The Long Thread Podcast: Recent Episodes
Long Thread Media
The artists and artisans of the fiber world come to you in The Long Thread Podcast. Each episode features interviews with your favorite spinners, weavers, needleworkers, and fiber artists from across the globe. Get the inspiration, practical advice, and personal stories of experts as we follow the long thread.
When she married her husband, "polyester kid" Anita Luvera Mayer received an extraordinary wedding gift from her mother-in-law: a loom and weaving lessons. A weaving store owner, Marcelle Mayer gave the same gift to each of her daughters-in-law. The others didn't take to it, but for Anita it was the beginning of a whole new life. Although she preferred making simple cloth to complex patterns, weaving opened the doors to meeting other fiber artists, teaching across North America, and learning to make her own clothes, beginning with a "pukey green dress" that she wore for years and kept as a teaching tool. Exploring new techniques and refining her approach, she championed the revolutionary idea that women—all women—should like what they see when they look in the mirror. Anita Luvera Mayer is an inspiration . . . and a delight. This episode was originally released in 2021. This episode is brought to you by: Treenway Silks Treenway Silks is where weavers, spinners, knitters and stitchers find the silk they love. Select from the largest variety of silk spinning fibers, silk yarn, and silk threads & ribbons at TreenwaySilks.com (https://www.treenwaysilks.com/). You'll discover a rainbow of colors, thoughtfully hand-dyed in Colorado. Love natural? Treenway's array of wild silks provide choices beyond white. If you love silk, you'll love Treenway Silks, where superior quality and customer service are guaranteed. Anson County Fiber Arts Festival The Anson County Fiber Arts Festival is the place to discover the wonderful world of cotton and hemp fibers, and so much more! You'll find fibers from animal and plant, plus a vendor hall, workshops, used equipment sale, a engaging fiber shed, and activities for the entire family. Plus, the town's historical society will take you on a journey of the town's deep roots as a textile town. Join them September 22-23 at their inaugural event in historic, uptown Wadesboro, North Carolina. For more information, visit ansoncountyfiberartsfestival.com (https://ansoncountyfiberartsfestival.com) or follow them on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100090568583693&locale=hi_IN&paipv=0&eav=AfabFyZchm6Yvmp-etfgtk3xE3IQtUfGaU4jkfFNMuOJ0UdwJ0XqIsThH9i7mFi4NtI).
Susan Druding was a graduate student at the University of California-Berkeley when she first learned to spin and weave. In the Bay Area of the 1960s, fiber interest and social tensions both ran high. Without a business plan but with a lease on a small storefront, Susan and a business partner opened Straw Into Gold, a store devoted mostly to spinning and dyeing. Spinning legend Bette Hochberg, author of Handspinner's Handbook and Spin Span Spun, was a regular, and legendary spinning wheel maker Alden Amos set up shop in the basement. Award-winning spinner Celia Quinn ran the old carding machine that they used to create rainbow batts. They became the first United States distributor of Ashford spinning wheels and equipment. Whether as a shop owner or storyteller, Susan Druding has yarns like nobody else. This episode was originally released in 2021. This episode is brought to you by: TreenwaySilks logo //www.datocms-assets.com/75073/1656653452-treenwaysilks_logo.png Treenway Silks is where weavers, spinners, knitters and stitchers find the silk they love. Select from the largest variety of silk spinning fibers, silk yarn, and silk threads & ribbons at TreenwaySilks.com (https://www.treenwaysilks.com/). You'll discover a rainbow of colors, thoughtfully hand-dyed in Colorado. Love natural? Treenway's array of wild silks provide choices beyond white. If you love silk, you'll love Treenway Silks, where superior quality and customer service are guaranteed. https://www.datocms-assets.com/75077/1690488549-anson-county-edited-edited-edited.png?w=500 The Anson County Fiber Arts Festival is the place to discover the wonderful world of cotton and hemp fibers, and so much more! You'll find fibers from animal and plant, plus a vendor hall, workshops, used equipment sale, a engaging fiber shed, and activities for the entire family. Plus, the town's historical society will take you on a journey of the town's deep roots as a textile town. Join them September 22-23 at their inaugural event in historic, uptown Wadesboro, North Carolina. For more information, visit ansoncountyfiberartsfestival.com (https://ansoncountyfiberartsfestival.com) or follow them on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100090568583693&locale=hi_IN&paipv=0&eav=AfabFyZchm6Yvmp-etfgtk3xE3IQtUfGaU4jkfFNMuOJ0UdwJ0XqIsThH9i7mFi4NtI).
After you finish weaving fabric that you love and are proud of, cutting it up can be an unappealing thought. What if it falls apart? What if you make the wrong cut? What if the finished piece doesn't turn out like you picture it? For Daryl Lancaster, the challenges of transforming a handwoven fabric into a wearable garment are the real pleasure—and if problem-solving is the goal, then what looks like a problem is really a creative prompt. As she tells her students, "This is fiber. There's always a way to fix it. There's always a way to go to Plan B, and we have a really big alphabet." With decades of teaching sewing classes and a line of patterns specifically designed for handwoven fabric, you might expect her to have firm rules about what fabrics to use with which patterns, but she takes a relaxed approach. "When you sew garments, any pattern will work. You have to have the skill set to make it work right. But patterns are patterns. The hardest part is to get it to fit," she says. "Any pattern, once you get it to fit you, you can turn into a garment, as long as the fabric that you have is suitable for that silhouette. And if it's not, can you make it suitable, or should you try a different silhouette?" One of her long-term projects for Handwoven was a series of color and fabric forecasts that anticipated fashion trends. With an eye on world events, cultural happenings, and even sports schedules, she created a set of images designed to inspire weavers to move outside their traditional yarn choices. Today Pinterest and Etsy have joined the famed Pantone in making forecasts freely available, but seeing the large-scale trends interpreted for an audience of handweavers is an inspiring way to look at the industry models. In recent years, Daryl has stopped traveling to teach. Instead, she offers virtual lectures and has built a robust YouTube channel that covers general sewing and fitting as well as specific tips for working with her patterns. In her time at home, she's enjoying weaving on her 64 (!) looms, including a fleet of little eight-shaft metal Structo looms. Funny, bold, and innovative, Daryl is exploring new ways of sharing her ideas even as she enjoys the evolution of her weaving practice from business to hobby. "You know, I'm at this wonderful crossroads in my life where that part of my career on the road teaching is done," she says. "Now I'm trying to reprogram my brain that I don't have to be a teacher anymore. You know, there are new people coming on to do this. And if I've left them information on my experience for them to use, have at it." Episode show notes including photos at handwovenmagazine.com (https://handwovenmagazine.com/long-thread-podcast-daryl-lancaster). This episode is brought to you by: Treenway Silks Treenway Silks is where weavers, spinners, knitters and stitchers find the silk they love. Select from the largest variety of silk spinning fibers, silk yarn, and silk threads & ribbons at TreenwaySilks.com (https://www.treenwaysilks.com/). You'll discover a rainbow of colors, thoughtfully hand-dyed in Colorado. Love natural? Treenway's array of wild silks provide choices beyond white. If you love silk, you'll love Treenway Silks, where superior quality and customer service are guaranteed. Anson County Fiber Arts Festival The Anson County Fiber Arts Festival is the place to discover the wonderful world of cotton and hemp fibers, and so much more! You'll find fibers from animal and plant, plus a vendor hall, workshops, used equipment sale, a engaging fiber shed, and activities for the entire family. Plus, the town's historical society will take you on a journey of the town's deep roots as a textile town. Join them September 22-23 at their inaugural event in historic, uptown Wadesboro, North Carolina. For more information, visit ansoncountyfiberartsfestival.com (https://ansoncountyfiberartsfestival.com) or follow them on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100090568583693&locale=hi_IN&paipv=0&eav=AfabFyZchm6Yvmp-etfgtk3xE3IQtUfGaU4jkfFNMuOJ0UdwJ0XqIsThH9i7mFi4NtI). Links Daryl Lancaster's website (https://www.daryllancaster.com/) Daryl's YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmz2mYvnteUP11-LvK8-eNg/videos) Sewing patterns and digital monographs (https://www.weaversew.com/shop/) “Handwoven Kitchen Aides: Where Have all the Aprons Gone?” Handwoven March/April 2002. (https://shop.longthreadmedia.com/products/handwoven-march-april-2002-digital-edition) “Lose Weight, Reduce Stress.” Handwoven January/February 2002. (https://shop.longthreadmedia.com/products/handwoven-january-february-2002-digital-edition) Daryl's trend forecasting began with "Color Forecasting” in Handwoven September/October 2003 (https://shop.longthreadmedia.com/products/handwoven-september-october-2003-digital-edition) and ran through January/February 2007 (https://shop.longthreadmedia.com/products/handwoven-january-february-2008-digital-edition). "The Indestructible (tiny) Structo." Handwoven September/October 2017. (https://shop.longthreadmedia.com/products/handwoven-september-october-2017-digital-edition)
"All This by Hand"—that's the promise of PieceWork magazine, which was first published in 1993 to honor the handwork created through the ages, mostly by women, mostly with little fanfare. "Handwork reflects peoples history, daily lives, and cultures. In this issue's stories, handwork means physical survival, personal hope, and cultural identity," said Veronica Patterson in the first issue. To celebrate where the magazine came from and what sustains us, we interviewed two delightful women: Veronica Patterson, who edited PieceWork from 1993 until 1997, and Pat Olski, who has held the post since 2022. In addition to her tenure as the magazine's editor, Veronica has been a book editor and is an accomplished, widely published poet. She has served as the first Poet Laureate of Loveland, Colorado. Pat has been a knitwear designer, authored several needlework books, and taught knitting and embroidery. PieceWork's 30th anniversary issue appears in newsstands and inboxes in July. Check the PieceWork website (https://pieceworkmagazine.com/) for anniversary celebrations as well as for images and show notes. This episode is brought to you by: Treenway Silks Treenway Silks is where weavers, spinners, knitters and stitchers find the silk they love. Select from the largest variety of silk spinning fibers, silk yarn, and silk threads & ribbons at TreenwaySilks.com (https://www.treenwaysilks.com/). You'll discover a rainbow of colors, thoughtfully hand-dyed in Colorado. Love natural? Treenway's array of wild silks provide choices beyond white. If you love silk, you'll love Treenway Silks, where superior quality and customer service are guaranteed. Links PieceWork magazine (https://pieceworkmagazine.com/) PieceWork indexes (https://pieceworkmagazine.com/piecework-indexes/) Cannarella, Deborah. "The 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Co. Fire." PieceWork September/October 1993. (https://shop.longthreadmedia.com/products/piecework-september-october-1993-ep7069) Faubion, Trish. "The Amish and the Hmong: Two Cultures and One Quilt." PieceWork November/December 1993. (https://shop.longthreadmedia.com/products/piecework-november-december-1993-digtial-edition) Norris, John. "The Rare Art of Birch Bark Biting." PieceWork September/October 1993. (https://shop.longthreadmedia.com/products/piecework-september-october-1993-ep7069)
Don't try to put Sarah Swett in a box—if you do, she might just weave a bag on it. (https://handwovenmagazine.com/inspiration-everywhere-handspun-yarn-tapestry-weaving/) Growing up on the East Coast, Sarah found herself more enchanted with knitting sweaters from farm yarn than the traditional college track. She spent her young adulthood as a ranch hand and cook in Montana and Idaho, where she brought her yarn in by pack mule. She fell in love with the Palouse region of western Idaho for its rolling hills and agricultural bounty, settled there, and began to explore the possibilities of home. She is as inspired by the sweeping landscape as by the tiny discoveries of making cordage from milkweed and dandelion she finds in her garden. When Melanie Falick featured Sarah in her 1996 book Knitting in America, she was equally enchanted with knitting, spinning, and weaving; she also pursues stitching and dyeing. Aside from a few years when injury kept her from knitting, it has been a constant companion, and she handspins nearly all of the yarn she uses for both knitting and weaving. But Sarah's most important craft is fiber play: weaving grocery lists into monumental tapestries, weaving iris-leaf cordage into tiny fringeless tapestry book covers, creating balanced plain-weave strips on backstrap looms, and sketching comics of a squirrel and crow weaving those bags around cardboard boxes. Sarah's tapestries have appeared in dozens of exhibitions, but she prefers not to stray far from home herself. Her Substack newsletter gives readers a weekly peek into her intriguing imagined and real worlds. What she most hopes to share, though, is not her playful approach to her life and art, but permission for others to explore their own. "I would like everyone to be enchanted by their life," she says, "and I would like them to be enchanted by what they're enchanted by—not what I'm enchanted by." It hardly seems possible not to be enchanted by Sarah's work, even if it ultimately inspires us just to get out and play.
Visit the Long Thread Podcast website (https://longthreadmedia.com/podcast). Find the show notes with photos on the Little Looms website (https://littlelooms.com/long-thread-podcast-sarah-swett). This episode is brought to you by: Treenway Silks Treenway Silks is where weavers, spinners, knitters and stitchers find the silk they love. Select from the largest variety of silk spinning fibers, silk yarn, and silk threads & ribbons at TreenwaySilks.com (https://www.treenwaysilks.com/). You'll discover a rainbow of colors, thoughtfully hand-dyed in Colorado. Love natural? Treenway's array of wild silks provide choices beyond white. If you love silk, you'll love Treenway Silks, where superior quality and customer service are guaranteed. Peters Valley School of Craft Peters Valley School of Craft enriches lives through the learning, appreciation and practice of fine craft. For more than 50 years, accomplished artists and students have come together in community at our craft school for powerful creativity and joyous life-long learning in the beautiful Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. We are firmly dedicated to inclusion, diversity, equity, and access through all of our programs. We value and welcome the experienced professional artist, the new learner, the collector—and everyone in between who can be touched by the power of craft. Visit petersvalley.org (http://petersvalley.org/) to start your journey today! Links Sarah Swett's website (https://www.afieldguidetoneedlework.com/) The Gusset (https://sarahcswett.substack.com/) is Sarah's weekly Substack newsletter Fringeless: Four Selvedge Warping (https://rebeccamezoff.com/fringeless), Sarah's class with Rebecca Mezoff Wild Textiles by Alice Fox (https://www.alicefox.co.uk/) Lurie-Larochette Tapestries (http://www.lurie-larochettetapestries.com/) Melanie Falick discusses Kids Weaving and Knitting in America in Season 6 of the Long Thread Podcast (https://pieceworkmagazine.com/long-thread-podcast-melanie-falick/) Sarah's fully illustrated guides (https://www.afieldguidetoneedlework.com/store/c2/Guides.html) range from storytelling to practical design direction
Clara Parkes became many knitters' guiding light and best friend when she launched Knitter's Review in 2000. One of the early standouts in the early online knitting landscape, the site developed a devoted following for its in-depth, objective yarn reviews and lively forums. Several years after the site's inception, she began writing books, starting with The Knitter's Book of Yarn, which was followed by The Knitter's Book of Wool and The Knitter's Book of Socks. As she explored the yarn industry, Clara carefully maintained a journalist's independence, taking readers along with her as she learned how the yarns we love come to be. After her first three books, which were large-format, full-color, and featured a number of designs, her following works have been memoirs of her literal and metaphorical travels or in-depth narratives reporting about the yarn world. In 2012, she launched the Great White Bale, a combination small-batch yarn experiment and behind-the-scenes tour of the remaining American wool industry, for which she purchased a very special bale of wool and reported on its progress through the process of becoming yarn. In recent years, she has created several online communities: The Wool Channel, which is devoted to celebrating wool, and The Daily Respite, which offers a moment of wonder and calm each morning. Clara invites knitters and readers to join her in exploring the ways in which wool is a force for good in the world, and how crafters can join in its support. This episode is brought to you by: Treenway Silks Treenway Silks is where weavers, spinners, knitters and stitchers find the silk they love. Select from the largest variety of silk spinning fibers, silk yarn, and silk threads & ribbons at TreenwaySilks.com (https://www.treenwaysilks.com/). You'll discover a rainbow of colors, thoughtfully hand-dyed in Colorado. Love natural? Treenway's array of wild silks provide choices beyond white. If you love silk, you'll love Treenway Silks, where superior quality and customer service are guaranteed. Peters Valley School of Craft Peters Valley School of Craft enriches lives through the learning, appreciation and practice of fine craft. For more than 50 years, accomplished artists and students have come together in community at our craft school for powerful creativity and joyous life-long learning in the beautiful Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. We are firmly dedicated to inclusion, diversity, equity, and access through all of our programs. We value and welcome the experienced professional artist, the new learner, the collector—and everyone in between who can be touched by the power of craft. Visit petersvalley.org (http://petersvalley.org/) to start your journey today! Links Visit Clara Parkes's website (https://claraparkes.com/) for her books, events, and latest projects. Follow Clara on Instagram @claraparkes (https://www.instagram.com/claraparkes/) The Wool Channel (https://www.thewoolchannel.com/) is a community, publication, and platform devoted to promoting and educating about the benefits of wool. The Daily Respite (https://dailyrespite.substack.com/) is Clara's Substack offering a moment of wonder and reflection each morning.
Marcia Young started her craft publishing journey by accident, with a newsletter and website for her local quilt guild. With small children at home, she fit in writing around the edges, until almost overnight she saw an opportunity for a new magazine devoted to fiber arts. Fiber Art Now and the Fiber Art Network began at Marcia’s kitchen table, and she published it quarterly for nearly a decade. Eventually Marcia was ready for a new challenge, and she realized that Fiber Art Now was ready for a new direction, too. The publication joined with Quiltfolk, a quarterly magazine devoted to the rich community of American quilting. With her first publishing love in a good new home, Marcia found herself exploring a new medium of her own: book publishing. Schiffer Publishing is an independent publishing company whose craft list includes weaving and fiber arts titles (including Thrums Books, a group of titles about international textile traditions founded by Linda Ligon). As the Imprint Lead for Schiffer Craft, Marcia’s charges include a range of traditional arts such as leather, clay, and paper. Schiffer’s goal, Marcia says, is to be a valued partner in the lives of makers. This episode is brought to you by: Handweaving.net (https://handweaving.net/) is the comprehensive weaving website with more than 75,000 historic and modern weaving drafts, documents, and powerful digital tools that put creativity in your hands. Now it's simple to design, color, update, and save your drafts. Our mission is to preserve the rich heritage of hand weaving and pass it down to you. Visit Handweaving.net and sign up for a subscription today! You’ll find the largest variety of silk spinning fibers, silk yarn and silk threads & ribbons at TreenwaySilks.com (https://www.treenwaysilks.com/). Choose from a rainbow of hand-dyed colors. Love natural? Their array of wild silk and silk-blends provide choices beyond white. Treenway Silks—where superior quality and customer service are guaranteed. Links Schiffer Craft (https://www.schiffercraft.com/) In Search of Wild Silk (https://www.schiffercraft.com/products/in-search-of-wild-silk-exploring-a-village-industry-in-the-jungles-of-india) by Karen Selk Deep Color (https://schifferbooks.com/products/deep-color-the-shades-that-shape-our-souls) by Keith Recker Create Naturally (https://www.schiffercraft.com/products/create-naturally-go-outside-and-rediscover-nature-with-15-makers) by Marcia Young Thrums Books (https://www.schiffercraft.com/search?type=product&q=thrums+product_type:Craft) Fiber Art Now (https://www.fiberartnow.net/) "Spinning Paper Thread" (https://spinoffmagazine.com/spinning-paper-thread-in-ghana/) by Mary Hark explores papermaking in Ghana. "Redefining the Paper Towel" (https://handwovenmagazine.com/notes-from-the-fell-redefining-the-paper-towel/) by Tom Knisely approaches paper and weaving from a new angle.
More than 100 years have passed since Shaniko, Oregon, went from "Wool Capital of the World" to forgotten spur of the Union Pacific Railway. A dozen miles from Shaniko, R.R. Hinton was the area's largest producer of sheep and wool at his Imperial Stock Ranch, raising Columbia sheep for meat and wool. When Dan and Jeanne Carver bought the Imperial Stock Ranch in the 1980's, they established a conservation plan—not something many working farms did at the time, but something that Dan saw as vitally important. To preserve the water and soil of their thousands of acres, the Carvers turned to unexpected partners: the cattle and sheep who grazed their high desert land. Sheep have a reputation for damaging the ecosystem by overgrazing, but Dan and Jeanne believed that careful stewardship through intensive rotational grazing, humane predator management, and water conservation could bring grazing animals back in balance with the landscape. In 2017, the Carvers accepted a challenge to become the first ranch certified under the Responsible Wool Standard, which establishes criteria for the welfare of sheep, ecosystem, and working conditions used to produce the wool. As consumer demand for sustainably produced wool grew, the Carvers founded Shaniko Wool Company to join with other family ranches in obtaining RWS certification and delivering ethically and ecologically sound wool. Shaniko Wool comprises ten ranches whose practices are independently audited. Based on the environmental benefits she witnessed, Jeanne was certain that the sheep and their agricultural practices were a net benefit to the natural world, but over the past several years, she has taken steps to prove it. Through measurements of the soil and audits of their emissions, Shaniko Wool Company has documented that their ranching operations offset tons of greenhouse gas emissions by capturing tons of carbon in the soil. Listening to Jeanne Carver talk about her family's goals and results for their ranch offers an inspiring message for those of us who love wool and ecosystem conservation: with careful management, sheep can be an undeniable force for good. This episode is brought to you by: Handweaving.net (https://handweaving.net/) is the comprehensive weaving website with more than 75,000 historic and modern weaving drafts, documents, and powerful digital tools that put creativity in your hands. Now it's simple to design, color, update, and save your drafts. Our mission is to preserve the rich heritage of hand weaving and pass it down to you. Visit Handweaving.net and sign up for a subscription today! You’ll find the largest variety of silk spinning fibers, silk yarn and silk threads & ribbons at TreenwaySilks.com (https://www.treenwaysilks.com/). Choose from a rainbow of hand-dyed colors. Love natural? Their array of wild silk and silk-blends provide choices beyond white. Treenway Silks—where superior quality and customer service are guaranteed. Links Shaniko Wool Company (https://shanikowoolcompany.com/) Responsible Wool Standard (https://textileexchange.org/responsible-wool-standard/) Textile Exchange (https://textileexchange.org/) Stories of Stories of Fashion, Textiles, and Place (https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/stories-of-fashion-textiles-and-place-9781350136335/) by Leslie Davis Burns and Jeanne Carver Imperial Stock Ranch website (https://imperialstockranch.com/) Pacific Northwest Fibershed: Imperial Stock Ranch (video) (https://imperialstockranch.com/2018/02/1004/) Nativa Precious Fiber/Chargeurs (https://www.chargeurs.com/les-metiers/luxury-materials/nativa-precious-fiber/?lang=en)
Catharine Ellis loved planning weaving projects, but once the warp was on the loom and the design decisions made, much of the discovery was over: with decades of experience, she knew pretty well what the finished project would be. She wasn't bored, exactly, but ready for a new direction in her weaving. Taking a class with shibori master Yoshiko Wada, she was intrigued by the way carefully placed stitches could be drawn up into pleats that became a dye resist. The traditional method does require a lot of stitching, though. Was there a way to combine the techniques and tools of handweaving with the concepts of shibori? That question became the basis for decades of sampling, exploration, and collaboration. Exactly what a woven shibori project will look like is only revealed when the gathering threads are removed, so there is an element of suspense until the entire process of weaving, crimping, and dyeing are complete. With a retirement from her longtime teaching position pending, Catharine began to consider her dye practice. The school's dye facilities—and waste water infrastructure—would be inaccessible, so her dye process would need to take a rural water supply and septic tank system into account. In classes with natural dye master Michel Garcia and collaborations with Joy Boutrup, she honed her skills in creating a range of natural colors on cellulose fabrics, especially cotton, which are considered especially difficult to dye. Her second book, The Art and Sciece of Natural Dyes with Joy Boutrup, has become the essential resource for predictable, safe, colorfast natural dyeing. Catharine Ellis's artistic practice and teaching link traditional textile practices with contemporary innovation. This episode is brought to you by: Handweaving.net https://www.datocms-assets.com/75073/1659137902-handweaving-net-logo-large-300dpi.jpg Handweaving.net (https://handweaving.net/) is the comprehensive weaving website with more than 75,000 historic and modern weaving drafts, documents, and powerful digital tools that put creativity in your hands. Now it's simple to design, color, update, and save your drafts. Our mission is to preserve the rich heritage of hand weaving and pass it down to you. Visit Handweaving.net and sign up for a subscription today! TreenwaySilks logo //www.datocms-assets.com/75073/1656653452-treenwaysilks_logo.png You’ll find the largest variety of silk spinning fibers, silk yarn and silk threads & ribbons at TreenwaySilks.com (https://www.treenwaysilks.com/). Choose from a rainbow of hand-dyed colors. Love natural? Their array of wild silk and silk-blends provide choices beyond white. Treenway Silks—where superior quality and customer service are guaranteed. Links: The Art and Sciece of Natural Dyes Woven Shibori (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/629067/the-weavers-studio---woven-shibori-by-catharine-ellis/). The Studio Formulas Set for The Art and Science of Natural Dyes : 84 Cards with Recipes and Color Swatches (https://schifferbooks.com/products/the-art-and-science-of-natural-dyes) (publishing in 2023) Catharine Ellis website (https://www.ellistextiles.com/) The Dyer's Handbook: Memoirs of an 18th-Century Master Colourist (https://www.oxbowbooks.com/oxbow/the-dyer-s-handbook.html) Yoshiko Wada (https://yoshikowada.com/)
The charkha is so important in the traditions of India that Mohandas K. Gandhi proposed placing it at the center of the national flag. The wheel can signify economic independence, mindful practice, and national identity, yet the number of practicing handspinners and even people who know how to spin has dwindled. Born into a family of traditional potters, Avani Varia's work has always involved the preservation of traditional crafts in India. Yet she carried around a box charkha for years before learning to spin on it. She was surprised to learn that her mother had learned charkha spinning as an essential part of her school curriculum. Wanting to make charkha spinning a joyful, approachable pursuit, she began organizing events under the name "Chalo Charkha Ramiye," which translates roughly to "Let's have fun with charkha spinning." She wrote a book by the same name that teaches techniques of charkha spinning, box charkha maintenance, and the historical importance of the tool. Avani has found a receptive audience for her easygoiong charkha lessons, even making a splash at birthday parties. Behind the fun, though, are serious pursuits. To keep handspinning growing, handspinning teachers need to be trained—and find paying work. On the production side, the handful of traditional spinners throughout the country might be able to find an eager market for their handcrafted, sustainable yarns if they had the business infrastructure (or even mobile phones) to connect them with buyers. With Yarn Spinners Guild India, Avani is working to establish connections between handspinners and buyers in India and abroad. This episode is brought to you by: Handweaving.net (https://handweaving.net/) is the comprehensive weaving website with more than 75,000 historic and modern weaving drafts, documents, and powerful digital tools that put creativity in your hands. Now it's simple to design, color, update, and save your drafts. Our mission is to preserve the rich heritage of hand weaving and pass it down to you. Visit Handweaving.net and sign up for a subscription today! You’ll find the largest variety of silk spinning fibers, silk yarn and silk threads & ribbons at TreenwaySilks.com (https://www.treenwaysilks.com/). Choose from a rainbow of hand-dyed colors. Love natural? Their array of wild silk and silk-blends provide choices beyond white. Treenway Silks—where superior quality and customer service are guaranteed. Links Avani Varia (http://avnivaria.com/) Chalo Charkha Ramiye (http://avnivaria.com/projects/chalo-charkho-ramiye/) Yarn Makers Guild India (http://avnivaria.com/projects/yarn-makers-guild-india/) Devin Helmen, "Book review: Chalo Charkha Ramiye, A Contemporary Charkha Movement" (https://spinoffmagazine.com/chalo-charkho-ramiye-a-contemporary-charkha-movement/) Avani Varia, "Spinning Arts, Education and Economy in India" (https://spinoffmagazine.com/spinning-arts-education-and-economy-in-india/) Anne Merrow, Mahatma Gandhi's Charkha in Michigan (https://spinoffmagazine.com/mahatma-gandhi-s-charkha-in-michigan/)
Planning to spend a few months traveling around South Asia, Leslie Rinchen-Wongmo unexpectedly found herself in search of a teacher and workshop where she could learn the process of making stitched thangka. On a tour of Tibetan businesses as part of her work for the Tibetan Central Authority (also called the Tibetan Government-in-exile), she saw artisans using silk fabric, horsehair, and silk thread to stich images of divine or inspiring figures. In Tibetan tradition, fabric artworks often depict the embodiment of Buddhist ideals in a form linked with meditation and reverence. Painted silk thangka are easier to find, both as finished pieces and in workshops, but the stitched form known as göchen thangka is rare even in the city where the Dalai Lama lives. Thangka are both textile tradition and spiritual objects, with roots stretching back a thousand years. Leslie's apprenticeship was a deep immersion into Tibetan culture. With serious commitment to learning the art as well as participating in the Tibetan community, she found a place in a working atelier, first making small pieces and later collaborating on larger elements of the large silk pieces. As they worked, she could sometimes hear the bells or traffic that marked the Dalai Lama's travels from and returns to his home temple. Often called appliqué, göchen thangka are not composed of pieces of fabric laid over a ground cloth. Instead, the elements of the design are cut individually and pieced together, with silk-wrapped horsehair forming outlines between pieces. The result is a supple, subtlely textured image. Leslie writes about her journey and her artwork in her new book, Threads of Awakening, (https://threadsofawakening.com/book/) which was published in 2022. An excerpt from the book will appear in PieceWork Spring 2023. This episode is brought to you by: Handweaving.net (https://handweaving.net/) is the comprehensive weaving website with more than 75,000 historic and modern weaving drafts, documents, and powerful digital tools that put creativity in your hands. Now it's simple to design, color, update, and save your drafts. Our mission is to preserve the rich heritage of hand weaving and pass it down to you. Visit Handweaving.net and sign up for a subscription today! You’ll find the largest variety of silk spinning fibers, silk yarn and silk threads & ribbons at TreenwaySilks.com (https://www.treenwaysilks.com/). Choose from a rainbow of hand-dyed colors. Love natural? Their array of wild silk and silk-blends provide choices beyond white. Treenway Silks—where superior quality and customer service are guaranteed. Links: Leslie Rinchen-Wongmo's website (https://threadsofawakening.com/)
When you think of weaving tools, you probably picture shuttles, sleying hooks, a raddle, and a warping board. Just as important for many weavers is the software that displays and manipulates weaving drafts. Even if you don't use a computer-controlled loom, weaving software helps you visualize your project, check it for errors, and envision variations, among other functions. It seems like a far cry from handwritten drafts or Industrial Revolution-era books of weaving instructions. When Kris Bruland became interested in weaving in 2003, he came across some of those old drafts and manually entered them into weaving software to create WIFs. Not content with entering them one by one, he developed a method to read a printed draft and convert it to a WIF (akin to optical character recognition, which turns a page of printed text into a digital file). With that digital tool, a whole library of historic patterns became available for contemporary weavers to use and experiment with. Kris began Handweaving.net with 200 drafts, but the site's offerings have grown to 75,000 WIFs. The site offers a number of weaving tools through a browser, so members can save their works in progress and access them from any device. Handweaving.net also includes a digital archive of documents related to all kinds of textiles—from alpaca to zigzag. Kris is proud that the site's visitors weave with everything from rigid-heddle to 60-shaft looms. Kris Bruland makes weaving tools for the internet age, with a site that connects weavers across the world. This episode is brought to you by: Handweaving.net https://www.datocms-assets.com/75073/1659137902-handweaving-net-logo-large-300dpi.jpg Handweaving.net (https://handweaving.net/) is the comprehensive weaving website with more than 75,000 historic and modern weaving drafts, documents, and powerful digital tools that put creativity in your hands. Now it's simple to design, color, update, and save your drafts. Our mission is to preserve the rich heritage of hand weaving and pass it down to you. Visit Handweaving.net and sign up for a subscription today! TreenwaySilks logo https://www.datocms-assets.com/75073/1656653452-treenwaysilks_logo.png You’ll find the largest variety of silk spinning fibers, silk yarn and silk threads & ribbons at TreenwaySilks.com (https://www.treenwaysilks.com/). Choose from a rainbow of hand-dyed colors. Love natural? Their array of wild silk and silk-blends provide choices beyond white. Treenway Silks—where superior quality and customer service are guaranteed.
No matter where in the country, stepping into the Sincere Sheep booth at a fiber festival is a breath of fresh air. With naturally dyed yarns, wool that is processed fleece by fleece, and a selection of favorite Northern California sourced products, the space is full of rich color. No watery pastels or muted hues here—Brooke Sinnes's colorways are vivid, bright, and contemporary. After 20 years as a natural dyer in the Bay Area, Brooke draws inspiration from her environment and her fiber community network. From sourcing local wool to developing a new yarn line, the work of a natural dyer involves constant problem-solving and trouble-shooting, through the physical demands of the work and the vagaries of water chemistry and dye materials. The opportunity to connect with local partners, yarn industry colleagues, and customers is the inspiration that Brooke finds in Sincere Sheep. The good news, she says, is that through community and connection, every knitter, spinner, shopper, and fan can make a big difference in the fate of a small fiber business. This episode is brought to you by: Handweaving.net https://www.datocms-assets.com/75073/1659137902-handweaving-net-logo-large-300dpi.jpg Handweaving.net (https://handweaving.net/) is the comprehensive weaving website with more than 75,000 historic and modern weaving drafts, documents, and powerful digital tools that put creativity in your hands. Now it's simple to design, color, update, and save your drafts. Our mission is to preserve the rich heritage of hand weaving and pass it down to you. Visit Handweaving.net and sign up for a subscription today! TreenwaySilks logo //www.datocms-assets.com/75073/1656653452-treenwaysilks_logo.png You’ll find the largest variety of silk spinning fibers, silk yarn and silk threads & ribbons at TreenwaySilks.com (https://www.treenwaysilks.com/). Choose from a rainbow of hand-dyed colors. Love natural? Their array of wild silk and silk-blends provide choices beyond white. Treenway Silks—where superior quality and customer service are guaranteed. Links Sincere Sheep (https://sinceresheep.com/) Elemental Affects (https://www.elementalaffects.com/) Mendocino Wool and Fiber (https://www.mendowool.com/) Meridian Mill House (https://meridianmillhouse.com/) Valley Oak Wool Mill (https://www.valleyoakwoolmill.com/)
If you want to learn about silk—raising it, processing it, or using it—sooner or later you will find yourself on Michael Cook's site devoted to silk and sericulture, wormspit.com (http://www.wormspit.com). Raising silkworms and weaving with silk bring together two of Michael Cook's fascinations: textiles and bugs. He has tried, mastered, and teaches about every stage in the life cycle and production of silkmoths, silkworms, and silk fabric. The tongue-in-cheek title of his website, Wormspit, refers to the process that silkmoth caterpillars use to build their cocoons. The gland that produces of fibroin and sericin isn't actually salivary, but silkworms work their jaws to create a filament nearly a mile long. When their cocoons are complete, they may break the cocoon to emerge as moths, or in the case of most silk production, the cocoons are stifled so that the silk can be unwound in a single unbroken strand. Most of the silk used in textiles is from the ultradomesticated domesticated Bombyx mori silkworm, which may also be called mulberry silk or China silk. Some people are aware of a few types of wild silk, such as tussah or tasar, which are raised specifically for textile production. But the silk varieties we commonly think of represent only a tiny fraction of the moths worldwide who make some kind of silk in the wild. Michael has explored techniques from the Stone Age through contemporary tools to reel silk and create a variety of thread structures, which he uses in weaving and embroidery. Through demonstrations, classes, and his website, he makes sericulture accessible—whether you're more interested in insects or threads.
Navajo-Churro sheep have a centuries-old history and an even greater meaning to the Diné, but the commercial market set a low price for their wool. A group of shepherds have come together to find strength—and value—in solidarity. "Take care of the sheep, and the sheep will take care of you." Nikyle Begay remembers their grandmother saying those words as they watched her flock. Nikyle grew up to raise Navajo-Churro sheep of their own, loving the lustrous fleece and beautiful sheep along with the connection to their ancestors. Despite the breed's cultural and spiritual value, Navajo shepherds received a very low price and even less respect for their wool. Shepherds were encouraged to breed with finewool sheep to make the fleece more commercially saleable. But doing that would breed out the strength, luster, and color variation that make Navajo-Churro sheep the perfect wool for weaving traditional weft-faced tapestries. Remembering their grandmother's advice, Nikyle and a fellow Navajo-Churro shepherd, Kelli Dunaj, developed a plan for a wool co-op that would support shepherds with shearing, buy their wool at a fair price, process it into yarn, and sell it—then devote the proceeds to repeating the process next year. The project's first year was 2021, when they took wool to the mill and saw their online shop sold out within days. In 2022, word of mouth brought even more shepherds to sell to the co-op, and the group has plans to grow again next year. This episode is brought to you by: Handweaving.net Handweaving.net (https://handweaving.net/) is the comprehensive weaving website with more than 75,000 historic and modern weaving drafts, documents, and powerful digital tools that put creativity in your hands. Now it's simple to design, color, update, and save your drafts. Our mission is to preserve the rich heritage of hand weaving and pass it down to you. Visit Handweaving.net and sign up for a subscription today! Treenway Silks You’ll find the largest variety of silk spinning fibers, silk yarn and silk threads & ribbons at TreenwaySilks.com (https://www.treenwaysilks.com/). Choose from a rainbow of hand-dyed colors. Love natural? Their array of wild silk and silk-blends provide choices beyond white. Treenway Silks—where superior quality and customer service are guaranteed.
What would you do if your sheep's wool lost half its value practically overnight? That's what happened to shepherds in 1990, when the end of a longstanding subsidy upended small and large wool flocks around the United States. In the decades that followed, American farmers and textiles rode a roller coaster, searching for value in a once essential fiber. But things look very different on the small scale, where wool is measured in dozens of sheep and pounds per week rather than thousands of heads and millions of pounds per year. In their quest to start a meaningful family business, Lydia Christiansen and her husband have set up their mill at the intersection of sustainable land use, local farms, an authentic experience for handcrafters, and the resurgent interest in domestic non-superwash wool. Abundant Earth Fiber transforms American fiber through its commitment to small-batch wool, creating lively yarns and roving. For Abundant Earth Fiber, Lydia says, “Wool craft is more than just yarn, it’s our connection with the natural world and the satisfaction of meaningful work.” Yarn, roving and dyes—made thoughtfully, in small batches—forms the bridge between sustainable farm and wool craft. Until August 15, Abundant Earth Fiber is partnering with Long Thread Media to offer 25% off storewide for All Access subscribers. Visit LT.Media/perk (https://LT.Media/perk) for details.
Sheri Berger vowed that cross stitch would be the hobby that she kept just for herself. After turning her scrapbooking hobby into a business, then launching the online yarn store The Loopy Ewe in 2006, she was just looking for a way to relax in the evenings, renew her creativity, and enjoy the sheer pleasure of passing needle and thread through cloth. The Colorado Cross Stitcher was her craft escape. But the more she became absorbed in cross stitch, the more Sheri wanted to participate in the community. She posted a video to YouTube, and before she knew it, she had launched a new business and a community. In this episode, Sheri talks about how cross stitching has changed, why it's drawing so many new stitchers now, what it's like to pass The Loopy Ewe to a new owner, and her new hopes for the needlework industry.
In the early 1970s, a lively community and spirit of fearless exploration sprang up in Northern California that sent ripples around the country and shaped the world as we know it today. The fiber world, of course. As a child, Stephenie remembers seeing clouds and imagining them as wispy shawls overhead. She uses her fine artist's training and eye when stirring a dyepot, designing clothing, and developing her textile plans, but she is drawn to well made tools and straightforward cloth. When she chose her first sewing machine at age 8, she preferred the straightforward practicality of her treadle machine to her mother's modern bells-and-whistles machine, because she could understand and work with every part of it. (She still has it.) For decades, Stephenie worked in partnership with Alden Amos, the wheelmaker and teacher whose legendary technical expertise fill the pages of The Alden Amos Big Book of Handspinning. Her illustrations are on nearly every page of the book, bringing abstract concepts and technical directions and a bit of whimsy to the 500 pages. In illustration as in all her work, Stephenie does serious work with a gleeful sense of humor. In her spinning classes, Stephenie loves listening to the challenges her students bring in, offering suggestions for the wheels and spindles that are giving them fits—suggestions that can be as gentle as a bit more oil or as direct as a quick tap of a hammer and anvil. Join us for a delightful conversation, with a dose of inspiration and empowerment. This episode is sponsored by Treenway Silks. Find the show notes (https://spinoffmagazine.com/long-thread-podcast-stephenie-gaustad) for this episode.
Kate Larson's first childhood memory is of meeting a lamb on her family's farm in rural Indiana. That connection with sheep and the land forms the anchor of her life's work, even as it draws her to stories and communities a world away. After a careful search, Kate chose her "forever sheep," a flock of Border Leicesters who not only provide her with wool she adores but revitalize the soil of her homestead. Through every thoughtful decision—grazing, breeding, shearing, and the thousand other choices that make up a shepherd's work—she is using her sheep to create the home and the world she wants to be part of. That devotion to fiber and wool are a natural affinity for the editor of Spin Off, a position Kate has held since 2016, and the author of The Practical Spinner's Guide: Wool. But with a love for literature and admiration for traditional handwork, she also selects and edits the wide-ranging textile stories of PieceWork magazine.
Since Amy Norris learned to weave in the late 1980s, the digital age has swept through weaving in two ways: by linking the global community of weavers to each other, and by using computers to manipulate and execute weaving drafts. Weaving is ancient, but many weavers have been early adopters and digital enthusiasts. As founder and list administrator for WeaveTech, Amy has helped weavers everywhere share information (and play nice) with fellow curious weavers. The internet has connected all kinds of groups, but the digital revolution offers breakthroughs in what weavers can do. As Amy points out, weaving is a binary system, with each shaft or thread in the up or down position—just the kind of bits and bytes that computers process. Weaving software lets you see how any change in the draft will affect your weaving with just a click—a far cry from the hours with pencils, graph paper, and erasers needed for charting a design before the programs became available. Taking the technology boost a step further, computer-assisted looms use the weaving software to physically control which shafts rise and fall. These explorations are the stuff of Amy Norris's dreams, so much that a particular, popular effect takes its name partly from her. (Amy and Marg Coe have been working on an approach to designing with parallel threading that has been dubbed the "Corris Effect.") But although computers have changed so much in the weaving world, Amy still believes in and dedicates her time to organizing and supporting programs of her local and regional guilds. Serving on a variety of boards and committees throughout the years, she has played a vital role in maintaining the traditional infrastructure of the weaving community.
What does it mean to revive a skill that's been lost for centuries? In Inca and pre-Inca cultures, weavers in the Andes practiced a form of doubleweave that disappeared sometime after contact with Europeans. Museum collections include pre-Columbian pieces made in doubleweave, but the skilled artisans who wielded backstrap looms at the beginning of this millennium didn't know the technique. Jennifer Moore was a doubleweave expert when she first went to Peru, with experience teaching the technique to weavers on 4+ shafts. She practiced doubleweave in her studio, working with the interplay of colors and geometric designs. She spoke a little Spanish, no Quechua (the local language), and had tried basic weaving on a backstrap loom a few times. How did a weaver working with a compu-dobby loom teach expert Andean weavers a technique from their own heritage? She started by teaching herself first, then planting the seeds of an art that has taken root again its native culture. Join Jennifer Moore as she describes her journey in doubleweave and the thread that joins weavers across time.
Melvenea Hodges nurtures a small crop of cotton in her back yard in South Bend, Indiana. Besides beautiful foliage and some of her favorite fiber to spin, she tends her plants to celebrate what she can create with her own hands—not just beautiful textiles but a connection to her heritage and a source of peace. As a primary school teacher, her working days are hectic, but she and a friend have a pact to save some creativity for themselves. Although her spinning and weaving projects are ambitious, she doesn't confuse creativity with productivity. The magic happens, she says, "once we take away the element of creating for some kind of purpose and just accept that creating is a natural part of being and that it is inherent in us." That creativity takes the form of exploring Scandinavian weaving, spinning to weave a traditional overshot coverlet, or painting whimsical wooden jewelry. No matter what, though, she grounds each day by spinning cotton, seated on the floor with her back to a wall, losing her thoughts as her spindle turns. "If your life's whirlwind is whirling too fast," she advises, "get yourself a spindle."
When you imagine goldwork embroidery, do you picture something flashy, glinting, and formal? You might be surprised to discover that goldwork or metalwork embroidery can be subtle and colorful. As Natalie Dupuis practices it, goldwork embroidery is as much about covering the gold or silver thread with silk couching stitches as placing the precious metal front and center. With centuries-old traditions across Europe and Asia, goldwork embroidery thrived in guilds and workshops, where it turned heads in ecclesiastical and royal commissions. Using traditional materials, Natalie designs modern needlework for contemporary fiber artists—and teaches embroidery artists around the globe. This episode is sponsored by Treenway Silks.
Working in the studio of a Japanese dollmaker, seventeen-year-old John Marshall learned skills for every step of the process from making glass eyes to shaping the body to creating intricately designed clothing. He developed a love for natural dyes on natural fibers, especially katazome (a paste-resist technique using stencils), as he studied dyeing and garment design for five years. Over five decades, his work in Japanese fiber techniques has followed two paths: creating traditionally inspired art-to-wear and sharing what he has learned through extensive writing and teaching. In our lively and wide-ranging discussion, John shares stories of how lac insects are "herded" in the Himalayas, what a suit made from bagworm silk feels like, and what he plans to do with his collection of the Emperor's old clothing. This episode is sponsored by Treenway Silks.
You may think of silk as just slick and shiny. (There's a reason we say "as smooth as silk.") But as she chased the thread of silk across Asia and through villages of Assam, Karen Selk discovered that it can be much more: It can be gold, copper, cream, and white. It can be slick or toothy, hardy or delicate. Most of all, it can be a delight for fiber artists and a way of life for men and women whose livelihood depends on worms, cocoons, and moths. Besides what most people imagine what they think of silk, Bombyx mori, and even the less-common honey-colored tussah silk, there are a number of special silks available to today's fiber artists. They include different species, such as the shimmering gold of muga or the red or cream of eri. There are preparations from intact cocoons to pierced cocoons to mawata, top, and bricks, plus "waste" such as carrier rods, pulled sari silk, and the chocolate-colored peduncle stems of some tasar cocoons. Even within a single country—India—the variety of silk is rich enough to keep a fiber artist happily occupied. Karen and her husband Terry founded Treenway Silks in 1977 and spend the next decades importing silk yarns from China, discovering unusual forms of silk in India, dyeing a huge palette of colors, and supplying material to weavers, spinners, stitchers, and other fiber artists. Since selling the business, she has continued teaching and writing; her book about wild silks is due out in Fall 2022. This episode of The Long Thread Podcast is sponsored by Treenway Silks.
A career professional at Levi Strauss & Company, Eileen Lee learned about dyeing, weaving, and sewing on an international scale: giant factories full of loud looms weaving 2/2 twill, pattern pieces cut out of four-foot-high stacks of cloth, and no possibility of adding a tuck here or a dart there without retooling. During her years in the industry, Eileen saw major shifts in the market for the company's signature product, as their target customer began to look elsewhere and their manufacturing shifted overseas. A century ago, Eileen's grandmother saw a tradition on the cusp of changing, even disappearing. Hawaiian quilting grew from the basic stitches taught by Christian missionaries into a distinct cultural tradition, with large appliqué motifs and echo quilting lines. But the quilters who made these quilts didn't share them outside their families; some quilts were burned to keep their designs a secret. Hannah Ku´umililani Cummings Baker threw open her cache of quilt designs and taught the skill to anyone who cared to learn, creating both a wider market and a fresh generation of quilters. One of her students was her granddaughter Eileen, who wrote about her grandmother in PieceWork Summer 2021. From her grandmother's tutelage to a career in mass-market textiles to her current studio and teaching practice, Eileen Lee's story is woven and stitched together.
Part of the Royal School of Needlework's collection is in tatters . . . by design. The collection includes some fine examples of stitching techniques, but what makes the archive more interesting are the pieces where fraying has revealed something about the stitching of a particular piece. All of the pieces support the school's mission: to preserve traditional needlework techniques and educate students around the world in stitching well. Whether to future needlework tutors, undergraduates, or stitchers around the world, the RSN teaches foundations in needlework that emphasize skilled craftsmanship as well as self-expression. As Chief Executive of the Royal School of Needlework, Dr. Susan Kay-Williams oversees an institution that teaches hobbyist needleworkers around the world, offers a BA degree in needlework, creates textiles for royal occasions, and above all works to preserve the techniques of stitching for future generations. One of the school's major initiatives has been the RSN Stitch Bank (https://www.rsnstitchbank.org/), a free online database that records embroidery stitches from around the world. To prevent needlework stitches from being lost over time, the stitch bank provides written instructions, videos, photos, and illustrations for 150 stitches and counting. As Dr. Kay-Williams remarks, the RSN may be a small organization, but it does not have small ambitions. This episode is brought to you by: WEBS® America’s Yarn final logo-1 //images.contentful.com/cjwcissb5f6t/2YTiGtgBOZalJA2mUFiF8z/8db71155d15565351a2dfd57095c890d/WEBS___America___s_Yarn_final_logo-1.jpg WEBS - America's Yarn Store (https://www.yarn.com/) is your source for everything you need for your next weaving project. WEBS carries a wide selection of yarns, looms, tools, and accessories. And, you can save up to 25% every day with the WEBS Discount! Visit yarn.com (https://www.yarn.com/) for more info.
Whether it's growing and processing fiber or embroidering with handspun, hand-dyed linen thread, Cassie has always looked at traditional textiles and said, "I have to learn to do that." She's learned to split cane and weave baskets in the Cherokee style, ret flax in dew, and weave an overshot coverlet in two weeks. Having learned the old skills, she gladly teaches anyone who wants to know, just as fiber "grandmothers" did for her. The preservation of old textile skills runs deep in the Southeast and Appalachian communities where coverlets and silk-raising and natural dyeing took root. Cassie follows in the footsteps of Craft Revival movement, which led to the founding of folk and craft schools in the Southeast, and the Deerfield Society of Blue and White Needlework, which revived interest in colonial needlework of New England. Cassie Dickson is leading her part of a textile craft revival—and we're invited to join in.
The Vesterheim has 80 spinning wheels. Laurann Gilbertson says that they didn't really mean to have so many, but it seems that every woman who emigrated from Norway in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century came prepared to make the cloth she needed to run her household: the wool and linen krokbragd coverlets, linens for wearing and bedding, carefully embellished folk costume, and all the other textiles that a woman in a new country and generations after her would need to live comfortably. In time, she might switch to commercial cotton thread for her hardanger embroidery or stop spinning her own sheep's wool, but producing cloth was an important part of life, so it's best to be prepared. The spinning wheels are treasures (but the museum probably won't accept any more). The museum also has rugs, coverlets, hand coverings, folk garments, knitwear (of course!), tapestries, and other Norwegian and Norwegian-American items from a Viking sword to Rosemaling chests to photographs and furnishings. Laurann shares the joys of working with, learning about, and caring for a museum's collections. as well as some of the difficult decisions that curators face. She offers expert advice on how to make the most of a museum—and how to make the most of your own family's treasures, museum-worthy or not. Vesterheim is one of many museums centered on a specific cultural or historic focus, but the elements of running a museum are shared across the field: collecting and preserving according to a policy, assisting in research for scholars, making the collection available to the public, and promoting education about the museum's area of interest. Vesterheim Museum (https://vesterheim.org/) is located in Decorah, Iowa.
Deborah Robson is known to, even revered by, a generation of handspinners as the author of The Fleece and Fiber Sourcebook (https://www.storey.com/books/the-fleece-fiber-sourcebook/#) with Carol Ekarius. She has a distinguished track record as an editor—Shuttle, Spindle & Dyepot, Spin Off magazine, and books including the massive Alden Amos Big Book of Handspinning. Deborah has devoted herself to learning and teaching about the heritage of rare-breed sheep and has worked with the Livestock Conservancy’s Shave ‘Em to Save ‘Em. Her video Handspinning Rare Wools (https://learn.longthreadmedia.com/courses/handspinning-rare-wools) is available from Long Thread Media.
When she married her husband, "polyester kid" Anita Luvera Mayer received an extraordinary wedding gift from her mother-in-law: a loom and weaving lessons. A weaving store owner, Marcelle Mayer gave the same gift to each of her daughters-in-law. The others didn't take to it, but for Anita it was the beginning of a whole new life. Although she preferred making simple cloth to complex patterns, weaving opened the doors to meeting other fiber artists, teaching across North America, and learning to make her own clothes, beginning with a "pukey green dress" that she wore for years and kept as a teaching tool. Exploring new techniques and refining her approach, she championed the revolutionary idea that women—all women—should like what they see when they look in the mirror. Anita Luvera Mayer is an inspiration . . . and a delight.
Kenya Miles balances farming, teaching, community-building, and her own artwork. Besides cultivating madder, indigo, and other botanical colors, she grows awareness of natural dyes, serving as an artist-in-residence at Maryland Institute College of Art and teaching workshops to aspiring dyers and farmers alike. Despite full days farming and teaching, she launched the ambitious Blue Light Junction in 2020 as a natural dye studio, alternative color lab, retail space, dye garden, and educational facility in central Baltimore. She has a deep love of indigo (both the color and her son, who shares the name), but she also finds peace in growing naturally colored cotton and connection in the tannin/iron chemistry often known as mud dyeing. In this episode, she talks about her growing roots in Baltimore and her love of exploring the world. This episode is sponsored by WEBS - America's Yarn Store.
Nilda Callañaupa Alvarez first organized an informal project in the 1970s with weaver friends in Chinchero, an Andean village near Cusco, Peru. As the traditional skills and distinctive styles of indigenous weavers declined in her village and others like it, the project grew into the Center for Traditional Textiles of Cusco. CTTC organizes groups of elder, adult, and young weavers to develop and pass on their skills; the organization also has a marketplace of handmade products on their website and on the Avenida del Sol in Cusco. Nilda spoke with us from her home in Cusco, Peru. In the middle of their second winter of the pandemic in the Southern Hemisphere, we talked about what COVID has meant for weavers there and how textile lovers can still have a relationship with weaving communities. This episode is sponsored by WEBS - America's Yarn Store.
Amy D. McKnight weaves not only doubleweave but point twill on a rigid-heddle loom, prefers a hybrid method of direct and indirect warping for long but efficient warps, and uses weaving software (usually a tool for 4+ shaft weaving) to plan her projects. It's not just pushing a simple loom to do more complex weaving, it's also bringing a love of weaving to completely new audiences. She created a plan for the Common Threads Loom, a versatile pin loom/potholder loom/diagonal-weaving loom that anyone can make with simple office supplies, and she offers it as a free download on her site. Having created a rich weaving course that she offered for subscribers, she decided that keeping the information behind a paywall wasn't for her—and recently posted it to watch freely at YouTube. Amy D. McKnight calls herself a motivational, inspirational weaver, and you will, too.
Mathew Gnagy has started to bring 16th-century to the streets. Wearing a hand-stitched, exquisitely tailored suit, whether inspired or patterned directly from historical sources, brings him not only the pride of a skilled maker and the comfort of perfectly fitting clothes but also a feeling of being "ten feet tall"—the satisfaction of looking terrific. Learning to knit, sew, spin, and practice a variety of crafts as a child, and growing up in a family of artists and artisans, he is enthusiastic about mastering the techniques that have developed and been lost through the centuries. With his website, the Modern Maker Schoolhouse (https://www.themodernmaker.co/), and series of books, Mathew shares his methods for creating 16th- and 17th-century clothing, including handsewing, ironwork, embroidery, needle lace, and weaving trim. In addition to historical clothing, Mathew is an accomplished knitwear designer; his contemporary knitting book, Knitting Off the Axis, presented garments with decidedly nontraditional construction methods. In his professional life, Mathew works in costume design for television, film, and theater, using his needlework skills to convey a characher at a glance. This episode is sponsored by WEBS - America's Yarn Store, your source for everything you need for your next weaving project. WEBS carries a wide selection of yarns, looms, tools, and accessories. And, you can save up to 25% every day with the WEBS Discount! Visit yarn.com (https://www.yarn.com/) for more info.
Susan Druding was a graduate student at the University of California-Berkeley when she first learned to spin and weave. In the Bay Area of the 1960s, fiber interest and social tensions both ran high. Without a business plan but with a lease on a small storefront, Susan and a business partner opened Straw Into Gold, a store devoted mostly to spinning and dyeing. Spinning legend Bette Hochberg, author of Handspinner's Handbook and Spin Span Spun, was a regular, and legendary spinning wheel maker Alden Amos set up shop in the basement. Award-winning spinner Celia Quinn ran the old carding machine that they used to create rainbow batts. They became the first United States distributor of Ashford spinning wheels and equipment. Whether as a shop owner or storyteller, Susan Druding has yarns like nobody else.
In addition to Viking and Anglo-Saxon reenactment, which drew Penelope Hemingway to learn handspinning and other textile crafts, she enjoys uncovering what household items, clothing, and other items of daily life can reveal about the people who used them. Exploring these items, known as "material culture," has led her in the footsteps of needleworkers from centuries ago, from the knitting needles used by the Brontë sisters to some of the last commercially handknitted gloves from the Yorkshire Dales.
People used to ask Heavenly Bresser why she had 11 spinning wheels. Not any more. (For one thing, she now has 29—and counting—wheels.) Each one has earned its place based on historical significance, adaptation for a particular technique, or scarcity. But don't imagine that she has an expensive hoard gathering dust. Heavenly turns down as many wheels as she acquires, finds them at excellent prices, and restores them to working order. Along the way she's learned her way around textile history, wheel mechanics, and power tools.
Teacher and artist Deb Menz made herself comfortable in a subject that many fiber artists shy away from. Students arrive in her classes with dispiriting stories of choosing colors that are ugly or blah, and classes on color theory may not have made them any more comfortable. But by balancing basic understanding of color concepts with permission to play, she helps her students learn that just looking and appreciating can unlock their creativity.
Rebecca Mezoff became a tapestry weaver as an adult after a career in occupational therapy, finding that it suited her artistically and let her use other skills she loved, such as teaching, dyeing, and spinning. She weaves very large pieces in her studio and very small pieces in outdoor spaces that she explores with a small handheld loom. Her popular online classes teach skills from beginning tapestry to design.
In 2004, Linda Cortright began publishing Wild Fibers, a magazine that tells the stories of natural fibers from seemingly ordinary (mohair) to jaw-droppingly astonishing (seal wool). Linda’s magazine reports stories from remote, sometimes difficult locations (Antarctica and Afghanistan, just to name a few). Grounded by the pandemic, Linda found time for a bigger project: The Eye of Fiber, a new photo book that explores animal fibers on 6 continents.
Franklin Habit is often mobbed at fiber events, by fans of his own work or of his scandalous Romney, Dolores Van Hoofen. For this episode, we were lucky to find him in a quieter spot: his home studio, surrounded by his treasured collection of books and antique dollhouse. In this episode, he explains his love of sewing, weaving, spinning, and other forms of needlework, some learned at his grandmother’s knee in Pennsylvania coal country. He has a particular love for vintage needle arts, preserving historic techniques and tools with curiosity and tenderness. A writer and illustrator, Franklin is the author of two books, It Itches: A Stash of Knitting Cartoons and I Dream of Yarn: A Knit and Crochet Coloring Book. Settle down for a visit—by turns warm, whimsical, and whip-smart—with this celebrated knitter, writer, illustrator, and textile enthusiast.
Maggie Casey and Judy Steinkoenig are well known as teachers and writers. Almost every day for 28 years, you would have found one or both of them behind the counter or helping customers at their store, Shuttles, Spindles & Skeins in Boulder, Colorado. The retail store closed in early 2020, and as they plan their next projects, they sat down to tell us about the behind-the-scenes truths of owning a yarn store. Is it as delightful or as difficult as people might imagine? What’s the strangest request they ever got? What was the hardest decision they ever faced together? We got the inside scoop.
When you picture weaving, does the image of a big floor loom come to mind, or a heddle that holds the threads in place? How about a stack of perforated cardboard squares? Author, instructor, weaver, and spinner John Mullarkey came across the ancient craft of tablet weaving (also known as card weaving) and fell in love with the possibilities of the technique.
Visiting museums and archaeological sites in the American Southwest, Louie García finds inspiration to revive the fiber techniques of the past. But where others might see ruins, Louie sees connections to the Pueblo heritage that is part of his daily life.
It's easy to fall under the spell of Norman Kennedy as he shares stories of the old ways of spinning and weaving, which he learned from some of the last practitioners of their crafts. Growing up in Scotland, Norman was fascinated by the stories that the older spinners and weavers told—and even as they thought he was crazy to want to learn, they gladly explained what they knew: how to make durable cloth efficiently as part of a life of hard work. While he picked up textile knowledge, Norman also picked up songs in many languages. Spinners and weavers may claim him as our own, but Norman's first visit to the United States came in 1965, when he sang at the Newport Folk Festival (the same year that Bob Dylan scandalized the crowd by plugging in an electric guitar). Returning to the United States the next year, he continued to sing while eventually serving as Master Weaver at Colonial Williamsburg. In the 1970s, he moved to northern Vermont and founded the Marshfield School of Weaving. The school continues to teach traditional spinning and weaving techniques and houses the largest collection of working 18th and 19th century looms in the United States. Norman has taught classes, given concerts, and led waulkings around the world. In 2003, he was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship, which is the United States' highest honor for folk and traditional arts.
As an author, color expert, and publisher, Keith Recker's path returns over and over to handmade textiles. From the colors of turmeric and indigo to the resurgence of ethnic color in a former Soviet republic, he shares some of the amazing places his love for color has taken him.
Recovering from a health crisis, Charllotte Kwon needed to find a new career as well as an outlet for her love of color. She fell in love with the designs, hues, and pace of India, and she founded Maiwa to partner with textile artisans. Beginning with embroidery and printing, she cultivated relationships with families working in longstanding craft traditions, then worked to develop markets to create a livelihood for villagers who work with natural color. Maiwa's latest project is a new website that includes an exhaustive list of dyestuffs and how to use them (including 8 different methods for dyeing with indigo). In this episode, she reflects on how the scope of her project has changed over the decades—and what she hopes uncertain times will bring.
The first issue of Handwoven, which appeared in 1979, included an article by Debbie Redding, "Your Weaving Teacher." Your Weaving Teacher became a regular column full of practical advice until Deborah Chandler (as she was then known) left her writing and teaching pursuits to enter the Peace Corps. She found her way back to weaving, of course. In this conversation with Linda Ligon, she shares her best advice for any weaver—the tips and tricks that make weaving more accessible and enjoyable.
A self-described "spinner who weaves," Sara Lamb works in a wide variety of media: leather, embroidery, dyeing, and knotted cut pile, to name just a few. You might see her in one of her signature Japanese-style jackets, which she makes entirely from scratch, spinning white silk for a year or two before dyeing, weaving, and sewing the fabric into a simple shape. The slow yet intense process takes a year or more—and she has a closet full of them. Sara's willingness to make mistakes (and see them through) has led to a rich library of samples and series of projects. Sara is the author of Spin to Weave, Practical Spinner's Guide: Silk, and Woven Treasures. She's also the instructor of the workshops Spin to Weave and Spinning Silk.
American-born weaver Deborah Chandler is the author of the bestselling Learning to Weave, (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/628751/learning-to-weave-by-deborah-chandler/) an essential book for generations of beginning artisans. She has lived in Guatemala for 20 years, working with Maya weavers and helping them find markets for their work. In this episode, she addresses the complex issue of cultural appropriation as it affects the indigenous weavers she knows: What is a fair price for handmade work? Who should have control over ethnic designs and motifs? How do we determine what's a fair arrangement—and who gets to decide? Deborah and Linda discuss the intersection of ethnic craftsmanship, upscale marketing, and Western consumers. Deborah Chandler is the creator and director of Weaving Futures, where she has had the pleasure and honor of working with many Maya weavers. She leads cultural tours to communities in the Guatemalan Highlands, with a focus on indigenous artisans and their work. She is the author of two books about Guatemalan textiles, Traditional Weavers of Guatemala (https://thrumsbooks.com/product/traditional-weavers-of-guatemala-their-stories-their-lives/) and A Textile Traveler’s Guide to Guatemala (https://thrumsbooks.com/product/a-textile-travelers-guide-to-guatemala/) (both published by Thrums Books (https://thrumsbooks.com/)). She lives in Guatemala City.
Sarah Wroot brings a reverence to her work with cloth, whether it's spinning, weaving, or stitching. This issue explores her passion for making and preserving textiles. Cloth can derive value from the care that went into its making, the emotional resonance of using it, its connection to the past, or its physical and symbolic protection. Sarah developed and stitched a hat inspired by a brightly colored hat from Uzbekistan. She spun the yarn for weaving the cloth and embroidering the motifs on it. She describes the process in "Uzbekistan by Hat," Spin Off Summer 2014. (https://shop.longthreadmedia.com/products/spin-off-summer-2014-digital-edition) After seeing a historic textile collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Sarah embarked on a quest to recreate an 18th-century fabric called cassemire. You can find her articles about spinning for the fabric (https://spinoffmagazine.com/18th-century-woven-cloth-cassimere/) and finishing the woven cloth (https://spinoffmagazine.com/18th-century-weaving-fulling-cloth-shearing-swatches/) on the Spin Off website. You can find more details about these explorations and her other pursuits at her website, wroot.com (http://www.wroot.com/).
Although Terry Mattison is the first to say that she's still exploring and learning about natural dyes, she has achieved great results (and great adventures) connecting the realm of fiber with the kingdoms of plant and fungus. Mushroom Dyeing You might be surprised to learn that mushrooms can yield a huge range of colors, even some that can be challenging with plant dyes. Here are a few of Terry's results. https://images.ctfassets.net/cjwcissb5f6t/2fewEQBbbiVIFqC6vmbC6E/49d9728c191c6aa1c85642c2ce7f5a77/Mushroom-dyed-fiber.jpg?w=500&fm=webp https://images.ctfassets.net/cjwcissb5f6t/3ZlYHBZuy213j4ve64Ttog/d904466e3a77f9c97536127eb7c98c1f/Natural-dyes.jpg?w=500&fm=webp Terry's sample kit for testing for colors in mushrooms fits in a small lunchbox. https://images.ctfassets.net/cjwcissb5f6t/3ukMzZBYXjBlvzL0QJWyn7/c126306be704f0469ad0418d9a402703/Mushroom-Kit.jpg?w=500&fm=webp To learn more about mushroom dyeing, check out Alissa Allen and Mycopigments (https://www.mycopigments.com/). The Facebook group Mushroom and Lichen Dyers United (https://www.facebook.com/groups/mycopigments/) offers resources and discussions from other dyers. Botanical Printing Combining the chemistry of plant dyeing with the line and form of printing, botanical printing (also known as eco-printing) can create spectacular results. Below, a printed napkin that Terry disliked the color of, transformed with a wash of iron. https://images.ctfassets.net/cjwcissb5f6t/7Jn0F18wmUHexYhobkjewA/31b10793aeb7f21e7aa60617a69c3cf4/Printed-napkins.jpg?w=800&fm=webp https://images.ctfassets.net/cjwcissb5f6t/dMsMVYLnG9opHcQUmfp0J/078584c3d818593d0e77c962fb770523/Leaf-print.jpg?w=800&fm=webp To learn more about botanical printing, check out The Best of Both Worlds: Enhanced Botanical Printing (https://janedunnewold.com/books-and-digital-media/the-best-of-both-worlds-enhanced-botanical-printing-preorder) by Jane Dunnewold or Bundle, Steam, Print! (https://www.eugenetextilecenter.com/bundle-steam-print) by Janis Thompson. Natural Dyes Maiwa (https://maiwa.com/) has recently made their extraordinary knowledge base of natural dyeing available online at their Natural Dyes website (https://naturaldyes.ca/). Some natural dyers strongly prefer color that is fast, i.e. unchanged by washing, light, and time; others allowing or even prefer changeable colors, which are known as "fugitive."
Shay Pendray may be best known as the host of The Embroidery Studio and Needle Arts Studio and author of The Needleworker’s Companion. Having visited Japan to learn the techniques of Japanese embroidery over 18 years, she is recognized as an expert in this art form. Shay owned Needle Arts, Inc., a group of retail stores in southern Michigan specializing in needlepoint, thread, and Japanese embroidery. She continues to teach needlepoint near her home in Michigan. Shay was a student at Henry Ford’s Edison Institute school (https://www.thehenryford.org/history-and-mission/educational-vision/), which taught children in grades K through 12 from 1929 to 1953. It was located in Greenfield Village (now part of the Henry Ford Museum), which now houses a working weaving studio including an operational Jacquard loom. Shay and her horse, Einstein, participate in a cattle drive in Wyoming each year, as reported in USA Today. (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/10/15/85-year-old-michigan-cowgirl-still-drives-cattle-across-wyoming/3983391002/) To learn more about Hardanger embroidery, see “Needlework to Do When Loneliness Comes: Anna Anderson’s Hardanger Tablecloth” (https://pieceworkmagazine.com/hardanger-embroidery-needlework-to-do-when-loneliness-comes/) by Laurann Gilbertson, and “A Hardanger Coaster to Stitch” (https://pieceworkmagazine.com/a-hardanger-coaster-to-stitch/) by Joan Leuenberger. Download a copy of the November/December 2012 (https://shop.longthreadmedia.com/products/piecework-november-december-2012-digital-edition) issue of PieceWork to read more about Hardanger in Laurann Gilbertson’s article, “Needlework to Do When Loneliness Comes: Anna Anderson’s Hardanger Tablecloth.”