82 episodes

The artists and artisans of the fiber world come to you in The Long Thread Podcast. Each episode features interviews with your favorite spinners, weavers, needleworkers, and fiber artists from across the globe. Get the inspiration, practical advice, and personal stories of experts as we follow the long thread.

The Long Thread Podcast Long Thread Media

    • Leisure
    • 4.7 • 152 Ratings

The artists and artisans of the fiber world come to you in The Long Thread Podcast. Each episode features interviews with your favorite spinners, weavers, needleworkers, and fiber artists from across the globe. Get the inspiration, practical advice, and personal stories of experts as we follow the long thread.

    Spotlight Episode: Yarn Barn of Kansas

    Spotlight Episode: Yarn Barn of Kansas

    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.

    • 59 min
    Rebecca Mezoff (classic)

    Rebecca Mezoff (classic)

    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!

    • 38 min
    Hannah Thiessen Howard, Slow Knitting

    Hannah Thiessen Howard, Slow Knitting

    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!

    • 56 min
    Keisha Cameron, High Hog Farm

    Keisha Cameron, High Hog Farm

    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.


    Vis

    • 49 min
    Justin Squizzero, The Burroughs Garret

    Justin Squizzero, The Burroughs Garret

    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

    • 42 min
    Kaffe Fassett, Artist & Color Master

    Kaffe Fassett, Artist & Color Master

    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.

    • 35 min

Customer Reviews

4.7 out of 5
152 Ratings

152 Ratings

CPMinni ,

Fabulous!

I love this podcast!! I find myself waiting for each episode and get very excited when a new one is released. This podcast covers so many different subjects within fiber arts and is well thought out. I also like how the interviewer is very conscious of cultures and how different cultures/people might like to share their skills and histories with the public. When I discovered it I went back and listened to every episode :)

eg portland ,

Love this podcast

I have found many exciting textile artists, all types, by listening to this pod. I appreciate how in depth the interviews are and the overall spirit is inspirational. I usually pick up a neglected project during or after an episode and get busy while I listen. I hope this keeps going.

wanda prescott ,

Absolutely addictive

While some of the talks are so completely specialized
and so much so that I don’t know what the craft looks like, there are many more podcasts that are like a thread that is pulled and a story evolves that becomes more and more fascinating with the telling. If you like hearing about diverse lives,cultures, and handcrafts, prepare to be enthralled. I especially recommend the Hawaiian quilt/ Levi Strauss episode

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