The Long Thread Podcast

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...

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...

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, weav...

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...

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 p...

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 p...

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 v...

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, auth...

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...

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,...

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 looki...

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 tape...

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...

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 grandmoth...

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 owni...

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...

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 crea...

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...

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...

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 pr...

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 col...

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...