This story could have been written yesterday, or it could have been written 200 years ago. Life can be painfully hard, or joyously fortunate, but life goes on. This story is excerpted from a book we published in 2013, Faces of Tradition: Weaving Elders of the Andes, and details the life of a typical Elder […]
10
Apr
Apr
If life hadn’t taken an unexpected pivot, we would be in China right now with a group of friends. This very day, we would have been visiting a village that specializes in folded embroidery (my favorite kind), and we would be on our way to a workshop in that technique and others at the Sun […]
03
Apr
Apr
When I think of the Peruvian highlands, one of the first images that comes to mind is a steep and winding dirt road with switchbacks stretching out as far as the eye can see, and mid-vision, a tiny figure walking along at a steady pace. She’s wearing her many skirts (for warmth), and her beautifully […]
27
Mar
Mar
What I love: mountains, hats, cloth, stories within ritual. On our third day in China’s Guizhou Province last spring, publisher Linda Ligon, photographer Joe Coca, and I bounced along steep and muddy mountain roads with our dear guide Wang Jun and faithful driver Mr. Zhou. We were in China to work on our newest book […]
20
Mar
Mar
A few weeks ago, I wrote about authors Lynda Teller Pete and Barbara Teller Ornelas and their busy lives teaching, weaving, and writing. In that post, I mentioned that Lynda was teaching on Valentines day at Gauge Yarn shop in Austin,Texas. She sent us this wonderful follow-up story of time spent with one of her […]
13
Mar
Mar
“A leader is a person capable of always giving a little more in everything they do in helping and contributing to the well-being of the group and the community. A leader tries to be as humane as possible to resolve conflicts. A leader must be a responsible, honest and sincere person. A leader accepts constructive […]
06
Mar
Mar
“I’d like you to meet a friend of mine,” says Wang Jun, wanting to broaden our understanding of Miao textiles. I was in Guiyang, Guizhou Province, with Karen Brock and Joe Coca, working on Every Thread a Story: Traditional Chinese Artisans of Guizhou Province. So Jun took us straightaway to meet with his friend Zeng […]
28
Feb
Feb
You can learn a lot from carefully studying a piece of cloth: Its age, the fiber and its origin, the interlacement of the threads, the pigments used to color it, the cultural references in its design. And so much more. Museums and scholarly books are troves of information for understanding how and why textiles have […]
21
Feb
Feb
In mid-December, we received a detailed narrative from Lynda Pete and her sister Barbara Ornelas (authors of Spider Woman’s Children: Navajo Weavers Today) about the consulting work they were doing at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery in New York. It seems they were on hand to help prepare an interactive Navajo weaving exhibition at the Bard […]
14
Feb
Feb
It was a chance encounter, my first meeting with Wang Jun. Joe Coca and I were in Guizhou Province, China, with a potential author, checking the area out for a couple of weeks. Wang Jun was our translator. That book didn’t work out, but in the course of our travels, we became enchanted with the […]
