I just drove down to Santa Fe to attend the Fifteenth annual International Folk Art Market. It’s always a great time to connect with fiber friends and especially our authors as many are also artisan participants, volunteers, or translators. (Look for a full recap in next week’s blog.) Nilda Callanaupa Alvarez of the Center for Traditional […]
10
Nov
Nov
Linda Ligon and I have been traipsing about Cusco, Peru the last several days, participating in Tinkuy 2017 Gathering of the Textile Arts. Sponsored by the Center for Traditional Textiles of Cusco and Andean Textile Arts, Tinkuy celebrates weaving traditions from around the world. Spinners, dyers, weavers, and artisans from Laos to Afghanistan and places […]
04
Aug
Aug
This week we are thrilled to welcome Keith Recker, founder and editor of HAND/EYE magazine and international trend and color forecaster, as our special guest author. Keith shares his thoughts about our new book Secrets of Spinning, Weaving, and Knitting in the Peruvian Highlands. Enjoy his wonderful perspective. Thank you, Keith! Textiles–A Way of Life […]
04
Nov
Nov
It was pretty blue at the Textile Society of America Symposium a couple of weeks ago, indigo blue. There was the indigo dye workshop on Ossabaw Island and a tour of its indigo history, an indigo art exhibition, and Catharine Ellis and Rowland Ricketts each chaired different sessions called “Indigo and Beyond” offering seven different presentations related to […]
23
Sep
Sep
Today, I am traveling with a dear friend to peer inside the original 1623 book that gave us The Tempest (one of my favs), Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and all the bard’s best. Well, in fact, all the bard. The book, Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, is the first complete collection of his plays. […]
16
Sep
Sep
I’ve been reading a terrific book called I Contain Multitudes about microbes and their pervasive role in all of creation, not to mention my own gut. So a recent story in the New York Times immediately caught my eye: “Could Ancient Remedies Hold the Answer to the Looming Antibiotic Crisis?” As I dug into the story, […]
04
Mar
Mar
I get the best email. Dear Linda, Here’s a question that has been wandering around in the back of my mind ever since I went to Peru a couple of years ago. I’m a weaver, knitter, and sewist, so I love this stuff. In the Sacred Valley, we saw Nilda Callanaupa and her merry band […]
26
Feb
Feb
Recently, my son Ian and I were skiing at one of our favorite spots in the Rockies. Ian wore his chullo that I’d brought him from Peru a couple of months ago. I’ve been skiing in mine for years, and now my kid gets to be one of the coolest dressers on the slopes, too. Chullos […]
15
Jan
Jan
Accha Alta A little more than ten years ago, I was visiting the breathtakingly high, beautiful Andean village of Accha Alta. This very traditional small community was still farming potatoes the old way, tilling near-vertical land with handheld hoes. They were still weaving sacks (costales) of handspun llama wool on backstrap looms to take those […]
01
Jan
Jan
Since Linda and I returned from Peru a couple of weeks ago, where we were hard at work on a future Thrums book, Peru has occupied much of my brain space. Visions of sugar plums and all that fun holiday stuff were nudged aside by images of Andean peaks and Inca ruins and textile–ancient and […]
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