The Long Thread Podcast

Like many spinners, Charan Sachar discovered fiber crafts without realizing that they would transform his life. While studying for a masters degree in computer science, he began working with clay, ma…

When colonists first left Spain for what became Mexico and the American Southwest in 1598, they came with the continent’s first wool sheep. These weren’t the famed finewool Spanish Merinos—export of …

As a knitter in a new place, Irene Waggener looks for knitting as she explores. Not all of the countries where she finds herself have robust yarn-shop networks and textile tourism, so sometimes she n…

In 1974, two young industrial designers in the Netherlands started a company making spinning wheels. Beginning in a family member’s chicken coop, they built a modern wheel featuring an upright castle…

The Nettle Dress is available to stream online from November 15–December 2, 2024.

Most of us avoid nettles, thinking of them as weeds whose little stinging hairs can inject a painful toxin into the …

Melvenea Hodges nurtures a small crop of cotton in her back yard in South Bend, Indiana. Besides beautiful foliage and some of her favorite fiber to spin, she tends her plants to celebrate what she c…

Exploring the textile traditions of her Scandinavian ancestors, supporting Indigenous Andean weavers in preserving their traditions, or producing material for contemporary fiber artists, Anita finds …

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…

Nanne Kennedy has her feet firmly planted in the soil of midcoast Maine. Growing up on a farm near the ocean, she could smell the salt air and small local factories, and she started saving in her “fu…

When Knit Picks was founded by husband and wife team Kelly and Bob Petkun in 2002, the company began with a mail-order catalog and soon added online purchasing. Buying yarn online seemed both strange…

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 intrigue…

Embrace the potential of your phone’s camera, choose indirect lighting (not a flash) to show texture, and get your knits off the ground—these are just a few pieces of Gale Zucker’s advice for how to …

Have you ever opened a book or seen a photograph and thought to yourself, “I have to learn to do that”?

When Emily Lymm first fell in love with knitting, she wondered casually if she could turn her…

Tommye McClure Scanlin had a choice. To make the images she wanted to create with weaving, she could either pursue complex forms of weaving that rely on dobby, jacquard, and draw-loom technology—or s…

Indigo is a unique dyestuff, no less so for being found in so many different plants. Coaxing the blue hue out of green leaves and onto yarn or cloth requires a combination of chemistry and skill that…

Andrew Wells is the third generation of the iconic American yarn manufacturer Brown Sheep Company. Living near the family business outside Scotts Bluff, Nebraska, he grew up giving tours and sweeping…

Working together in a Philadelphia yarn store, Kate Gagnon Osborn and Courtney Kelley learned how to help customers choose the right yarn for a project, welcome in timid new knitters, and create samp…

If you knit, spin, sew, weave, or follow any crafty pursuit, you will not be surprised that many of our most common metaphors come from textiles. They are interwoven in our vocabulary, and whether yo…

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…

A career professional at Levi Strauss & Company, Eileen Lee learned about dyeing, weaving, and sewing on an international scale: giant factories full of loud looms weaving 2/2 twill, pattern pieces c…