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Uninvited Guests in Handspun Yarn
Traveling companion and handspinner Pat Wagner Thompson with her stash of handspuns. While you’re reading this, my friends and I are traveling through coastal Oaxaca, Mexico. We’ve come to see the...
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Meet the Makers of the Traditional Oaxacan Hand Spindle
Antonio and Maria, Oaxacan hand spindle makers. Last month, ClothRoads traveled the Oaxacan coast of Mexico on an off-the-beaten-path fiber tour with Eric Mindling of Traditions Mexico. We did indeed...
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The Color Purple–Purpura Shell Dyeing in Oaxaca
Gone are the days when hundreds of Mixtec men scrambled over the rocky Oaxacan shoreline north of Huatulco to extract the milky liquid from the purpura patula, a marine mollusk. But thankfully to the...
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The People of the Loom, an Amuzgo Village in Guerrero, Mexico
Talk about a long-awaited day—we were about to see the finest backstrap-loom-woven brocade textiles produced in Mexico. We were also nearing the end of our fiber tour of coastal Oaxaca, traveling a tad...
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Textile Travel Wanderlust
Today’s mail arrived including a handful of travel catalogues. I do a quick flip through the pages to see if any of them include distant journeys with a remote chance of meeting textile artisans. I...
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Creating Connected Textile Communities
World cultures gathered in Santa Fe last week to celebrate artisans and their amazing range of handcrafted products at the International Folk Art Festival. This cross cultural collaboration brought...
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ClothRoads Wish List — New Textile Books of 2016
Textile people are book people. It’s inevitable–just as we collect textiles, we collect books. We have to own these books, for in their reading we dream of travel taken or places yet to come; we dream...
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Textile Vortex of Oaxaca—Next Stop for Weave a Real Peace
It seems that the textile vortex has settled on Oaxaca, Mexico. For it is here that the indigenous weavers and natural dyers still create extraordinary textiles based on ancestral traditions and...
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The Road to Secrets
Three years ago this fall I was in Oaxaca, getting ready to do a field trip with Eric Mindling for his book, Oaxaca Stories in Cloth. During the few days before we were scheduled to hit the road for...
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