In a Nutshell
 

Your booking contribution goes towards community-based jobs & affordable housing, as well as youth higher education and trade school long-term tuition scholarship savings for English language learners that built the studio and inspired its purchased. LoomsStore contributions go straight to our youth artist and construction worker in residency's short-term education costs.

 

How You Become Part of the Story
 

Every booking, every purchase, and every visit adds a thread to this story. When you choose to hold your elopement, graduation, boudoir session, or creative shoot here, you are not just renting a space. You are investing in a young artist's education, a construction worker's trade school, and a community's vision for affordable housing and sustainable living. Your presence here affirms that art, care, and collective work matter. You become part of the legacy we are building together.

 

Tip the Community Serving you Directly
 

Tips for the original build team and ongoing service team of community-based landscapers, cleaners and construction maintenance support, as well as our ongoing silent auction from the original down payment crowdfunding through the art spinoffs upcycled from our build can be found through our gift butter campaign here!

 

Our Story

 

Way back when there was just a garden and the community that stewards and admires it…

 

For over eight and a half years, Looms of Liberation has been a space of gathering, growing, and spontaneous creation. Strangers have wandered into the front yard and taken photos in front of the lake with the Rocky Mountain view. Neighbors have stopped to admire the flowers, over 100 species that bloom in sequence through the seasons. We have sold those flowers for Mother's Day fundraisers for a variety of causes. Housemates and couples have done photoshoots among the blooms, and spontaneous still flower photo shoots ended up blown up on the walls of our master bedroom in the suite.

 

The idea for this studio did not come first from a business plan. It came from a decade of watching people fall in love with the spaces we were already building, and realizing that those moments deserved a place of their own.

 

Over the last 9 years, we gathered, portrayed, and created new art at Looms of Liberation through our Sustainability Arts Collective (SAC). 

Sustainability Arts, a term our collective coined, is a method of creating functional and aesthetic additions to an environment that utilizes localized biodegradable materials and upcycled human-made materials, in a way that withstands weathering, erosion, and time. The design forms take their inspiration from naturally occurring phenomena and interdependent systems of natural ecologies. The resulting creations are beautiful and generative, engaging the humans and the ecosystems in which they belong.

 

Through SAC, which coined the phrase Sustainability Arts, we built the structural components of the Garden Room through a community-funded grant and collective labor. Since then, every material already laying around was used first to finish past the point of the grant and stick to our values. Recycled insulation walls, greenhouse-inspired passive solar and cooling design, and an Earth floor with added details that make it heat, snow, electrostatic, and flood ready were all part of the build. The breathable but shaded Garden Room stands as a living example of what happens when a community comes together to build something beautiful yet functional, all with their very own hands.

 

How Studio Maine got woven in…

 

Simultaneously to co-founding Looms of Liberation, Caela met Katia, teaching fourth grade at a neighborhood DPS elementary. Over the last three years, Studio Main was purchased through the organization Dreams for a Reimagined Family, born out of the fundraising campaign for housing and education for Caela’s former DPS student-artist and her handy brother who originally brought this property's inspiration and down payment campaign into our hands and who have now transformed it for your enjoyment and lasting memories. Katia, the young artist who was hired to hand weave our tassels, handpaint our signature stage and handcrafts the blankets, used the scraps from the build to create art & comfort pieces to sell back to the community for tuition funds. Her brother Mateo learned construction and renovation skills to help convert the space. 

 

When Caela discovered that her disability was lifelong, affecting her mobility and wrist function, she did not stop. She translated the entire concept of Looms Studios via oral instructions. No drawings. No blueprints. Just words, repeated as many times as it took, in as many languages as needed, from below ladders to those atop, and occasionally, risking her joints above them. She chimed in over the phone during all hours of the night and floated multiple layers of gear on her reflective striped adorned cargo rack as she e-biked and scootered back and forth between properties and stores, guiding, clarifying, holding the vision steady, 8 ft wood strips and metal bars in hand.

 

Caela found herself constantly distracted by the beautification of our community spaces. She wanted to make sure they could be discovered and appreciated by eyes from around the world, magnetized to the signature mixture of styles. Whether it was for a queer elopement from a faraway red state, a neighbor's graduation photo, a professional one-of-a-kind shot that goes viral, or an artist's breakthrough boudoir that brings their skills to another level, she saw the potential in every corner. She would stand in the space in the middle of the night when it was quiet, nothing from the present interrupting her vision of the future's potential. One idea led to the next. She would run it by photographers and her eclectic builder team until one idea turned into ten, turned into a hundred, and built a photography park and residency center.

 

This space is a response to real, overlapping crises: a disability that shattered the ability to continue an education career, a market crisis that prevented the sale of Studio Main's Park campus to mobilize the crowdfunded down payment for the education fund, exorbitant tuition prices for students with unique barriers, a job market that offers little recognition or stability, and unprecedented political and societal risks that make the future feel uncertain.

 

Caela knew, not just for herself, but for the entire community around her, that we needed a clear vision. A vision that made space for everybody to not just gain relief from the conglomerate of crises, but to build something that would make a mark much bigger than the hands that built it.

 

This studio was built by first and second-language English and Spanish speakers from around the world who reside in deeply intimate local communities, including representation from Venezuela, Honduras, Colombia, Uganda, Palestine, and the Philippines, as well as veterans, foster care survivors, queer, straight, and gender expansive people, those of all heights and sizes, ages ranging from 18 to 57… and even babies and dogs were even known to pass through studio work days for a hello. 

 

But most importantly, this studio was built with love, compassion, intentional sustainable construction, and an unwavering belief that art can hold more than one story at a time. It was built by people who believed in each other, and who believed that the spaces we create can shape the lives that pass through them.

 

The memories made here cannot be shot anywhere else. The light, the texture, the history, the hands that built it, all of it is specific to this place.

 

Welcome. This is what we built together. You are part of it now.

 

Tips for the original build team and ongoing service team of community-based landscapers, cleaners and construction maintenance support, as well as our ongoing silent auction from the original down payment crowdfunding through the art spinoffs upcycled from our build can be found through our gift butter campaign here!