The Long Thread Podcast Long Thread Media

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