Morning sermon from 13th October 2024. Preacher John Hall

Morning sermon from 6th October 2024. Preacher Simon Smith

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 picture an array of bobbins leashed to a cluster of pins and arrayed on a pillow, or a tatting shuttle, or a steel crochet hook. All of these images w…

Morning sermon from 29th September 2024. Preacher Ruth Bancewicz

Morning sermon from 22nd September 2024. Preacher Greg Downes

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 “future farm fund” when she was 12. Eminently practical, she looked for ways that her farm could make her a living. “I'm a New England Yankee, and self re…

Morning sermon from 15th September 2024. Preacher Jonathan Aldersley

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 and inevitable: knitters began choosing yarns that they could only see onscreen, in the early days of functional search engines, at a time when many p…

Morning sermon from 8th September 2024. Preacher Chris Goswami

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 intrigued. A local exhibit of Diné textiles enthralled her, and she set about learning to weave in the Navajo style. Returning to Patagonia, where she had been…

Morning sermon from 1st September 2024. Preacher George Green

Morning sermon from 25th August 2024. Preacher Simon Smith

Morning sermon from 18th August 2024. Preacher Stuart McPhail

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 take knitting photos you love. Whether she’s shooting in a studio or a barnyard, Gale uses her camera to bring her subjects to life. Gale grew up in a …

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 passion for fiber arts into a profession. Not seeing many successful pathways to a career in knitting, she continued as a graphic designer. She loved th…

Morning sermon from 4th August 2024. Preacher Chris Goswami

Morning sermon from 28th July 2024. Preacher Simon Smith

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 she could go the other way and place every color and pick by hand using tapestry techniques and a very simple loom. Preferring a drawing pencil to a cal…

Morning sermon from 21st July 2024. Preacher Carol Best

Morning sermon from 13th July 2024. Preacher Phil Jump

Morning sermon from 14th July 2024. Preacher Chris Goswami

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 has arisen across the globe. Rowland and Chinami Ricketts each found their own way to indigo in Tokushima, Japan: Rowland was looking for a sustainabl…

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 the floors when his parents, Peggy and Robert Wells, ran the business. His grandfather, Harlan Brown, had been a sheep and lamb farmer before deciding…

Morning sermon from 30th June 2024. Preacher Ken Livingstone

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 samples to help move yarn out the door. They learned what didn’t work (donut-shaped balls of yarn that hopped off the shelves and tangled, patterns that us…

Morning sermon from 23rd June 2024. Preacher Chris Goswami

Morning sermon from 16th June 2024. Preacher John Hall

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 you like to spin a yarn from words or fibers, you will recognize many of them. But then there are the words whose textile roots are less obvious: Rocket.…

Morning sermon from 9th June 2024. Preacher Simon Smith

Morning sermon from 2nd June 2024. Preacher Matt Pierce

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 has at least one of: a work in progress. Jen and Masey had each finished projects for bereaved family members before, but neither of them could take o…

Morning sermon from 26th May 2024. Preacher Simon Smith

Morning sermon from 19th May 2024. Preacher Carol Best

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 cut out of four-foot-high stacks of cloth, and no possibility of adding a tuck here or a dart there without retooling. During her years in the industry,…

Morning sermon from 12th May 2024. Preacher Chris Goswami

Morning sermon from 5th May 2024. Preacher Chris Goswami

Lilly Marsh creates blankets, shawls, and other cloth, almost exclusively from local wool. Working closely with farmers and the nearby Battenkill Fiber Mill, she gets to know not only her neighbors but the fibers they grow: the surprisingly lovely wool from East Friesian sheep raised to produce milk, the springy Dorset crosses that are popular in t…

Morning sermon from 28th April 2024. Preacher Neal Stanton

Morning sermon from 21st April 2024. Preacher Sam Rotchell

The call of complexity draws some weavers to more shafts, more structures, more hand-manipulated techniques. For Annie MacHale, refining the techniques and celebrating the artistry of very simple bands has been a lifelong fascination. Starting when she first picked up a shuttle and inkle loom in her teens, Annie has worked in wool, cotton, and hemp…

Morning sermon from 14th April 2024. Preacher Mark Elder, Tarporley Chapel

Morning sermon from 7th April 2024. Preacher Jane Henderson, Regional Minister NWBA

“Rule number one: Never drink the dye bath.” Indigo and cochineal may be the most widely recognized natural dyes for many fiber artists, and there’s little temptation of sampling an indigo vat or pot of ground insects. But a simmering kettle of dye mushrooms or lichens? That might smell delicious, but if you’re in a class with Alissa Allen, it’s no…

Morning sermon from 31st March 2024. Preacher Chris Goswami

Morning sermon from 29th March 2024. Preachers Kenny Best & Alison Johnston

Morning sermon from 24th March 2024. Preacher Simon Smith

In a period when agriculture moved toward chemicals, genetic engineering, and monoculture, Sally Fox decided to explore what could happen if she collaborated with nature instead of fighting it. With an academic background in entomology, she studied ways to minimize the amount of pesticides needed to grow crops, and the more she saw the effects of t…

Morning sermon from 17th March 2024. Preacher John Hall

When Susan Bateman first opened Yarn Barn of Kansas in 1971, a woman starting a small business couldn’t get a credit card in her own name. Weavers like her had a hard time finding yarns, tools, and other supplies, some of which were only available from overseas, and she thought there must be an opportunity to bring fiber artists more of what they n…

Morning sermon from 10th March 2024. Preacher Scott McPhail