The Long Thread Podcast Long Thread Media

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!