The Long Thread Podcast

Andrew Wells is the third generation of the iconic American yarn manufacturer Brown Sheep Company. Living near the family business outside Scotts Bluff, Nebraska, he grew up giving tours and sweeping the floors when his parents, Peggy and Robert Wells, ran the business. His grandfather, Harlan Brown, had been a sheep and lamb farmer before deciding to begin processing wool yarns, a business he eventually passed along to his daughter and son-in-law. (The company is named not for the color of the sheep but for the Brown family.)

In 1980, the following ad appeared in Spin Off magazine:

Sheep Company Starts Mill

The Brown Sheep Co. of Mitchell, Nebraska, has started a spinning mill. They have wools in gray, black and white and knitting and weaving yarns for sale. For more information write: The Brown Sheep Co., Rt. 1, Mitchell, NE 69357. Send $1 for samples.

The risk that Harlan Brown took in 1980 put the family on a course to become an important resource for American crafters. Decades later, Andrew and his family are pushing their commitment to A

Building on Tradition

The first five decades of Brown Sheep Company have been times of decline for both natural fibers and American manufacturing, but the Wells family continues producing wool yarn. Mantaining consistent quality in the face of such seismic shifts has called on the family’s creativity and perseverance. Instead of straying from their core values by moving production overseas or reducing quality, they continue purchasing wool from the American West and creating yarn in their small-town facility.

Brown Sheep Company performs as much of the processing as they can do themselves, from spinning through dyeing and packaging. Finding a dye house has become a challenge for many yarn manufacturers, and Western Nebraska has a dry climate with scant water resources. Brown Sheep Company keeps the process within their own hands by doing all their own dyeing. Their dye facility conserves water and energy by filtering waste water to use for the next dye bath (even if it’s a different color). The company stores a sample length of each dye lot for years, just to make sure that each skein of Lamb’s Pride or Nature Spun will match the same colorway that you bought years ago.

The choice of fiber reflects Brown Sheep Company’s philosophy, too. Instead of chasing ultrafine fibers that prove less durable in finished goods, Andrew travels to the Center of the Nation Wool Warehouse in South Dakota to choose soft wool in grades appropriate for hats, mittens, scarves, and sweaters. Lamb’s Pride blends in some mohair for luster, drape, and durability. The easy-care classics Cotton Fleece and Cotton Fine include enough wool to stay light and elastic, which makes them popular for summer and baby items as well as weaving. Their newest yarn, Harborside Aran, is composed of four plies for a substantial yarn inspired by Irish sweaters; the palette of 17 colors has a rich, slightly heathered look.

On the Needles and Beyond

These days, Brown Sheep yarns may be most popular for knitting and crochet, but the company has always served a variety of fiber crafts. Lamb’s Pride and other non-superwash wool yarns are go-to essentials for fulling (knitted or crocheted feltmaking). The company offers a number of their yarns wound on cones to make them accessible to weavers from pin loom to rigid heddle to multi-shaft.

Brown Sheep Company’s yarns have been used in weaving since the very beginning, when Harlan Brown sold his yarns to Diné (Navajo) weavers out of his car on his first sales trip. Diné weavers continue to use Brown Sheep yarns in their handwoven textiles, and they are an important partner for the company. Closer to home, the company’s Director of Merchandising—and Andrew’s wife—Brittany Wells has fallen in love with weaving and design. In addition to designing for magazines such as Handwoven and Little Looms, she created an officially registered pattern for Scotts Bluff County Tartan. Andrew and Brittany’s young sons are the fourth generation of the Brown-Wells family to work in the family business—so far, as models.

In this spotlight episode, Andrew and Brittany talk about the process of making high-quality wool yarns, the impact that Brown Sheep Company has in the American craft landscape, and what makes them more excited than ever to carry on the family tradition.

To see photos of Brown Sheep Company’s yarns, the Wells family, and the projects discussed in the episode, visit the show notes at Handwoven magazine.

Links

• Brown Sheep Company website
  
• Visit the Brown Sheep Company blog for knit-alongs, yarn spotlights, and craft tips
  
• Subscribe to the Newsletter
  
• Find Brown Sheep Company on Facebook and Instagram
  
• Find Brittany’s “Quick Guide to Weaving with Brown Sheep Yarns”, with advice for multishaft, rigid-heddle, and tapestry looms
  
• Watch Peggy and Andrew Wells share the history and values of Brown Sheep Company in their About Us video
  
• See the “Nebraska Stories” feature from Nebraska Public Television
  
• Take a class in person at the Brown Sheep Schoolhouse near Scotts Bluff, Nebraska

This episode is brought to you by:

Brown Sheep Company is a four-generation family business bringing you high quality wool and natural fiber yarns. We spin and dye U.S.-grown wool into hundreds of vibrant colors at our mill in western Nebraska. Our mill has something to offer for every craft, from our well-known knitting and crochet yarns to wool roving for spinning and felting. We offer U.S-made needlepoint yarn as well as yarn on cones for weaving. Learn more about our company and products at BrownSheep.com.

Working together in a Philadelphia yarn store, Kate Gagnon Osborn and Courtney Kelley learned how to help customers choose the right yarn for a project, welcome in timid new knitters, and create samples to help move yarn out the door. They learned what didn’t work (donut-shaped balls of yarn that hopped off the shelves and tangled, patterns that used a few yards of a 100-gram skein) and what did (unfussy classic yarns, wearable sweaters, and lots of fun-to-knit hats). They founded Kelbourne Woolens in 2008 to offer yarns and patterns to local yarn shops like the one where they met. Their academic and artistic backgrounds gave them a love of fibers—both studied weaving and dyeing—but much of what they’ve learned in business has been gleaned through trial and error, common sense, and their extraordinarily collaborative partnership.

They have developed a slightly eclectic grouping of yarns based on natural fibers: a range of colorwork-friendly 100% wools, a trio of heathered and tweed yarns milled in the Donegal tradition, some lightweight summer cottons, a mohair blend, and several other projects at various stages of development. Their Germantown yarn, named for the Philadephia neighborhood and the centuries-old American wool yarn tradition, was fueled by Courtney’s love of history and Kelbourne’s desire to offer a domestically grown and spun yarn that welcomes knitters at all levels.

In addition to developing yarns for the Kelbourne Woolens label, they distribute a small number of other yarn companies, bringing their yarns to American yarn stores. That includes Faroese company Navia, which preserves the knitting and agricultural heritage of a tiny group of North Atlantic islands, and Misha & Puff, a knitwear company that offers a RWS-certified line of yarns and patterns.

Having recently opened a retail space attached to their warehouse in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadephia, Kate and Courtney now have their own space to welcome knitters in person, experience the currents of the knitting world, and learn to suppport other yarn shops.

Links

Kelbourne Woolens’s website and store locator

Read more about the history of Germantown yarns in “Yarn with a History as Old as America” in PieceWork Winter 2022.

The Wool Islands, a short documentary about Faroese wool and yarn

This episode is brought to you by:

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. 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.

KnitPicks.com has been serving the knitting community for over 20 years and believes knitting is for everyone, which is why they work hard to make knitting accessible, affordable, and approachable. Knit Picks responsibly sources its fiber to create an extensive selection of affordable yarns like High Desert from Shaniko Wool Company in Oregon. Are you looking for an ethical, eco-friendly yarn to try? Look no further than Knit Picks’ Eco yarn line. Need needles? Knit Picks makes a selection for knitters right at their Vancouver, Washington headquarters.

KnitPicks.com—a place for every knitter.

If you knit, spin, sew, weave, or follow any crafty pursuit, you will not be surprised that many of our most common metaphors come from textiles. They are interwoven in our vocabulary, and whether you like to spin a yarn from words or fibers, you will recognize many of them.

But then there are the words whose textile roots are less obvious: Rocket. Bombastic. And we’ve forgotten the regional roots of some kinds of fabric, where the skill and creativity refined in a particular place produced an exceptional kind of cloth. You might know what fiber comes from Kashmir, but can you identify the sources of muslin, gauze, damask, or calico? You might know that the pejorative term “shoddy” comes from the fabric trade, but can you identify the roots of tawdry, sleazy, and chintzy?

In this episode, Jess Zafarris and I trace the threads of textiles in our vocabulary. Jess is co-host of Words Unravelled (one of my favorite podcasts) and author of several books, most recently Words from Hell: Unearthing the Darkest Secrets of English Etymology.

Links

Useless Etymology website

Words Unravelled with RobWords and Jess Zafarris podcast audio and video

Useless Etymology Instagram @uselessetymology

Rigmaroles & Ragamuffins: Unpicking Words We Derive from Textiles and Ruffians and Loose Women: More Words Derived from Textiles by Elinor Kapp are available from the author.

Dhaka muslin

“Drizzling: A Regency Rainy-Day Hobby”

Shoddy From Devil’s Dust to the Renaissance of Rags by Hannah Rose Shell

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. 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.

Yan Barn of Kansas

Learning how to weave but need the right shuttle? Hooked on knitting and in search of a lofty yarn? Yarn Barn of Kansas has been your partner in fiber since 1971. Whether you are around the corner from the Yarn Barn of Kansas, or around the country, they are truly your "local yarn store" with an experienced staff to answer all your fiber questions. Visit yarnbarn-ks.com to shop, learn, and explore.

When Jen Simonic and Masey Kaplan’s friend lost her mother, she had the challenge of going through her mother’s things while grieving her loss. Among her posessions was something almost every crafter has at least one of: a work in progress. Jen and Masey had each finished projects for bereaved family members before, but neither of them could take on this one, a pair of crocheted blankets for two very tall sons.

If the two of them were happy to finish a loved one’s unfinished craft project, they thought, other fiber artists would be willing to do it, too—fiber artists with a variety of craft skills. And there must be families of deceased crafters who weren’t lucky to know someone personally who could take on the task but would treasure having a finished item that their loved one began for them. So began Loose Ends, an organization that Jen and Masey think of as matchmakers for heirs and finishers of uncompleted works,

Loose Ends, which was established in May 2023 as a 501(c)3 nonprofit, set out to build a network that connects volunteer crafters with local families to complete projects that were left unfinished by death or disability. Hanging flyers near their homes, Jen and Masey quickly found finishers and projects in crochet, knitting, and quilting. Loose Ends currently seeks finishers in any textile handcraft and matches finishers with projects across the world. Projects under way include weaving, embroidery, and beading, as far afield as Alaska, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. Their informational flyer is now available in 12 languages.

You may be surprised to learn that for about 2,000 projects in process, 25,000 volunteers have signed up as finishers—so crafters far outnumber craft projects at this time. But Loose Ends is always looking for more volunteer finishers, both to cover a variety of crafts and to match families with nearby finishers when possible.

Any of us who love making things with our hands hate to think of our work in progress going to waste, languishing in boxes or (worse) winding up in the trash if we’re not able to finish them ourselves. By matching finishers and unfinished works, Loose Ends brings solace to families of deceased crafters and honors the work of their loved ones.

Links:

Loose Ends Project website

Sign up as a finisher or request help with a loved one’s project on the web forms.

Help families and finishers find Loose Ends by hanging flyers, which are available in several languages.

Visit the website to make a donation.

This episode is brought to you by:

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. 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.

At Stewart Heritage Farm in New Market, Tennessee, farm to fiber and yarn has been a part of their story for 20 years. Home to a small herd of alpacas, Stewart Heritage produces small-batch roving, yarn, and finished goods available in 100-percent alpaca and natural blends in natural tones and brilliant hand-dyed colors. Discover the fine quality, long-lasting comfort, and soft luxury of alpaca to wear and enjoy in your home. Explore and shop alpaca at stewartheritagefarm.com.

Brown Sheep Company is a four-generation family business bringing you high quality wool and natural fiber yarns. We spin and dye U.S.-grown wool into hundreds of vibrant colors at our mill in western Nebraska. Our mill has something to offer for every craft, from our well-known knitting and crochet yarns to wool roving for spinning and felting. We offer U.S-made needlepoint yarn as well as yarn on cones for weaving. Learn more about our company and products at BrownSheep.com.

KnitPicks.com has been serving the knitting community for over 20 years and believes knitting is for everyone, which is why they work hard to make knitting accessible, affordable, and approachable. Knit Picks responsibly sources its fiber to create an extensive selection of affordable yarns like High Desert from Shaniko Wool Company in Oregon. Are you looking for an ethical, eco-friendly yarn to try? Look no further than Knit Picks’ Eco yarn line. Need needles? Knit Picks makes a selection for knitters right at their Vancouver, Washington headquarters.

KnitPicks.com—a place for every knitter.

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.

This episode is brought to you by:

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. 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.

You’re ready to start a new project but don’t have the right yarn. Or you have the yarn but not the right tool. Yarn Barn of Kansas can help! They stock a wide range of materials and equipment for knitting, weaving, spinning, and crochet. They ship all over the country, usually within a day or two of receiving the order.

Plan your project this week, start working on it next week! See yarnbarn-ks.com to get started.

Brown Sheep Company is a four-generation family business bringing you high quality wool and natural fiber yarns. We spin and dye U.S.-grown wool into hundreds of vibrant colors at our mill in western Nebraska. Our mill has something to offer for every craft, from our well-known knitting and crochet yarns to wool roving for spinning and felting. We offer U.S-made needlepoint yarn as well as yarn on cones for weaving. Learn more about our company and products at BrownSheep.com.

Lilly Marsh creates blankets, shawls, and other cloth, almost exclusively from local wool. Working closely with farmers and the nearby Battenkill Fiber Mill, she gets to know not only her neighbors but the fibers they grow: the surprisingly lovely wool from East Friesian sheep raised to produce milk, the springy Dorset crosses that are popular in the region, and other fibers of the Hudson Valley Textile Network. Formerly a shepherd herself, Lilly knows how important and unique this wool is to the families who raise it.

She is a full-time professional custom weaver. “I weave primarily with all local wool,” she says. “That’s what I do full time, day after day after day.” The cloth that she weaves helps farms and small businesses transform their fibers into finished products that shoppers at a farmers’ market can take home and enjoy. She sees her role as weaver not as the sole artistic voice directing textile production but as one link in the chain between farm and consumer.

Lilly appreciates her complex, powerful looms and their ability to create dynamic cloth, but the designs that make her heart sing are the ones that bring out the best in her materials. Where many weavers gravitate toward cotton, silk, and lyocell, she finds wool yarns fascinating and nuanced.

At earlier points in her textile journey, Lilly was a shepherd herself, raising a flock of Corriedales in Indiana. She earned a PhD in America Studies, focusing on the work of knitter Elizabeth Zimmermann. As she expands her studio and deepens her work with the Hudson Valley Textile Project, she says, "What else would I do with my time? This is what I want to do. If you ask me what I want to do tomorrow, I want to show up at my studio and see what else we can make. Wow, that’s what I want to do."

Links

Lilly March Studios

Hudson Valley Textile Project

Long Thread Podcast interview with Mary Jeanne Packer

This episode is brought to you by:

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. 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.

At Stewart Heritage Farm in New Market, Tennessee, farm to fiber and yarn has been a part of their story for 20 years. Home to a small herd of alpacas, Stewart Heritage produces small-batch roving, yarn, and finished goods available in 100-percent alpaca and natural blends in natural tones and brilliant hand-dyed colors. Discover the fine quality, long-lasting comfort, and soft luxury of alpaca to wear and enjoy in your home. Explore and shop alpaca at stewartheritagefarm.com.

Brown Sheep Company is a four-generation family business bringing you high quality wool and natural fiber yarns. We spin and dye U.S.-grown wool into hundreds of vibrant colors at our mill in western Nebraska. Our mill has something to offer for every craft, from our well-known knitting and crochet yarns to wool roving for spinning and felting. We offer U.S-made needlepoint yarn as well as yarn on cones for weaving. Learn more about our company and products at BrownSheep.com.

KnitPicks.com has been serving the knitting community for over 20 years and believes knitting is for everyone, which is why they work hard to make knitting accessible, affordable, and approachable. Knit Picks responsibly sources its fiber to create an extensive selection of affordable yarns like High Desert from Shaniko Wool Company in Oregon. Are you looking for an ethical, eco-friendly yarn to try? Look no further than Knit Picks’ Eco yarn line. Need needles? Knit Picks makes a selection for knitters right at their Vancouver, Washington headquarters.

KnitPicks.com—a place for every knitter.

The call of complexity draws some weavers to more shafts, more structures, more hand-manipulated techniques. For Annie MacHale, refining the techniques and celebrating the artistry of very simple bands has been a lifelong fascination. Starting when she first picked up a shuttle and inkle loom in her teens, Annie has worked in wool, cotton, and hemp, creating practical cloth that’s just a few inches wide.

Any bandweaver has heard the question more times than they can count: “But what can you do with it?” Annie replies, “The uses are limited only by your imagination.” Her work has found an avid audience and market among guitarists and reenactors. The simplicity of an inkle band is its key to versatility as a strap or ribbon. “A woven band can be so many things to so many people, and in the world of weaving, it’s very simple, but it’s also very useful,” she says. “That’s what attracted me to inkle weaving.” (She has a list of uses on her website for anyone who weaves more bands than they currently have a use for.)

Although Annie describes her own approach to design as spontaneous, her first book contains an extensive directory of patterns and palettes for weaving inkle bands. In Celebration of Plain Weave can be read as a response to the idea that making plain bands isn’t real weaving. “It seemed to me there was this general sense that plain weave wasn’t all that interesting, that if you wanted to do something cool, you either had to learn some pickup technique or do card weaving. And I disagree with that,” she says.

Plain weave holds plenty to keep her engaged and exploring, but Annie also plays with pick-up in her work. Her second book focuses on an unusual and complex Baltic technique using three warp colors. She also loves finding connections between her bandweaving and traditional weaving techniques from around the world, from banded Chimayo designs to Scandinavian backstrap bands to Andean pickup.

Besides weaving miles of inkle bands on her own, Annie enjoys teaching inkle weaving, including basic skills, color and design, and several methods of pickup. “Have loom, will travel,” she says, referring to her upcoming classes across the country (listed on her website).

Links

Annie MacHale’s website

Upcoming class schedule

In Celebration of Plain Weave

Three-Color Pickup for Inkle Weavers

“Inkle Weaving Basics” (free class on Taproot Video)

“Uses for a Woven Band”

Annie’s Instagram

Annie’s woven guitar straps

This episode is brought to you by:

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. 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.

Learning how to weave but need the right shuttle? Hooked on knitting and in search of a lofty yarn? Yarn Barn of Kansas has been your partner in fiber since 1971. Whether you are around the corner from the Yarn Barn of Kansas, or around the country, they are truly your “local yarn store” with an experienced staff to answer all your fiber questions. Visit yarnbarn-ks.com to shop, learn, and explore.

Brown Sheep Company is a four-generation family business bringing you high quality wool and natural fiber yarns. We spin and dye U.S.-grown wool into hundreds of vibrant colors at our mill in western Nebraska. Our mill has something to offer for every craft, from our well-known knitting and crochet yarns to wool roving for spinning and felting. We offer U.S-made needlepoint yarn as well as yarn on cones for weaving. Learn more about our company and products at BrownSheep.com.

“Rule number one: Never drink the dye bath.”

Indigo and cochineal may be the most widely recognized natural dyes for many fiber artists, and there’s little temptation of sampling an indigo vat or pot of ground insects. But a simmering kettle of dye mushrooms or lichens? That might smell delicious, but if you’re in a class with Alissa Allen, it’s not soup you’re making—it’s an amazing range of colors. Depending on the species you find and the methods of extraction, you may get not only earthy browns and yellows but vivid purple, magenta, green, and more.

“Mycopigments,” the term that Alissa coined to talk about her work, draws from the word “mycology,” or the study of fungi. From her background as an ecologist with an interest in foraging, she has become an expert and sought-after teacher on the art of extracting pigments from mushrooms and lichens. As interest in mushroom dyeing has grown, the Facebook group she founded on the subject has become a popular international resource for aspiring color foragers.

One of the most intriguing elements of mushroom dyeing is the regional variation, not only in the mushrooms and lichens available but what influences come from the local biology. To make sure that her students have a good experience in a particular region, Alissa gathers and dries samples in preparation for classes. Having taught from coast to coast, and with a series of classes in Oaxaca, Mexico this fall, her library of mushroom samples is substantial. She sometimes ventures out mushroom-hunting with a small kit to test potential dye sources in the field.

Essential to Alissa’s work is careful and respectful foraging practice—not, as you might think, to avoid toxic mushrooms but to leave enough fungi and lichens to fulfill their roles in the ecosystem. Collecting only a portion of the specimens she finds and never purchasing dyestuffs gives her enough to dye and teach.

And the whole process is a source of wonder: What do these chemical compounds do for the mushrooms and fungi that they’re found in? Why did the first person decide to try extracting color from them in the first place? Why do the dyed products so often come out different colors from the original mushrooms? Listen as Alissa Allen shares some of the natural delights that she finds in unexpected places.

Links

Mycopigments website

Mushroom and Lichen Dyers United Facebook group

Mycopigments Instagram

Schedule of Alissa’s classes

This episode is brought to you by:

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. 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.

At Stewart Heritage Farm in New Market, Tennessee, farm to fiber and yarn has been a part of their story for 20 years. Home to a small herd of alpacas, Stewart Heritage produces small-batch roving, yarn, and finished goods available in 100-percent alpaca and natural blends in natural tones and brilliant hand-dyed colors. Discover the fine quality, long-lasting comfort, and soft luxury of alpaca to wear and enjoy in your home. Explore and shop alpaca at stewartheritagefarm.com.

Brown Sheep Company is a four-generation family business bringing you high quality wool and natural fiber yarns. We spin and dye U.S.-grown wool into hundreds of vibrant colors at our mill in western Nebraska. Our mill has something to offer for every craft, from our well-known knitting and crochet yarns to wool roving for spinning and felting. We offer U.S-made needlepoint yarn as well as yarn on cones for weaving. Learn more about our company and products at BrownSheep.com.

In a period when agriculture moved toward chemicals, genetic engineering, and monoculture, Sally Fox decided to explore what could happen if she collaborated with nature instead of fighting it. With an academic background in entomology, she studied ways to minimize the amount of pesticides needed to grow crops, and the more she saw the effects of those chemicals, the more she wanted to steer clear. Looking to avoid synthetic dyes, she was intrigued when she came across a few seeds of naturally colored brown cotton, which is naturally pest-resistant.

According to conventional wisdom, brown cotton couldn’t be bred to have a staple long enough for textile mills to process it commercially. Only easily dyed, longer stapled white cotton was suitable for large-scale use, the thinking went. But Sally decided to try anyway, breeding a few plants on the side as she continued working in agricultural research. Over time, she saw interesting results, including a range of green and brown hues; more washfast and lightfast color; longer staples; memory; even improved flame resistance.

As a spinner and weaver, Sally had a unique advantage as she developed her cotton lines: the help of skilled spinners who tried her samples and put them through a variety of tests. It was the handspinners who introduced the idea of boiling the cotton yarn, which weakened some colors and strengthened others that she brought forward. The support of handspinners and weavers helped sustain Sally through challenging decades when conventional agriculture threatened her work and her livelihood. Her cotton proved naysayers wrong: organic and naturally colored cotton could be spun at industrial scale and provide similar or better results to conventional cotton.

Today, Sally’s textile work is recognized not only for creating beautiful fiber and minimizing avoiding chemical pesticides and dyes but also fixing carbon in the soil. On her farm, she raises naturally colored finewool sheep and heirloom wheat in rotation with cotton. Like the fibers she has cultivated, her farm expands our ideas of what’s possible in organic agriculture.

Links

Vreseis website
Fiber, fabric, and yarn in the Vreseis shop
Vreseis’s Instagram

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. 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.

Yarn Barn of Kansas

You’re ready to start a new project but don’t have the right yarn. Or you have the yarn but not the right tool. Yarn Barn of Kansas can help! They stock a wide range of materials and equipment for knitting, weaving, spinning, and crochet. They ship all over the country, usually within a day or two of receiving the order.

Plan your project this week, start working on it next week! See yarnbarn-ks.com to get started.

Brown Sheep Company

Brown Sheep Company is a four-generation family business bringing you high quality wool and natural fiber yarns. We spin and dye U.S.-grown wool into hundreds of vibrant colors at our mill in western Nebraska. Our mill has something to offer for every craft, from our well-known knitting and crochet yarns to wool roving for spinning and felting. We offer U.S-made needlepoint yarn as well as yarn on cones for weaving. Learn more about our company and products at BrownSheep.com.

When Susan Bateman first opened Yarn Barn of Kansas in 1971, a woman starting a small business couldn’t get a credit card in her own name. Weavers like her had a hard time finding yarns, tools, and other supplies, some of which were only available from overseas, and she thought there must be an opportunity to bring fiber artists more of what they needed.

Susan and her husband, Jim, have spent decades building the kind of store she wanted to see when she was learning to weave and hoping to grow her fiber skills: one with a wide selection of yarns, a lively education program, and lots and lots of books. Yarn Barn of Kansas occupies thousands of square feet with a storefront, classroom, and a massive warehouse stacked with boxes of yarn. (Jim says that he can easily prove that they have ten tons of inventory, and the stock room has a directory to help staff find just the right box.)

Although the shop has Kansas right in the name, many of the store’s customers never set foot in the Lawrence, Kansas storefront. Susan and Jim make regular trips to fiber arts conferences from coast to coast, some years as many as one per month, always with that extensive (and heavy) selection of books that are difficult to find elsewhere. But many customers will never meet them or their staff in person anywhere. Beginning with printed catalogs and continuing with their website, Yarn Barn of Kansas meets many fiber artists where they are—literally, shipping to nearly all of the 50 United States every month.

That doesn’t mean they’re strangers, though. Customers across the country call the shop for advice, troubleshooting, and some quick how-to in addition to placing orders. The shop has a full roster of classes in a variety of crafts, but much of the teaching that the staff does every day is unscheduled help by phone or in person. Between answering customers’ questions and taking orders, Susan and other staff design projects and create samples to help customers use the yarns and techniques on offer.

Although they have offered classes and supplies for crafts from basketry to needlepoint to lacemaking in the past, Yarn Barn of Kansas currently focuses on weaving, spinning, knitting, and crochet. The store may be best known nationally as a weaving supplier, but closer to home, most of their local customers come for knitting. Susan and Jim had that range of customers in mind when thinking of their newest venture, a 100% organic cotton yarn from fiber sourced in Texas and spun and dyed in North Carolina. The unmercerized 4/2 yarn in 45 colors is a versatile size for crochet, rigid-heddle and multishaft weaving, and knitting. They’ve called the yarn Ad Astra, in recognition of Kansas’s state motto).

Links

Yarn Barn of Kansas website

Discover Ad Astra, the new organic cotton yarn

Read about Classes

Subscribe to the Newsletter

Find Yarn Barn of Kansas on Facebook

Read Susan Bateman and Melissa Parson’s series on weaving best practices for beginners and beyond at Handwoven

This episode is brought to you by:

Yarn Barn of Kansas

Yarn Barn of Kansas has been your partner in fiber since 1971. Whether you are around the corner from the Yarn Barn of Kansas, or around the country, they are truly your “local yarn store,” with an experienced staff to answer all your fiber questions. Visit yarnbarn-ks.com to shop, learn, and explore.

There may be no other type of textile that is more art and craft at the same time than tapestry weaving. Tapestry allows the weaver to create images with simple tools, but the skills and materials in tapestry are generally hard-wearing. You might find a tapestry on the floor as a rug as often as on a wall as a piece of art.

Rebecca Mezoff became a tapestry weaver 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.

In addition to teaching in person and online, she is the author of two books.

Links

The Art of Tapestry Weaving

Untangled: A Crafty Sheep’s Guide to Tapestry Weaving

Online classes

Rebecca’s article “Weaving with Handspun: What Makes a Good Tapestry Yarn?” appeared in Spin Off Spring 2017.

Listen to our interview with Rebecca’s spinning teacher, Maggie Casey, on the Long Thread Podcast.

This episode is brought to you by:

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. 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.

At Stewart Heritage Farm in New Market, Tennessee, farm to fiber and yarn has been a part of their story for 20 years. Home to a small herd of alpacas, Stewart Heritage produces small-batch roving, yarn, and finished goods available in 100-percent alpaca and natural blends in natural tones and brilliant hand-dyed colors. Discover the fine quality, long-lasting comfort, and soft luxury of alpaca to wear and enjoy in your home. Explore and shop alpaca at stewartheritagefarm.com.

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 to start your journey today!

For Hannah Thiessen Howard, slow knitting isn’t about the speed of making stitches or finishing projects. Swift and leisurely knitters alike can embrace the purpose and experience of knitting and how it connects crafter to community. Selecting materials, choosing projects, and approaching your work with an open mind all contribute to a meaningful knitting life.

Knitting can offer refuge, inspiration, and self-expression. It can also be a step, large or small, toward bringing about the kind of world that you’d like to see. From her first yarn-industry internship at a large international company, Hannah has gravitated to smaller and more independent projects, such as her work with the Hudson Valley Textile Project and consulting with small fiber-based companies. She has a new project in the works, a yarn-focused stock image website, that will provide photo resources that accurately reflect what crafts and crafters look like.

Although knitting is her primary professional focus, Hannah’s fiber practice wouldn’t be complete without spinning, both for the education it offers about yarn properties and for the connection to animals and farms. Not only do spinners have a more intimate experience with a fiber source, but they often provide meaningful financial support fiber farmers. And what could be a better complement to slow knitting than the hands-on process of making yarn yourself?

Hannah’s latest yarn passion is the carefully, lovingly curated collection that so many knitters mention with a hint of shame: her stash. Diving into the skeins she’s adopted over the years is an opportunity to reflect on her slow-knitting values . . . and decide what she wants to carry forward.

Links

Hannah Thiessen Howard’s website and Instagram

Slow Knitting and Seasonal Slow Knitting books

By Hand Serial

Greater Cumberland Fibershed

Hudson Valley Textile Project’s Common Threads

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. 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.

Yarn Barn of Kansas

Learning how to weave but need the right shuttle? Hooked on knitting and in search of a lofty yarn? Yarn Barn of Kansas has been your partner in fiber since 1971. Whether you are around the corner from the Yarn Barn of Kansas, or around the country, they are truly your "local yarn store" with an experienced staff to answer all your fiber questions. Visit yarnbarn-ks.com to shop, learn, and explore.

Peters Valley School of Craft logo

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 to start your journey today!

Although she grew up in the freezing winters of New York, Keisha Cameron and her husband decided to move their young family to a peri-urban spot outside Atlanta, Georgia, to set down roots and rebuild their connection to the land. They began with raising what their family needed for food and other daily necessities, but over the past decade, High Hog Farm has developed stocks of rare-breed sheep, angora rabbits, and chickens. In their gardens, the family cultivate produce as well as medicinal and dye plants. As returning-generation farmers, they not only love what they do, they also feel an obligation as stewards of their land.

Rediscovering the traditional ways of cultivating and using plants, Keisha has sampled different types of indigo, madder, marigolds, and a range of dyestuffs. The farm offers naturally dyed fibers as well as dyestuffs and classes in natural dyeing. As she grows attuned to her soil, she appreciates the multiple roles that a single plant can play. As a cultural seedkeeper, she focuses on not only preserving a diversity of plants but on reviving the knowledge of how they can serve a variety of needs.

Although High Hog has been home to a variety of different farm animals, Keisha fell in love with sheep. She felt an instant affinity for Gulf Coast Natives, a rare breed that can carry color genetics and are exceptionally well suited to her location. Her insistence on participating fully in the lives of her animals has led her to explore fiber arts—but also to learn the demanding skill of shearing. As a crucial part of her animals’ health, shearing is too important to leave undone if they can’t locate a shearer when needed.

For followers around the country, High Hog Farm is mainly accessible through their newly relaunched website and online store (as well as their enchanting social media accounts). For the community closer at hand, the farm has developed a variety of programs in fiber arts, photography, food preservation, and a variety of other agrarian arts. On being part of the grassroots fiber community, Keisha says, “I want to encourage everybody else, all the fiber artists and fiber and dye growers, to keep doing what you’re doing, because we are the people who are bringing color to the world.”

Links

High Hog Farm website

High Hog Farm’s Instagram

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. 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.

Stewart Heritage Farm

At Stewart Heritage Farm in New Market, Tennessee, farm to fiber and yarn has been a part of their story for 20 years. Home to a small herd of alpacas, Stewart Heritage produces small-batch roving, yarn, and finished goods available in 100-percent alpaca and natural blends in natural tones and brilliant hand-dyed colors. Discover the fine quality, long-lasting comfort, and soft luxury of alpaca to wear and enjoy in your home. Explore and shop alpaca at stewartheritagefarm.com.

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 to start your journey today!

Justin Squizzero loves exploring the frontiers of technology, seeing how he can tune a piece of equipment to produce a complex textile. The technology that fascinates him reached its peak before the 20th century. Weaving on an old loom doesn’t mean trying to turn back time, though—it means choosing the most refined technology to create the handwoven fabrics that he envisions. If a modern tool is better than the historic one (like the laser cutter that produced the small metal rings called mails, which were needed to to convert his loom from weaving coverlets to damask), that would be one thing. For all the supposed advances in technology in the last several hundred years, though, the best tool for weaving fine linen damask is still the one invented by Joseph-Marie Jacquard more than 200 years ago.

Studying with Norman Kennedy and Kate Smith at the Marshfield School of Weaving helped Justin deepen his understanding of and fascination with the tools and techniques of 18th- and 19th-century weaving. What began as a winter occupation between summers working in museums led to beginning a business as a traditional handweaver, becoming a regular teacher in School’s unique curriculum, and most recently taking on the role as its Director.

In Justin’s weaving practice, discovery and ingenuity are as vital looking to the past as to the future.

Visit the show notes page to see a photo of Justin's Jacquard loom.

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. 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.

Yarn Barn of Kansas

You’re ready to start a new project but don’t have the right yarn. Or you have the yarn but not the right tool. Yarn Barn of Kansas can help! They stock a wide range of materials and equipment for knitting, weaving, spinning, and crochet. They ship all over the country, usually within a day or two of receiving the order.

Plan your project this week, start working on it next week! See yarnbarn-ks.com to get started.

Links

The Burroughs Garret

Marshfield School of Weaving

Kaffe Fassett doesn’t play favorites in his work—he doesn’t have a favorite medium, and he definitely doesn’t have a favorite color. What he has is a powerful delight in combining the simple elements of color, line, and image, and a passion for helping other people share in that joy.

For someone whose career is inextricably linked to stitching, his needlework techniques are surprisingly simple. “I’m never interested in technical acrobatics,” he says. “I think that color is what is fabulous, and you know, a beautiful image that has beautiful colors doesn’t need to go any further.” Some of his best-known work layers brightly colored cotton fabrics of his own design into patchwork quilts, which he takes to beautiful locations to photograph. Yet one of the textiles he’s excited about is a vintage patchwork quilt top worked in diamonds and squares, with striking contrasts placed next to soothing harmonies. Visit the show notes page at pieceworkmagazine.com to see a photo of the quilt.

Kaffe’s work has expanded into so many formats in part because of a series of remarkable collaborations, both with companies (including Rowan, FreeSpirit Fabrics, and Peruvian Connection) and other artists. When sharing ideas or teaching, particularly with partner Brandon Mably, the enjoyment of seeing the spark of creative understanding in someone else is part of the joy. “That's what I would say to people: you know, the first thing is, get friends who are sympathetic to your dream. Try to find somebody who’s going to encourage you rather than discourage you.”

As the first living textile artist to have a show at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Kaffe’s artwork is valued and renowned the world over—yet through books, patterns, and his own “paint box” of fabrics and materials, his work is accessible to every crafter.

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. 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

Kaffe Fassett Studio

List of Kaffe Fassett books

Find a listing of Kaffe’s events

Kaffe’s designs and collaborations in yarn, needlepoint, and quilting fabrics are available on his website.

Between the sheep in the field and the lovely yarn in your hands lies the complex network of the wool industry. Fiber must be scoured, spun, and maybe dyed, and it all starts with shearing.

Attending a Fibershed symposium in 2012, Stephany Wilkes was surprised to learn that one of the barriers to local fiber production was a lack of trained shearers. A knitter and software developer, she had no hands-on livestock experience when she signed up for a shearing class through an extension center and found herself up to her elbows in wool. Despite the grueling labor and intensely specialized learning process, she relished the work and the way it pushed her squarely into the world of American fiber production.

Ten years into her career as a sheep shearer and wool classer, Stephany has supported small flocks, a small mill, and her fibershed. Her 2018 book, Raw Material: Working Wool in the West, is a riveting chronicle of her immersion in the world of sheep and wool. As a shearing instructor and catalyst for transformation in the fiber community, she has made it her business to improve the conditions and the market for quality wool.

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. 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

Stephany Wilkes website

Raw Material book

Fibershed

Mendocino Wool & Fiber mill

Lani’s Lana

Stephany’s article “Lani’s Lana: Sheep, Landscape, and Western Wool” appeared in Spin Off Winter 2023.

Wild Oat Hollow

Happy Goat cashmere and contract grazing project

Kaos Sheep Outfit

Shave 'em to Save 'em

What do you get when a crafter who loves colorful hand-dyed yarns (and hates stalking shop updates) crosses paths with a fresh, new yarn producer? Like many of her knitter friends in 2013, Lisa Chamoff was enchanted by the artful and expressive work of the independent dyers whose skeins were cropping up around the yarn world. Shoppers found new favorites by word of mouth, hearing about a new colorway or restock here and there. At the same time, talented dyers with fledgling businesses relied on that word of mouth to sell a few skeins at a time. Lisa saw an opportunity for a new kind of website: a marketplace where shoppers and dyers could come together to share new work. Indie Untangled opened for discovery.

After a few months of the online marketplace, Lisa realized that the hand-dyed-yarn fans who visit her site wanted more than just two days at the annual New York Sheep and Wool Festival (“Rhinebeck”). Gathering on the Friday before the larger festival, a group of crafters were interested in extending the weekend’s shopping and social opportunities. There was also an opportunity for smaller and newer yarn companies, who didn’t have booths at the larger show, to introduce themselves to an audience eager for the next new thing. Beginning with just a few booths, the Indie Untangled event is now an anchor of the New York Sheep and Wool Festival weekend, drawing a few dozen vendors and offering timed shopping opportunities.

Although most of Indie Untangled’s offerings connect shoppers and dyers directly, Lisa also collaborates with dyers and yarn producers for Indie Untangled-exclusive projects, beginning with the Knitting Our National Parks Collection. The latest project is the yearlong subscription Heritage Wool Collective, which pairs dyers with unique yarns from small farms and mills, beginning in 2024.

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. 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

Heritage Wool Collective Subscription

Indie Untangled

Rhinebeck Indie Untangled Event

Indie Untangled Marketplace

Knitting Our National Parks Series

[Sponsored Content] If you’ve been weaving, knitting, or playing with fiber for long—or if you’ve passed some fiber animals in a field—you probably think you know what an alpaca looks like: a fluffy creature with a long neck and spade-shaped ears. But you may not know that there’s a different kind of alpaca, one whose coat grows in long, silky ringlets instead of an allover fluffy halo. Suri alpacas make up a small fraction of the alpacas, both worldwide and in the United States, but their special fiber is worth checking out.

The number of Suri alpacas isn’t specifically known, but they’re estimated to make up as little as 5–10% of the population, with the remainder being Huacaya alpacas. But although Huacayas dominate in numbers, Suris are gaining recognition, in part thanks to a group of farmers who formed an association to promote the breed. The Suri Network strives to “protect, preserve, and promote the Suri alpaca” by educating fiber artists and farmers about this special fiber.

What makes Suri alpacas different is the exceptionally long, lustrous, silky locks of fiber that they produce. Growing as much as 7" per year on a young animal, Suri fiber is far longer than almost any other animal-based fiber. When spun into yarn, it is strong and feels even softer than its micron count would suggest. The smooth fiber is a treat to work with on its own, and it also brings strength and softness to fiber blends.

In recognition of the unique properties of the fiber, Suri Network has taken the unusual step of developing a trademark program, an indication to consumers that the producers have met the breed standards in a number of areas, including animal husbandry and suiting the fiber to its best purpose.

In this episode, Suri Network members and Suri producers Liz Vahlkamp of Salt River Alpacas and Laurel Shouvlin of Bluebird Hills Farm describe what makes Suri alpacas special, what fiber artists can expect from working with Suri fiber, and how the Suri breed is taking its place in the world of yarn and fiber.

This episode is brought to you by:

Suri Network

The Suri Network was established in 1997 to assist its members to protect, preserve, and promote the Suri alpaca. Since its beginnings, the Suri Network has been at the forefront of the alpaca industry promoting both the Suri alpaca and the use of its wondrous fleece.

Links

Suri Network

Suri Simply Stunning

Sip and Share about a variety of Suri subjects

Suri Network Video series about spinning, knitting, felting, and weaving with Suri fiber

The scale of Sarah Neubert’s work varies from miniature to monumental, from small pieces such as earrings to room-sized installations. She dreams of creating entire woven environments that are sensory and tactile, like cocoons or sanctuaries of fiber. Working on a large scale allows her to explore new techniques and push the boundaries of her art. However, she also appreciates the sense of accomplishment that comes from creating small, wearable pieces.

Her classes at the upcoming Weave Together with Handwoven event in February 2024 will let students work on a small tapestry loom to explore some of her favorite subjects. When Sarah teaches tapestry weaving with nontraditional wefts, she often brings found and foraged materials and invites students to bring their own elements to incorporate. Although these may be nontraditional (and even sometimes non-yarn), the weaving skills to incorporate and stabilize them strengthen the student’s grasp of weaving fundamentals. A class in textural weaving includes hand-manipulated techniques, traditional skills that she employs in very nontraditional ways.

One of her recent projects, a Woven Upholstery Mending tutorial, started with a refusal to just dispose of the couch that her cats had clawed. Using her weaving skills in a different application, she repaired her couch with rope and sturdy tools. When she shared her project and results on social media, the interest and enthusiasm were overwhelming. Sarah found herself designing and filming a course on how to create your own woven mends on furniture.

Instead of charging to view the class, Sarah has posted it on YouTube on a donation-based model in hopes of keeping other couches out of landfills. “I think having an energetic exchange is important in a lot of spaces, and I was really grateful for the people that donated,” she says.

Weaving isn’t just a form of art for Sarah, it’s also therapeutic. At first accidentally and now deliberately, she has found relief from anxiety and an opportunity to process her emotions while working at the loom. She experiences this as a flow state, an opportunity to heal. Although her early experiences as a weaver were fraught with perfectionism, she now explores how to make a piece the best she can . . . and then make room for the next project.

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. 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

Sarah Neubert’s website

Woven Upholstery Mending online class

[How to fix furniture with visible mending](How to fix furniture with visible mending) tutorial on YouTube

Tapestry Cuff Bracelet, a pattern for a woven cuff, available on the Little Looms website

“Woven Flow: Weaving as Meditation.” Sarah Neubert, Handwoven website

“Fiber art is finally being taken seriously.” Julia Halperin, The New York Times Style Magazine (accessed online), September 11, 2023.

Maya Angelou interview in the Paris Review, 1990.

The picture of a flock of primitive-breed sheep, the last of their kind, living on an island off the northeast coast of Scotland, has a certain romance to it. Plenty of knitters, spinners, fiber artists, and citizens of the modern world might idly dream of living on such an island and tending such a flock. With no background as a farmer and only a few years as a shepherd, Jane Cooper decided to bring that dream to life.

Enchanted by the fiber of the Boreray sheep, and with her life transformed by a class on knitting with rare breeds, Jane decided to buy a small parcel of land and start a spinner’s flock by adopting a few wethers from another farmer. In a short time, however, she found herself with more land—and more sheep—than she planned for. And so began her adventure as the shepherd of the “lost flock,” a group of sheep whose ancestors had escaped the official registry.

Since obtaining her first sheep in 2013, Jane not only developed her own breeding program but established several other breeding flocks in the Orkneys. She has explored the recent and ancient history of her sheep, from the Vikings who used dual-coated wool in their sails to the breed registries established in the 20th century (and traced how her own sheep came to be called “the lost flock.”)

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. 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

Orkney Boreray website

The Lost Flock book by Jane Cooper US edition and UK edition

Blacker and Beyond Ravelry group

Blacker Yarns and The Natural Fibre Company
Woolsack British wool website

Felicia Lo spent most of her college years wearing a lot of black.

The bright, happy color combinations that she loved as a child—lime green and hot pink, pink and yellow—didn’t fit other people’s idea of what colors went together, so she avoided wearing colors altogether. It took years to begin introducing color into her wardrobe again.

As handdyeing began its groundswell in the early 2000s, Felicia began experimenting with dyeing fiber and then yarn. As it turned out, fiber artists across the world thought that her color sense was not only acceptable but irresistible.

What began as a casual project in 2005 has grown into a company with a dozen staff members, hundreds of colorways, and a roster of yarn and fiber bases. Yet despite the company’s larger scale, each skein or braid of fiber is still prepared, colored, rinsed, and packaged by hand. Maintaining consistency in their very handmade product has meant transforming SweetGeorgia from her initial solo project into a team effort, with staff members collaborating on new colors and initiatives.

Felicia published her book Dyeing to Spin & Knit in 2017, with techniques for fiber artists to choose colors, apply them effectively, and use their handdyed creations. That same year, she founded the School of SweetGeorgia to offer online classes and community, first in handdyeing and later in knitting, spinning, weaving, and other fiber arts.

Although her fiber-arts practices stretch from spinning to crochet, tapestry, machine knitting, and weaving, Felicia always has a knitting project on the needles . . . and these days, it’s almost certainly not black.

More of our conversation with Felicia, including what's on her needles and her suggestions on how to choose yarn colors for a knitting project how to choose the right yarn structure for a knitted project, is available in the library for subscribers to Farm & Fiber Knits.

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. 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

SweetGeorgia

School of SweetGeorgia

Dyeing to Spin & Knit

In 2009, Mary Jeanne Packer founded Battenkill Fibers Carding & Spinning Mill to work with small farms, yarn companies, and even individual handspinners who wanted great yarn. The partnerships built around the mill are helping revitalize the regional wool economy and sustain shepherds and shops alike. We are far from the days when 13 water-powered mills lined the Battenkill River in Greenwich, New York, all processing American wool, but through collaborations across the textile industry, the prospects for high-quality yarn look bright.

For a farm with a few dozen sheep, a local yarn store wanting to make a special line of yarn, or even a handspinner with a prize fleece from the wool festival and no means to wash it, creating roving or yarn comes from a partnership with a mill built on expertise and trust. How should the fiber be washed, spun, and plied? What will bring out the best in the wool? The mill transforms and adds value to a year’s fiber crop, the results of the feed, care, and shearing that farmers condult year-round. Mary Jeanne relishes the opportunity to support members of the yarn community and make connections among them, so that a niche yarn company can source a special kind fiber or shepherds can keep their farms going with an additional source of revenue.

Seeing gaps in the regional textile industry and opportunities for sustainable growth, Mary Jeanne and yarn shop owner Gail Parrinello brought together a group of farmers, dyers, millers, designers, makers, distributors, and retailers in a network called the Hudson Valley Textile Project. One of the initiatives of the project is Clean Fleece New York, a medium-scale scouring facility that processes batches of fiber too large for a small mill but below the minimum for an industrial-scale scouring facility, which has just opened in fall of 2023.

More of our conversation with Mary Jeanne, including how to choose the right yarn structure for a knitted project, what surprising yarns you might be overlooking, and how to find the most wonderful yarns at a fiber festival, is available in the library for subscribers to Farm & Fiber Knits.

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. 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

Battenkill Fibers

Hudson Valley Textile Project

Clean Fleece New York

Mountain Meadow Wool

Shaniko Wool Company

Green Mountain Spinnery

Laxtons Wooltrace DK

Foster Sheep Farm

Bare Naked Wools/Knitspot

The Woolly Thistle

Brooklyn General Store

Kingdom Fleece and Fiberworks

Many weavers find their inspiration by asking, “What if...” Since she first sat down at a loom, Deb Essen has pushed the limits of her weaving by asking, “Why can’t I?”

Deb has followed that question since childhood, right through her career as a weaving teacher and author. Since she first neglected her table-clearing duties to watch a weaving demonstration at the age of 9, the craft of weaving has held her fascinated. And despite the disciplines of teaching, designing, and writing, that childlike spirit of exploration still gets free rein in her weaving studio. “I play with everything. I mean, that’s the beauty of weaving,” she says. “There’s something to play with all the time.”

When Deb talks about her favorite classes, the word “play” comes up often, and her approach is as lighthearted as it is methodical. “There’s always an amazing surprise for everybody in the class,” she says of her class on color in weaving. “You kind of have to throw color theory for artists out the window” and sample different color combinations. (Deb will be teaching color in weaving at the first Weave Together with Handwoven event February 25–29, 2024.)

Deb’s love of structure isn’t limited to complex multishaft looms, or even to pick-up patterns on rigid-heddle looms. When the new Zoom Loom debuted, Deb accepted the challenge to play with the small loom and see what she could create. “You know, never say no,” she says, and developed a line of toys and figures made solely of 4" woven squares. She explores the possibilities of texture, color, and pick-up on the little squares, too.

We’re looking forward to Deb joining us in Loveland, Colorado, February 25–29, 2024, for Weave Together with Handwoven. Her classes include Color in Weaving and two classes on weaving with pin looms.

For photos of Deb’s work, check out our show notes at handwovenmagazine.com.

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. 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

dje handwovens, Deb’s website and line of weaving kits

Color in Weaving video

Easy Weaving with Supplemental Warps book

Most of us avoid nettles, thinking of them as weeds whose little stinging hairs can inject a painful toxin into the unexpecting walker. But strolling through the woods near his home in England, Allan Brown was captivated by the tall native plants. Knowing that textile cultures across the world have produced cloth from nettles, he wanted to learn more about cloth made with nettle fiber.

Except for a few exceptions—giant Himalayan nettles and ramie, which is a non-stinging plant in the nettle family—the era of nettle textiles is over. But thousands of years ago, nettle cloth and cordage fulfilled human needs for garments and tools. Like other ancient textiles, nettle cloth has almost entirely disappeared, rotted away and returned to the soil.

Allan knew that the only way to experience cloth made from nettle would be to create it himself, so he set about processing, spinning, and weaving fabric from stands of nettles that grew wild in the woods. Before he could get down to cloth-making, though, he had to learn how to extract the fiber from the plant—a process without contemporary documentation or a skilled teacher. (The stinging parts of the plant are removed during processing, so textiles made from nettle fiber feel more like cotton or linen than stinging barbs.)

He learned to spin, which proved not only the most time-consuming but also the most meaningful part of the project. “I just found spinning so therapeutic,” he says. He felt the solace of handspinning keenly when his wife, Alex, passed away over the course of his nettle exploration.

In the aftermath of Alex dying, my world grew very small, my perimeters drew in, and I was just looking after the family. Sometimes my only connection to a wider world was just going out and collecting nettles, but it was within a really small geographical margin. So I think events sort of led me to, rather than looking for bigger and more, I tuned into the familiar, going in deeper and seeing what I could find and what I’d previously overlooked. And realizing, oh my goodness—all these plants, they provide dyes, these plants provide fibers, and they’re all there right on my doorstep and have been under my nose all along. So it feels like it’s really connected me to a sense of place in a much deeper way than perhaps I had been before.

As he spun years’ worth of yarn, Allan decided that the nettle project would culimate in a dress. A simple shape, cut efficiently from a narrow width of cloth, would be enough to create a dress for his daughter Oonagh, so he wove yards of plain-weave fabric and even spun the sewing thread to stitch the piece together. Seven years after his first experiments with nettle fiber, he slipped a handmade nettle dress over her head.

Following Allan on his exploration, his film-director friend Dylan Howitt captured the stages of the process and has released a film called The Nettle Dress. The film has been released in a number of markets, including the United Kingdom, and some audiences have been fortunate to meet the fiber artist and even touch the dress at a screening.

The story of the dress and its creator remind us that the long history of foraged, handmade cloth can be ours again if we have the dedication to revive it.

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. 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

The Nettle Dress film website
The Nettle Dress on Instagram

Nettles for Textiles Facebook group
Nettles for Textiles web page
From Sting to Spin, a History of Nettle Fibre by Gillian Edom

Kristin Nicholas lives in an idyllic historic New England home at the end of a dirt road, the interior handpainted in whimsical, vivid motifs. In neighboring fields, her family's hundreds of sheep graze in historic pastures. “From the outside looking in, it looks like a very romantic life,” she says. “But it is a ton of work. Most sane people wouldn’t do it, as far as I’m concerned.”

Kristin has never had a hard time reconciling her creative and practical sides, and in fiber art, she found a home for both. When she met her husband, one of their first outings was to the sheep barns where he had just taken a class in animal science. They put their passions for animals and textiles into practice right away when they bought their first four Romney sheep. Her mother says of the purchase, “Some people get an engagement ring. Kristin gets four sheep.”

As the creative director for Classic Elite Yarns, she designed knitwear, developed yarn lines and pattern collections, and helped transform the company from a small weaving-yarn distributor to a major yarn company. In her role, she selected and predicted which yarns would be most appealing to consumers and successful for yarn stores. Her own style, though, is absolutely distinctive. With bright colors and global textile inspirations, her bold designs have a folk art quality.

Through her decades in the yarn industry and as a professional artist, Kristin’s work has always drawn on her love of fiber and her showplace farm. Although their flock has grown from 4 to 400, Kristin is unsentimental about the need for the farming operation to turn a profit. “I'm a super practical person,” she says. “I have this whole artistic vision floating around in my head, but things have got to make sense financially for me.” This means that although she has been a spinner and knitter for decades, she does not mill the wool from her sheep into yarn. With a realistic eye on the high costs and low income from wool, she and her husband have decided to focus their efforts on raising lamb. A local yarn company, Bloom Woolen Yarns, arranges to purchase the wool clip instead.

These days, Kristin’s main creative outlet is her line of handpainted ceramics. She sells her pottery as well as grassfed lamb at the weekly farmer's market in Amherst, Massachusetts. She shares dispatches from her farm on her Substack newsletter.

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. 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 or follow them on Facebook.

Links:

“Wool Production from Small Flocks of Sheep”

“How Much Is That Knitter in the Window?”

Spin Off Summer 1983 (available free to Spin Off subscribers; see our help center for directions to access)

Kristin Nicholas’s website

PDF Patterns

Kristin’s Substack newsletter

Kristin’s colorful house

The farm and lamb business can be found at Leyden Glen Farm.

Bloom Woolen Yarns

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. 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 or follow them on Facebook.

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:

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. 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 or follow them on Facebook.

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.

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. 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 or follow them on Facebook.

Links

Daryl Lancaster's website

Daryl's YouTube channel

Sewing patterns and digital monographs

“Handwoven Kitchen Aides: Where Have all the Aprons Gone?” Handwoven March/April 2002.

“Lose Weight, Reduce Stress.” Handwoven January/February 2002.

Daryl's trend forecasting began with "Color Forecasting” in Handwoven September/October 2003 and ran through January/February 2007.

"The Indestructible (tiny) Structo." Handwoven September/October 2017.

"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 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. 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

PieceWork indexes

Cannarella, Deborah. "The 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Co. Fire." PieceWork September/October 1993.
Faubion, Trish. "The Amish and the Hmong: Two Cultures and One Quilt." PieceWork November/December 1993.
Norris, John. "The Rare Art of Birch Bark Biting." PieceWork September/October 1993.

Don't try to put Sarah Swett in a box—if you do, she might just weave a bag on it.

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.

Find the show notes with photos on the Little Looms website.

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. 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 to start your journey today!

Links

Sarah Swett's website

The Gusset is Sarah's weekly Substack newsletter

Fringeless: Four Selvedge Warping, Sarah's class with Rebecca Mezoff
Wild Textiles by Alice Fox

Lurie-Larochette Tapestries

Velma Bolyard, paper textile artist

Susan Martin Maffei, tapestry artist

Michael Rohde, tapestry artist

Archie Brennan: Tapestry as Modern Art

Melanie Falick discusses Kids Weaving and Knitting in America in Season 6 of the Long Thread Podcast

Sarah's fully illustrated guides 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. 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 to start your journey today!

Links

• Visit Clara Parkes's website for her books, events, and latest projects.
• Follow Clara on Instagram @claraparkes
• The Wool Channel is a community, publication, and platform devoted to promoting and educating about the benefits of wool.
• The Daily Respite is Clara's Substack offering a moment of wonder and reflection each morning.

After decades as an art therapist in suburban Sacramento, Lisa Mitchell and her husband, Greg Hudson, were ready for a radical life change. In her rewarding but exhausting career, Lisa spent her days harnessing the power of art and handwork to heal others, but she had little time to do it herself. Their concrete-jungle surroundings felt stifling. It was time for a radical, meaningful life change, one that would bring them more in touch with real materials, real experiences, real presence. They found a farm property in Whidbey Island, Washington, a fiber nexus for weavers, spinners, small mills, and small farms. And they set out in search of the right animals for their fiber farm.

At the Lambtown Festival in Dixon, Greg found them: a mother guanaco and chulengo (baby).

Guanacos are probably the least known camelid, the wild ancestor of llamas domesticated in the Andes thousands of years ago. Llamas are not uncommon in North America as pack, fiber, and guard animals, and although not cuddly, they have been bred for generations to be handled and interact with humans. Guanacos have not. Even the descendants of guanacos brought to United States zoos in the 1960s retain the wild nature of their Andean relatives. And unlike their cousins the vicuñas, who have similar huge dark eyes and coat distribution, guanacos are big. Greg and Lisa found themselves with a herd of animals tall enough to look them straight in the eye... but who really don't want to, thank you very much.

Raising guanacos has challenged the couple in more ways than they could have expected, but the lessons learned in the barn and on the farm have brought Greg and Lisa the very real and present life they had hoped to create. Besides the guanacos, they raise pygora goats and angora rabbits on the farm, and a friend raises a small flock of colored Merinos on their behalf. "So, now we raise animals for their fiber and make things with what they grow," Lisa says. "And I write about the discoveries we make along the way."

Find photos and show notes at the Spin Off Magazine website.

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. 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 to start your journey today!

Links

• Lisa and Greg's Whidbey Island farm is called Aliento Farm.
  
• Lisa shares lessons she's learned from her flock at A Fiber Life Podcast.
  
• Aliento Farm will hold their second Guanaco Spinning Experience farm retreat workshop on August 26, 2023.
  
• Shop for spinning fiber, yarn, and finished guanaco items at the farm's online shop..
  
• Follow the farm on Instagram for visits with the animals, yarns, natural dyes, and to watch for new chulengos (baby guanacos).

Wanting to help the women in her native country called Rangina Hamidi back to Afghanistan. Through the khamak embroidery they have practiced for generations, Kandahar Treasure supports women making a living with their needles.

Rangina Hamidi's parents and sisters left Afghanistan whe she was a child in the early 1980s, during the war with the Soviet Union, eventually settling in Virginia. She had recently finished her bachelor's degree in religious studies and women's studies when the attacks of September 11, 2001, suddenly turned the world's attention to the country where she was born. As images of covered Afghan women and calls to liberate the country focused the attention of military and political leaders, Rangina felt the pull to do what the whole world said must be done: help the women of Afghanistan. And so 20 years after her family left the country, she found herself drawn back to the city where she still had relatives, in the middle of another war.

Although she has pursued crafts and fiber arts for pleasure, Rangina mostly knew about khamak embroidery from seeing it embellishing her mother's clothes. Khamak involves tiny satin stitches in intricate geometric designs that echo the tile work of traditional Islamic architecture. It is the traditional art form of women in Kandahar, a counted thread technique worked freehand over fine plain-weave cloth. A set of khamak linens is an absolute requirement for a bridal trousseau and baby garments, and women often embroider wraps and tunics for men in their families, home textiles, and special occasion outfits. Khamak is one of the few ways that women have been able to earn money in this conservative region, whether restricted by laws or cultural norms. So when Rangina was looking for a development opportunity to help the women of Kandahar, khamak was the natural fit.

In 2008, Rangina founded Kandahar Treasure, a social enterprise run by and for the benefit of women in the Kandahar region. Kandahar Treasure not only helps women find markets for their work, it also helps raise the quality of the pieces and pays on completion--especially important when transportation and financial structures can be slow.

After founding Kandahar Treasure, and with a young daughter, Rangina was one of the founders of an international school in Kabul. She was serving as the school's principal when President Ashraf Ghani appointed her the country's Minister of Education, a post she held until the fall of the Republic in August 2021.

When Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in 2021, it seemed that Kandahar Treasure might be one of the casualties. Remarkably, the organization continues to operate, providing work and payment for women artisans. You can purchase their khamak pieces from several web stores and at the 2023 International Folk Art Market.

Rangina currently lives with her family in Arizona, where she teaches at the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University.

To see photos of Rangina and khamak embroidery, visit the PieceWork Magazine website..

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. 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

• Kandahar Treasure
  
• Embroidering Within Boundaries: Afghan Women Creating a Future by Rangina Hamidi and Mary Littrell
  
• Kandahar Treasure products at Ibu Movement
  
• Kandahar Treasure products at Global Goods Partners
  
• Kandahar Treasure will take part in the International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe, New Mexico, from July 6–9, 2023.

Venturing to a frozen lake in mid-winter, Josefin Waltin does something remarkable: She breaks the ice with a hatchet and climbs into the frigid water. And unlike an ice-bucket-challenge or polar bear dip, she does this every morning. With her head, feet, and hands covered in handspun wool knitwear, she looks pretty happy doing it, too. Although not everyone will take a dip in subzero temperatures, anyone who does should definitely wear wool for the adventure.

Josefin is a spinner, knitter, and fiber artist who has made the decision to primarily use heritage breeds of Swedish sheep. Although these 10 heritage breeds are unique to Sweden, the story of local sheep disappearing in favor of softer, uniform imported wool is shared across the fiber world. Using these breeds not only preserves her cultural heritage but also helps her craft more sustainably. Besides using heritage breeds of wool, she practices traditional (almost endangered) Swedish crafts such as twined or two-end knitting (tvåändsstickning) and nålbinding. They are slow processes. As Josefin says, "That's a superpower."

But drawing on the fiber world around her doesn't mean her interests are provincial. In one recent project, she combined the fleece of a Gestrike-breed ewe with a traditional knitting pattern from the High Atlas Mountains of Morroco. Using a Navajo-style spindle, she spun two colors of yarn and knitted them into a pair of warm snow-shoveling pants.

Josefin is exploring fiber traditions besides spinning, knitting, and looping. Her annual wool traveling club is starting a two-year exploration of fulling, planning to visit a water-powered fulling mill and process their own handspun, handwoven fabric. Last year's traveling club exploration took them to the small village of Dala-Floda to learn påsöm embroidery, a rich and even bombastic embellishment tradition. (A wool traveling club sounds like a very good thing to have.)

Through her online classes and explorations of the world of wool, Josefin inspires me to learn globally and spin locally.

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. 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

Josefin Waltin's website
Josefin's Instagram
Knit Spin Sweden by Sara Wolf and Josefin Waltin
Keepers of the Sheep: Knitting in Morocco’s High Atlas and Beyond by Irene Waggener

The resist-dye technique known as ikat involves wrapping individual threads in careful patterns, dyeing them, and then using the dyed threads as warp, weft, or both. With care and what Mary Zicafoose describes as a lot of fussing, the woven fabric displays a pre-planned design—geometric or figurative, crisp or feathery, multicolored or two-tone. This technique is time-consuming and labor-intensive, but the results are beautiful in ways unique to each of the textile traditions that practice it.

Mary Zicafoose first encountered ikat as a child, when her favorite aunt brought her a souvenir scrap of the fabric and told her it contained magic. Even when you know the painstaking and nonmagical process that weavers use to create ikat fabrics, her aunt's comment rings true: there is something charmed about the patterns that emerge in ikat, jaspe, pochampally, and other resist-dye-weave fabrics. Mary made her way toward ikat tapestry through her studies in other visual arts. Despite initially being insulted when a college professor suggested she consider working in fibers, she eventually found her passion in weaving and dyeing. She taught herself to weave ikat through a pamphlet and gradually pushed the limits of the technique, creating more complex and intricate designs.

In her studio practice, Mary creates stunning large-format weft-ikat tapestries, some requiring years of planning and weaving (and tens of thousands of knots). Beginning the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, she conceived a project in a new style: a huge landscape of the Sandhill Crane bird migration near her home on the Platte River in Nebraska.

In addition to her studio practice, Mary also loves to teach weavers the fundamentals of ikat. Her teaching approach involves breaking down the process into manageable steps—some very different from standard weaving practice! Her first book, Ikat: The Essential Handbook to Weaving Resist-Dyed Cloth, was written for a broad audience of weavers, with the aim of teaching a technique and encouraging people to apply it to their own signature style of weaving. Focusing on warp ikat, the book presents a step-by-step approach to a technique that she learned through trial and error. She is currently working on a companion book to go deeper into many different types of projects and build on skill sets.

The Seattle Art Museum's major exhibit of historic and contemporary ikat textiles that will be open through May 29, 2023.

This episode is brought to you by:

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. 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

Mary Zicafoose's website

Mary's first book, Ikat: The Essential Handbook to Weaving Resist-Dyed Cloth

Mary's class offerings

Ikat: A World of Compelling Cloth runs through May 29 at the Seattle Art Museum.

The treasure in a handmade life isn’t just mastering skills and making goods, Melanie Falick says—it’s the power in creation, connection, and expression along the way.

When Melanie Falick started to knit as a young adult, she fell in love with everything about it: the creative potential of yarn and color, the meditative process, the useful finished product, the community of fellow makers, and the stories it can tell us about lives past and present.

She has spent the years since then sharing her passion for knitting, and handwork generally, through roles as an author, editor, and creative director. Her books and creative collaborations all reflect her belief that craft is a pathway to wellness for all of us—as individuals, community members, and citizens of this planet.

Melanie would like us to celebrate what we make with our hands with pride. Through the process of craft, she says, we can connect to our ancestors, our environment, the people around us, and our inner selves. And when we share our skills and enthusiasm, we can help to bring more beauty, contentment, and empathy into the world.

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. 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.

Admiring the simplicity of traditional bandweaving, Kerstin Neumüller took her love of weaving a step further and learned to carve small, sweet rigid heddles. She was startled to find a big demand for her handmade, handpainted heddles, which sell out as soon as she posts a new batch.

With formal training as an apprentice in menswear tailoring, Kerstin's love for textiles is a lifelong passion. As owner of a denim store that offered repair services, her creative approach to mending clothing provided a way to blend her craft with her business. Her first two books, Indigo — Cultivate, Dye, Create and Mend & Patch, grew from this overlapping interest. But although she has a longstanding love of weaving, her heddles came from the urge to literally take matters into her own hands.

Growing up in Sweden as the granddaughter of craftspeople fed Kerstin's strong value of self-sufficiency. Using a simple, traditional woodworking knife with a piece of natural wood, could she fashion the weaving tool she needed to make a band? But if that sounds too earnest to be fun, Kerstin's heddles have a thorough and delightful dose of whimsy to keep them from being too serious. Recent heddle designs have included horses, houses, pomegranates, and women.

Although she receives more inquiries about buying heddles than she ever expected, Kerstin resists the idea of taking orders or commissions. She announces when a batch will be ready through her store, and when they're gone, they're gone. Working at her own pace lets her keep experimenting and following the direction of her creativity.

Her new book, Simple Weave, offers instructions on how to make a variety of tools in addition to weaving project directions for bands, household goods, and desk accessories. The appendix includes diagrams and materials lists for a carved heddle, a cardboard heddle, a homemade temple (stretcher), a backstrap loom, and a frame loom.

Visit the Long Thread Podcast website.

Links

Kerstin Neumüller's website

Kerstin's books, Simple Weave, Mend & Patch, and Indigo, are all available in the United States from the Vesterheim Museum

Kerstin posts about her carving, weaving, and available heddles on her Instagram page

This episode is brought to you by:

You’ll find the largest variety of silk spinning fibers, silk yarn and silk threads & ribbons at 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.

Life lessons are where you find them. Peggy Orenstein found them in her quest to build a sweater from scratch.

When I say that Peggy created a sweater from scratch, I mean wrestling a sheep to the ground and relieving it of its wool. Carding said wool by hand while Zooming with her father, who sometimes knew who she was. Spinning that lovely fluff, with all the typical push-pull-stop-go of a beginning spinner. Dyeing the yarn with colors from her backyard and beyond. After that, knitting the sweater was a breeze, sort of. (And despite the title of her book, Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World's Ugliest Sweater, it’s definitely not the world’s ugliest.)

But there were more lessons to be taken from this year-long odyssey. Lessons about fast fashion, regenerative agriculture, ancient goddesses, a planet at risk. The list goes on. The handmade thread, metaphorical or physical, ties together our human history, not neatly but with complicated and important entanglements.

Unraveling is not a how-to book. If you know much about any of the steps in the process of turning wool into wardrobe, you will smile or sometimes wince at the author’s fearless approach. But so much to think about! She gives us so much to think about!

Visit the Long Thread Podcast website.

Links

Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World's Ugliest Sweater

"The Revolutionary Power of a Skein of Yarn" , New York Times, January 27, 2023

peggyorenstein.com

This episode is brought to you by:

You’ll find the largest variety of silk spinning fibers, silk yarn and silk threads & ribbons at 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.

In 2010, Lynda Teller Pete was living in Denver with her husband Belvin, working full-time in a demanding government job in the Department of Labor, living the life on a modern urban Indian, doing a little weaving in her spare time. Then she pivoted. Quit the job and sat down at her loom and made the commitment to return to her roots.

With her older sister, Barbara Teller Ornelas, Lynda began teaching weaving classes and producing award-winning tapestries. In 2017, the two of them wrote Spider Woman’s Children: Navajo Weavers Today. They followed this with How to Weave a Navajo Rug and Other Lessons from Spider Woman, both published by Thrums Books/Schiffer Publications. And at the same time, Lynda collaborated on another book for the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, and she curated exhibits and lectured across the country. She and Barbara were featured in a segment of the PBS series Craft in America. She keeps a full teaching schedule, including classes for Navajos only as well as more culturally focused classes for non-indigenous students.

In 2022 she was elected to the board position for Equity and Inclusion by the prestigious Textile Society of America, and in the same year she was recipient of a Luce Foundation fellowship for Indigenous Knowledge, which will result in the translation of How to Weave a Navajo Rug into her native language. Her list of accomplishments and responsibilities goes on and on. And yet most any night, late into the night, you would find Lynda at her loom, rhythmically beating the pattern wefts into place in yet another tapestry. For after all, night is when the spider does its work.

Visit the Long Thread Podcast website.

This episode is brought to you by:

You’ll find the largest variety of silk spinning fibers, silk yarn and silk threads & ribbons at 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.

Lynda Teller Pete and Barbara Teller Ornelas's website

How to Weave a Navajo Rug by Lynda Teller Pete and Barbara Teller Ornelas

Spider Woman's Children by Lynda Teller Pete and Barbara Teller Ornelas

The Tellers on Craft in America

Textile Society of America

Luce Indigenous Knowledge Fellowships 2022

In Meg Swansen’s world, knitting is so much more than knit and purl. It links music, mathematics, deep history, and world-wide communities. It is a platform for creativity, invention, and technical mastery.

Music, you say? That’s how Meg proceeds merrily along a pattern round of several hundred stitches. She sings the repeat. Or at least chants it. And those long, long pattern rounds comprise her favorite kind of knitting: color-stranded Fair Isle designs. The interplay of color and motif and deep tradition are of endless interest to her.

Mathematics are integral to the craft, too, in Meg’s world. Her mother’s famous EPS, Elizabeth’s Percentage System, has empowered generations of knitters to devise their own patterns to suit their own gauges and their own body measurements. Now Meg’s son Cully has taken the concept to a new level, riffing off the famous Baby Surprise Jacket with new formulae to suit almost infinite sizes, shapes, and styles. It seems to be a family thing.

Impeccable technique matters to Meg, not just for its own sake but for the stories it tells of knitters in far-flung countries and cultures. She’s introduced the knitting world to the traditions of Latvia, Armenia, Estonia, Iceland, the Scandinavian countries, the list goes on and on. And it’s not just the motifs and styles of these cultures, but the ways of working, the ways of tending to details, that have been refined over many generations, even centuries. Meg has added her own tricks, too, and takes great pleasure in all the difference a simple slip of a needle-tip makes in her signature increase.

From her cozy, iconic Red Schoolhouse in the Wisconsin woods, Meg reflects on the hundreds of individual knitters who have come to the annual knitting camp that her mother started in 1974. So much sharing, learning, and teaching have come from these gatherings, and Meg is careful to credit the individuals that have made special contributions. While the camp happens only in the summer, it provides the spirit for a vast community that connects through her semi-annual newsletters, occasional book launches, teaching forays, and social media posts. So much more than knit and purl.

This episode is brought to you by:

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. 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

Schoolhouse Press

"The Long Thread" article featuring Meg Swansen can be found in PieceWork Spring 2023

When you think about circular weaving, you may flashback to weaving on a paper plate or cardboard using simple materials and methods. But artist and weaver Emily Nicolaides has taken circular weaving by storm, opening up the technique to include a new world of richness, beauty, and complexity.

In 2016, Emily began exploring shaped tapestry weaving and the possibilities and limitations of weaving in the round. She started with a simple arch and then developed more complex shapes, such as ovals, eventually finding herself back to weaving circles. In the years that followed, she tested many weaving methods to see how they could apply to circular weaving. She often discovered what worked (and did not) through trial and error. Her years of research and teaching her techniques landed her a book deal. Her book, Amazing Circular Weaving, came out in September 2022.

In this episode, Emily shares how weaving grounded her; how warp and weft coming together to create fabric mirrors how she brings herself and her knowledge together to make unique pieces. Host Anne Merrow connected with her at her home on the island of Cyprus and talked about her love of books, research, and the lineage and history we all take part in while weaving.

This episode is brought to you by:

You’ll find the largest variety of silk spinning fibers, silk yarn and silk threads & ribbons at 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

• See Emily Nicolaides’ website for information on her, and her book, Amazing Circular Weaving.
• You can find the tapestry weaving series, “Tapestry Talk,” by Tommye Scanlin in the Summer 2022, Fall 2022, Winter 2022, and Spring 2023 issues of Easy Weaving with Little Looms.
• Emily mentions The Handweaver’s Pattern Directory by Anne Dixon, and Shaped Tapestry by Kathe Todd-Hooker, as two of her favorite resources.
• Learn more about fythkiotiko (the famous colorful patterns from the village of Fyti) at https://heartlandoflegends.com/fythkiotika/.

More than spinning, weaving, stitching, or any of the other crafts she's written and published about, Linda Ligon is fascinated by the people who make traditional textiles. From Peruvian spinners to Miao embroiderers to Navajo weavers, the people who make cloth the way their ancestors did have a special interest for her.

Many of the people who know Linda Ligon's work don't know her by name (which is just fine with her). Linda founded Interweave in 1975, and it went on to become a craft juggernaut. After selling the company, she founded Thrums Books, which published highly illustrated, immersive books about traditional textiles around the world. She cofounded Long Thread Media in 2019, bringing three of her original publications (Spin Off, Handwoven, and PieceWork) home.

Bringing together textiles, stories, words, and images is Linda's life work—but she never loses her fascination for one person in particular: the reader.

This episode is brought to you by:

You’ll find the largest variety of silk spinning fibers, silk yarn and silk threads & ribbons at 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

Thrums Books
Long Thread Media

Most stores don't invite passersby to walk up to their shop, open a door, and help themselves—no obligation, no purchase required. But not long after opening new new yarn store in the Mt. Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia, Liz Sytsma hung a box on the side of the store labeled "Little Free Fiber Library." Inspired by the give a book, take a book model of the Little Free Library, Wild Hand wanted to create a place where anyone who wanted or needed yarn could obtain it freely. Instead of viewing the fiber library as competing with the shop's sales, the Wild Hand team views it as an opportunity to bring new crafters into the fold, make yarn accessible to all, and participate in their community.

Liz left the nonprofit world to open Wild Hand in 2019, wanting to build a a yarn store that would promote the kind of community she wanted to see: inclusive, diverse, thoughtful, kind. She gathered a team to work together as managers, teaching artists, and colleagues who share a dedication to building the kind of yarn shop where everyone who comes through the door can feel welcome and valued. One of the first projects of Wild Hand was the Community Commitment, a list of 11 principles that guide everything from purchasing decisions to customer service.

One of Liz's first collaborators was Theresa Hill, a spinner, teacher, independent dyer, and nurse. Theresa serves as one of the managers of Wild Hand, where she enjoys feeding the creativity and skills of the shop's customers. She appreciates the way Wild Hand encourages customers and staff members alike to be fully themselves in the space, free to be silly, make mistakes, and feel welcome.

In addition to a storefront in Philadelphia, Wild Hand has included an online store since early days, too. When COVID-19 closed the shop's physical doors and the operation shifted entirely online for a time, the Community Commitment kept right up: Liz prioritized accessibility on the website, too, and even the Little Free Fiber Library is available to online customers (who cover the cost of shipping). Although neighborhood roots are important, Wild Hand invites everyone to be part of their fiber community.

This episode is brought to you by:

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. 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:

Wild Hand website

Ewe-Nited States of Fiber

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 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. 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

In Search of Wild Silk by Karen Selk

Deep Color by Keith Recker

Create Naturally by Marcia Young
Thrums Books

Fiber Art Now
"Spinning Paper Thread" by Mary Hark explores papermaking in Ghana.

"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 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. 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

Responsible Wool Standard
Textile Exchange

Stories of Stories of Fashion, Textiles, and Place by Leslie Davis Burns and Jeanne Carver

Imperial Stock Ranch website
Pacific Northwest Fibershed: Imperial Stock Ranch (video)

Nativa Precious Fiber/Chargeurs

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 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. 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](https://schifferbooks.com/products/art-science-of-natural-dyes)

Woven Shibori.
The Studio Formulas Set for The Art and Science of Natural Dyes : 84 Cards with Recipes and Color Swatches (publishing in 2023)
Catharine Ellis website

The Dyer's Handbook: Memoirs of an 18th-Century Master Colourist
Yoshiko Wada

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 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. 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
Chalo Charkha Ramiye
Yarn Makers Guild India
Devin Helmen, "Book review: Chalo Charkha Ramiye, A Contemporary Charkha Movement"
Avani Varia, "Spinning Arts, Education and Economy in India"
Anne Merrow, 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, 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 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. 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

_Editor’s note: _In an earlier version of this episode, I made a statement that ignored the complexity, richness, and variety of spiritual practice through handcraft. Several readers were kind enough to point out the oversights, and we have edited the episode to remove the comment. Long Thread Media strives to represent and celebrate cultural diversity, now and in the past. I am grateful for the opportunity to account for and attempt repair for my error.

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 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. 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 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. 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

Elemental Affects
Mendocino Wool and Fiber

Meridian Mill House

Valley Oak Wool Mill

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. 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 and A Textile Traveler’s Guide to Guatemala (both published by Thrums Books). 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.

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 and finishing the woven cloth on the Spin Off website.

You can find more details about these explorations and her other pursuits at her website, 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.

Terry's sample kit for testing for colors in mushrooms fits in a small lunchbox.

To learn more about mushroom dyeing, check out Alissa Allen and Mycopigments. The Facebook group Mushroom and Lichen Dyers United 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.

To learn more about botanical printing, check out The Best of Both Worlds: Enhanced Botanical Printing by Jane Dunnewold or Bundle, Steam, Print! by Janis Thompson.

Natural Dyes

Maiwa has recently made their extraordinary knowledge base of natural dyeing available online at their Natural Dyes website.

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, 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.

To learn more about Hardanger embroidery, see “Needlework to Do When Loneliness Comes: Anna Anderson’s Hardanger Tablecloth” by Laurann Gilbertson, and “A Hardanger Coaster to Stitch” by Joan Leuenberger.

Download a copy of the November/December 2012 issue of PieceWork to read more about Hardanger in Laurann Gilbertson’s article, “Needlework to Do When Loneliness Comes: Anna Anderson’s Hardanger Tablecloth.”