The Long Thread Podcast

Small textile towns were once common in New England, with stout brick buildings harnessing the power of the region’s water to mill yarn and cloth. The Colony family had been owners of a mill in Harrisville, New Hampshire, since before the Civil War, but by the mid-twentieth century, such factories had begun to disappear. In 1970, 53 mills closed in New England, the Colony family’s among them. John Colony (known as Chick) returned from serving in the Coast Guard to a mill town without a working mill.

Chick saw that the small town would wither unless a new project came in to fill the gap. After considering the options, he had the idea: What better use could there be for an old mill village than to make yarn? So shortly after his father and uncle closed down the mill, Chick opened a business making woolen yarn on some of the same old equipment. The new endeavor was scaled back in scope, but yarn was coming from the old mill buildings once again under the label of a new company, Harrisville Designs.

The town’s buildings and surrounding watershed became the center of a historic preservation effort. More than 50 years later, Harrisville is known as the best preserved early textile village in the country.

Harrisville Designs’s woolen-spun yarns are dyed in the wool, blending 12 or 13 brightly dyed fibers into dozens of subtle heathered hues. Initially developed for weaving, the yarns have become popular among knitters looking for yarns with character.

The next generation, Chick’s son Nick Colony, has taken on management of the mill, developing knitting yarns such as their Nightshades color line and small-batch Shear as well as updating the company’s energy production and manufacturing facilities.

Harrisville Designs has produced a range of weaving looms for decades, but the youngest weavers probably know the company for their potholder looms. Realizing that the potholder loops and looms on the market were poor quality, Harrisville developed a metal loom and experimented to develop cotton loops in a range of bright colors.

Weavers, knitters, and history enthusiasts may all know Harrisville for different reasons, but the effort that began in 1971 as a preservation project has created new futures in this small New Hampshire town.

Links

Harrisville Designs website

Historic Harrisville

Red Brick Village, a documentary about preserving historic Harrisville

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.

The picture of a flock of primitive-breed sheep, the last of their kind, living on an island off the northeast coast of Scotland, has a certain romance to it. Plenty of knitters, spinners, fiber artists, and citizens of the modern world might idly dream of living on such an island and tending such a flock. With no background as a farmer and only a few years as a shepherd, Jane Cooper decided to bring that dream to life.

Enchanted by the fiber of the Boreray sheep, and with her life transformed by a class on knitting with rare breeds, Jane decided to buy a small parcel of land and start a spinner’s flock by adopting a few wethers from another farmer. In a short time, however, she found herself with more land—and more sheep—than she planned for. And so began her adventure as the shepherd of the “lost flock,” a group of sheep whose ancestors had escaped the official registry.

Since obtaining her first sheep in 2013, Jane not only developed her own breeding program but established several other breeding flocks in the Orkneys. She has explored the recent and ancient history of her sheep, from the Vikings who used dual-coated wool in their sails to the breed registries established in the 20th century (and traced how her own sheep came to be called “the lost flock.”)

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

Orkney Boreray website

The Lost Flock book by Jane Cooper US edition and UK edition

Blacker and Beyond Ravelry group

Blacker Yarns and The Natural Fibre Company

Woolsack British wool website

When you picture lace, what comes to mind: an old-fashioned once-white piece of Victorian embellishment? The elegant, possibly itchy decoration on a wedding gown? If you are a needleworker, you might picture an array of bobbins leashed to a cluster of pins and arrayed on a pillow, or a tatting shuttle, or a steel crochet hook. All of these images would be correct—but capture the tiniest slice of the world’s laces.

As a PhD student, Elena Kanagy-Loux considers lace through the lenses of history, culture, and gender. How have textile artisans around the world developed lace strutures? Who was making lace—and who was wearing it? (For what matter, what is lace, anyway?) Beyond our assumptions about lace are delightful surprises: Wearing lace previously denoted power and wealth rather than femininity. Traditional lace may include a riot of color. Although they look delicate, lace fabrics can be surprisingly durable.

Outside her academic pursuits, Elena takes a more hands-on view of lace. Having studied a variety of methods, she fell in love with bobbin lace, which seemed to click in her mind when she sat down at a lacemaking pillow. Like most of our readers, Elena generally creates lace for her own interest and enjoyment, though she has accepted several notable commissions: a collar presented to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Columbia Law School on the 25th anniversary of her investiture to the Supreme court, and a collar designed for the Threads of Power exhibit at the Bard Graduate Center. In addition to her own work, she teaches extensively, finding an audience of needleworkers eager to learn bobbin lace or improve their skills. She co-founded the Brooklyn Lace Guild, which offers classes as well as a community of lacemakers

Elena often hears from non-makers, “Isn’t that a dying art?” She replies—in her classes, her needlework, and her wardrobe (which often includes lace in her colorful, contemporary style)—“Lacemaking is a thriving art!”

Links

Elena Kanagy-Loux’s website

Find Elena on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok

Thr Brooklyn Lace Guild, which Elena co-founded, is hosting its first exhibition, “Little Lace: The Work of Brooklyn Lace Guild,” from October 10, 2024, through January 11, 2025.

The International Organization of Lace, Inc. hosts conventions and maintains a list of chapters and events for those interested in learning about lacemaking.

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.

Laverne Waddington discovered weaving by accident—bike accident, to be precise. Recuperating from a mountain biking crash in Utah, she discovered a book on Navajo weaving and was immediately intrigued. A local exhibit of Diné textiles enthralled her, and she set about learning to weave in the Navajo style. Returning to Patagonia, where she had been living, she built a simple loom and explored weaving on her own until it became clear that she would need to move north to satify her hunger for weaving knowledge, settling in Bolivia.

Over the following decades, Laverne traveled in South and Central America, learning backstrap techniques from indigenous weavers. Her curiosity has led her to the Andean Highlands, Guatemala, and other regions to learn hand-manipulated and pick-up methods and patterns from skilled local weavers.

Laverne loves to explore complex and intricate weaving styles, enjoying the way that each inch of warp and weft passes through her hands in a variety of pick-up techniques. Weaving on a backstrap loom, she sits inside each weaving project. Through videos, online classes, books, and ebooks, she teaches other weavers how to set up a backstrap loom for themselves and weave a variety of patterns. Teaching backstrap and pick-up techniques is as much a part of her practice as deepening her understanding of the weaving structures.

In this episode, discover Laverne Waddington’s passions and processes.

Links

Laverne has maintained a blog and weaving journal on her website since 2009.

Laverne’s books are available from Taproot Video.

Laverne offers a number of tutorials of techniques she practices as well as videos of a variety of weaving techniques and traditions.

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.

When Jen Simonic and Masey Kaplan’s friend lost her mother, she had the challenge of going through her mother’s things while grieving her loss. Among her posessions was something almost every crafter has at least one of: a work in progress. Jen and Masey had each finished projects for bereaved family members before, but neither of them could take on this one, a pair of crocheted blankets for two very tall sons.

If the two of them were happy to finish a loved one’s unfinished craft project, they thought, other fiber artists would be willing to do it, too—fiber artists with a variety of craft skills. And there must be families of deceased crafters who weren’t lucky to know someone personally who could take on the task but would treasure having a finished item that their loved one began for them. So began Loose Ends, an organization that Jen and Masey think of as matchmakers for heirs and finishers of uncompleted works,

Loose Ends, which was established in May 2023 as a 501(c)3 nonprofit, set out to build a network that connects volunteer crafters with local families to complete projects that were left unfinished by death or disability. Hanging flyers near their homes, Jen and Masey quickly found finishers and projects in crochet, knitting, and quilting. Loose Ends currently seeks finishers in any textile handcraft and matches finishers with projects across the world. Projects under way include weaving, embroidery, and beading, as far afield as Alaska, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. Their informational flyer is now available in 12 languages.

You may be surprised to learn that for about 2,000 projects in process, 25,000 volunteers have signed up as finishers—so crafters far outnumber craft projects at this time. But Loose Ends is always looking for more volunteer finishers, both to cover a variety of crafts and to match families with nearby finishers when possible.

Any of us who love making things with our hands hate to think of our work in progress going to waste, languishing in boxes or (worse) winding up in the trash if we’re not able to finish them ourselves. By matching finishers and unfinished works, Loose Ends brings solace to families of deceased crafters and honors the work of their loved ones.

Links:

Loose Ends Project website

Sign up as a finisher or request help with a loved one’s project on the web forms.

Help families and finishers find Loose Ends by hanging flyers, which are available in several languages.

Visit the website to make a donation.

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.