Hello!
My interest in fiber crafts began when I was around seven years old. I watched my aunt sew curtains and I asked if she would teach me how to use a sewing machine. She took me to our local fabric store and I remember reveling in all the patterns, colors, textures, buttons, and tools. We picked out a few fabrics and she showed me how to make stuffed animals and a quilted pillow case. Creating these pieces and gifting them to my family ignited something within me that burns bright to this day. I’m incredibly thankful that my curiosity in sewing was fostered by my aunt and the nice women working at the fabric store... I felt connected to something special, thoughtful, and old. These textile crafts have been a part of my life ever since.
I have always enjoyed learning about archeology, mainly Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Age ways of living, and for this reason stinging nettle has been a huge inspiration to my craft and the centerpiece of my weaving project. Nettle, urtica dioica, is a plant that has been used to make textiles for thousands of years. The oldest recovered nettle fabric dates back almost 3,000 years ago to a Bronze Age burial mound in Denmark. I have also read that archeologists can spot the location of ancient settlements by the presence of stinging nettle. This is because nettle has been cultivated by humans for ages not only for being an excellent textile but also for medicinal purposes.
Nettle Knots is my medicine, my push-back against a modern culture that has stripped us of our heritage crafts and replaced them with exploitative industries. This weaving practice is joyous reclamation of ancestral knowledge, and an homage to a time when all of our textiles were made by hand from plants, animals, and metals.
Weaving is one of the oldest crafts in human history, dating back at least 12,000 years to the Neolithic period. The process of interlacing twigs, reeds, stems, and fibers was developed to create shelters, fishing nets, baskets, paper, and clothing. For thousands of years weaving was a widespread skill throughout communities and became not only a tool for survival, but a complex artistry. Today most textiles are created by machines, but still the basic design of the loom has gone almost unchanged for thousands of years.
On a loom, every thread is touched and brought by hand through the eye of its own individual heddle. These formations, in conjunction with pressing certain treadles, create intricate patterns within the textile. It’s hard to describe the excitement that comes when you start sending your shuttle (weft) across the loom, and a gorgeous geometric pattern breaks through the surface of the warp. As the warp and weft threads interconnect, their colors and textures blend, and this blending can create the emergence of completely new colors. When I’m holding or working with a woven textile, I love to relax my gaze and watch these amazing patterns surface.
Textiles are not only fun from a visual standpoint, they are also a hugely textural and tactile experience. Now I was definitely one of those kids who sat outside in the dirt and grass and loved touching everything… making mud soup, picking berries and squishing them, holding crispy cicada shells, tracing the rough bark along the knots and burls of tree roots…. maybe you were one of these kids too. All this to say, when you have a textile made with natural fibers, I think it’s incredibly enjoyable to just feel it! Hold it in your hands, rub the fibers together… nettle is rough, archaic feeling, and durable… tussar silk (from silkworms) is papery but also incredibly smooth, bouncy, and soft…. wool is a scratchy fire retardant, it’s strong, and warm… alpaca is buttery, fluffy, dreamy and soft like a cloud… and etc. A textile can ignite many enjoyable sensory experiences at once.
I invite you now to explore and enjoy the ancient art of weaving, to cultivate an reverence for the land and animals our fibers and dyes come from, and to appreciate the slow and meticulous process that goes into making each piece.
Thanks for your support!
