
Cancel anytime. Full access while your subscription is active.
- Full Flagship course (8 modules)
- All three downloadable references
- Foundations guest series
- Community access (Discord)
- Project gallery submissions
- All future Companion tracks
Two months free · $24/mo equivalent · billed once annually.
- Everything in Monthly
- Priority cohort enrollment windows
- Founding-member recognition
- Early access to new courses
- 14-day refund window
- Save $58 vs. monthly
Cohort 1 — Crochet & Knit at Tensile Scale
Eight-week live program. 12 seats. Weekly critiques, instructor feedback, a group-built installation. Prerequisite: active subscription.
$349 founding-member · $499 standard thereafter
See cohort detailsPricing FAQ
Can I switch from monthly to annual later?
What's the refund policy?
Do subscribers automatically get into cohorts?
Do you offer discounts for students or emerging makers?
Cohort 1 — Crochet & Knit at Tensile Scale
The first live cohort, running eight weeks beginning ~3 months after launch. Twelve seats. Crochet and knit at Janet Echelman / Ernesto Neto scale — a small group building aspirational work together.
Dates
8 weeks · kick-off Q1, first year post-launch. Weekly 90-minute live sessions on Zoom.
Seats
12 cohort members · capped for critique quality · first come.
Price
$349 founding · $499 standard after cohort 1 · one-time payment.
Prerequisite
Active subscriber on the monthly or annual plan. The cohort is a live critique-heavy extension of flagship curriculum. Subscribe first, enroll second. See pricing →
Priority access for founding members.
Join the waitlist now for early access to the twelve seats before public enrollment opens.
Dr. Elena Marconi on the structural mechanics of cloth
A conversation with a textile-mechanics researcher on why woven and knit structures behave the way they do at scale — and what fiber artists can take from the math without needing to do the math.
About Dr. Marconi
Dr. Elena Marconi is a textile-mechanics researcher at TU Delft's Industrial Design Engineering faculty. Her work sits between materials science and structural engineering, with a focus on how woven and knit geometries translate into bulk mechanical properties. She has consulted on architectural-scale installations for projects in Rotterdam and Milan.
Episode notes
On why cloth drapes the way it does
"Every woven structure is a mechanical puzzle of friction, bending stiffness, and the geometry of the interlacement. A textile that drapes well is a textile whose fiber-to-fiber friction is low enough to rearrange, but whose bending stiffness at the yarn level is high enough to hold a fold."
On scaling from swatch to span
"What most practitioners get wrong is thinking a 3 m piece is just a 30 cm piece scaled up. Mass scales with area, but load paths are concentrated at anchors. The math is not linear. There are mental models we can teach, short of actually calculating."
On the science fiber artists should know
"Two ideas, really. First, every fiber has a characteristic bending length — how far it can stick out of a bundle before it flops. Second, every weave has a preferred strain direction. These together predict 80% of what your piece will do in the air. The rest is hardware."
Three hardware mistakes that will kill a hotel install.
Every maker who does their first paid commission at architectural scale makes at least one hardware mistake. Most of them are survivable. A few are not. Over the last seven years of doing this work — and watching other makers do it — I've seen the same three errors repeat often enough that I'm writing them down so you don't have to discover them on a hotel lobby floor at 11 p.m. the night before a grand opening.
1. Under-rating the anchors
Rope rated for 200 kg is not the same as an anchor rated for 200 kg. The weakest link in an install is almost never the rope — rope is cheap insurance. The weakest link is the fastener you drove into drywall or attached to a dropped ceiling whose real load rating is a function of what's above it. When you spec anchors, you need a rating for the anchor *plus* the substrate it's in, plus a safety factor of 4× to 5× over static load.
I learned this on a commission in Portland where a subcontractor installed the anchors for my piece before I arrived. Each anchor was rated 250 lb static, which seemed fine — the piece weighed 90 lb. What nobody accounted for: the piece oscillated in the HVAC airflow at roughly 0.3 Hz, and the dynamic load at peak was closer to 600 lb. The anchor held, but only because I got lucky.
2. Forgetting the sprinkler clearance
Commercial ceilings have sprinkler heads. The codes around them are specific and non-negotiable: most jurisdictions require 18 inches of clearance between the sprinkler and any suspended object. If your piece is at 20 inches, you're fine. If it's at 17 inches, the fire marshal will not sign off on the install, and you'll be unmounting it that afternoon.
3. Rigging without a second hanger
On any piece over about 25 lb, every load-bearing connection should have redundancy — two anchors per attachment point, two carabiners per anchor, two ways the whole thing could stay up if one element failed. This is industry-standard for anything rigged over human heads, and it should be standard for you.
There is no way to make a commission economical if you cut corners on the rigging. The math doesn't work. Every successful commissioned installer I know spends between 15% and 25% of their budget on hardware. Spend it.
Closing
A commission install is the moment your piece meets a building code. The work of the school, and a lot of what I'm trying to put into the Flagship, is the reconciliation between the sensibilities of textile practice and the realities of construction documentation. You don't need to become an engineer. You do need to respect what engineers know.
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One essay every two weeks on commission practice, material thinking, and the business of textile-architecture.
Spanning canopy,
West Coast boutique hotel.
A 4.2 m × 2.8 m knotted rope canopy installed above the check-in desk of a 62-room boutique hotel, completed over eleven weeks from brief to install.
The brief
The interior designer wanted a textural element above the check-in desk that referenced the region's maritime history without leaning into the literal. Their reference images were mid-century museum textiles and traditional ship rigging; they wanted something between. The space had a 4.5 m ceiling with a pre-existing I-beam grid, which suggested rigging rather than mounting.
The design
A three-layer knotted structure: a primary load grid, a secondary textural layer of Josephine knots, and a tertiary drape layer that gave the piece its spatial quality. The top layer carried all the load; the middle and lower layers were decorative and independent. This let the piece look soft and dimensional while structurally behaving like a taut canopy.
Installation
Installed over a single 14-hour day with a two-person team and scissor lift. The I-beam anchors held five swivel-rated rigging points; the piece suspended from those with 5 mm stainless cable and adjustable turnbuckles for final tension. Total hardware cost was $840; total piece cost to the client was $18,500 including design time, material, travel, and install.
What I'd do differently
The piece oscillates more than I want in the HVAC airflow. Anchoring the bottom edge with tension-only cable to the I-beam below would have settled it without visible hardware. The turnbuckles are overkill for the weight; a swaged cable would have read cleaner from below. Both are in the second iteration of this template, which is what you'll see in the Flagship.
The Flagship walks through this project, module by module.
The brief, the structural approach, the rigging, the install day — covered in full inside the Flagship course.
Preview the FlagshipIn-progress and finished work
from the community.
Subscribers share commission-scale builds here. Filter by technique, browse for reference, submit your own work once you've completed the Primer.
Suspended cord installation
Living room acoustic panel
Hotel restaurant screen
Tensioned study
Corporate lobby piece
Structural maquette, 1:5
Woven wall panel
Natural-dye banner set
Anchor-point load test
Submit your own work.
Available to subscribers who have completed the Primer. Three images, a 200-word write-up, technique tags. Reviewed and approved within a few days.
Submit a projectQuestions, answered.
If yours isn't here, email hello@fandindotextiles.com and we'll add it.
The school
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Subscription
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Cohorts
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Community
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Technical
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Luisa Gil Fandindo
Textile practitioner working at architectural scale. Based in [city, to be written]. Commissions for hospitality, corporate, retail, and museum interiors.
Practice
[Three to four paragraphs on the founder's working practice — the origins of the move from textile work to built structural work, the kinds of commissions taken, the recurring problems that shaped the curriculum. To be written during content production.]
Selected commissions
Spanning canopy · Portland · 2024
Acoustic partition · Brooklyn · 2024
Museum threshold screen · Oakland · 2023
Retail storefront · London · 2023
Approach to teaching
The work of this school rests on one conviction: the knowledge a working commissioned textile artist uses every day is not written down, not taught in textile schools, and not reachable from YouTube. Pricing, rigging, code, fabrication partnerships, client management — this is craft knowledge in the old sense of the word, and the only way to move it is to teach it directly, with your own commissions as the evidence.
I am not an engineer. I am not an architect. I have spent seven years reconciling textile practice with the realities of commercial construction, and I believe the school is the faithful record of that reconciliation. You do not need to become what I became. You need to learn what I learned.
Welcome back, friend.
Your place in the work.
Upgrade to the Flagship
The full architectural macramé course is available with a monthly subscription. Three gated downloadables included.
See pricingCohort 1 — opens soon
Twelve seats · Crochet & Knit at Tensile Scale · founding-member pricing.
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