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 f...
Jun 03, 2023•46 min
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...
May 20, 2023•1 hr 18 min
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 ...
May 06, 2023•39 min
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. M...
Apr 22, 2023•47 min
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 ...
Apr 08, 2023•49 min
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 provi...
Mar 25, 2023•49 min
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 swe...
Mar 11, 2023•43 min
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 W...
Feb 25, 2023•54 min
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 de...
Feb 11, 2023•50 min
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, e...
Jan 28, 2023•1 hr 1 min
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 juggernau...
Jan 14, 2023•29 min
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 t...
Dec 10, 2022•1 hr 7 min
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 ...
Nov 26, 2022•42 min
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...
Nov 12, 2022•1 hr
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 ...
Oct 29, 2022•44 min
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 l...
Oct 15, 2022•1 hr
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 depic...
Oct 01, 2022•54 min
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 Brula...
Sep 10, 2022•53 min
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 communi...
Aug 26, 2022•59 min
If you want to learn about silk—raising it, processing it, or using it—sooner or later you will find yourself on Michael Cook's site devoted to silk and sericulture, wormspit.com (http://www.wormspit.com). Raising silkworms and weaving with silk bring together two of Michael Cook's fascinations: textiles and bugs. He has tried, mastered, and teaches about every stage in the life cycle and production of silkmoths, silkworms, and silk fabric. The tongue-in-cheek title of his website, Wormspit, ref...
Aug 13, 2022•57 min
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 ...
Jul 30, 2022•49 min
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 ...
May 27, 2022•1 hr
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 co...
May 13, 2022•44 min
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 c...
Apr 29, 2022•55 min
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 choic...
Apr 15, 2022•56 min
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...
Apr 01, 2022•49 min
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...
Mar 18, 2022•1 hr 3 min
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,...
Mar 04, 2022•51 min
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 hea...
Feb 18, 2022•50 min
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 a...
Feb 04, 2022•1 hr 11 min
