When she married her husband, "polyester kid" Anita Luvera Mayer received an extraordinary wedding gift from her mother-in-law: a loom and weaving lessons. A weaving store owner, Marcelle Mayer gave the same gift to each of her daughters-in-law. The others didn't take to it, but for Anita it was the beginning of a whole new life. Although she preferred making simple cloth to complex patterns, weaving opened the doors to meeting other fiber artists, teaching across North America, and learning to make her own clothes, beginning with a "pukey green dress" that she wore for years and kept as a teaching tool. Exploring new techniques and refining her approach, she championed the revolutionary idea that women—all women—should like what they see when they look in the mirror. Anita Luvera Mayer is an inspiration . . . and a delight.

Kenya Miles balances farming, teaching, community-building, and her own artwork. Besides cultivating madder, indigo, and other botanical colors, she grows awareness of natural dyes, serving as an artist-in-residence at Maryland Institute College of Art and teaching workshops to aspiring dyers and farmers alike. Despite full days farming and teaching, she launched the ambitious Blue Light Junction in 2020 as a natural dye studio, alternative color lab, retail space, dye garden, and educational facility in central Baltimore.

She has a deep love of indigo (both the color and her son, who shares the name), but she also finds peace in growing naturally colored cotton and connection in the tannin/iron chemistry often known as mud dyeing. In this episode, she talks about her growing roots in Baltimore and her love of exploring the world.

This episode is sponsored by WEBS - America's Yarn Store.

Nilda Callañaupa Alvarez first organized an informal project in the 1970s with weaver friends in Chinchero, an Andean village near Cusco, Peru. As the traditional skills and distinctive styles of indigenous weavers declined in her village and others like it, the project grew into the Center for Traditional Textiles of Cusco. CTTC organizes groups of elder, adult, and young weavers to develop and pass on their skills; the organization also has a marketplace of handmade products on their website and on the Avenida del Sol in Cusco.

Nilda spoke with us from her home in Cusco, Peru. In the middle of their second winter of the pandemic in the Southern Hemisphere, we talked about what COVID has meant for weavers there and how textile lovers can still have a relationship with weaving communities.

This episode is sponsored by WEBS - America's Yarn Store.

Amy D. McKnight weaves not only doubleweave but point twill on a rigid-heddle loom, prefers a hybrid method of direct and indirect warping for long but efficient warps, and uses weaving software (usually a tool for 4+ shaft weaving) to plan her projects.

It's not just pushing a simple loom to do more complex weaving, it's also bringing a love of weaving to completely new audiences. She created a plan for the Common Threads Loom, a versatile pin loom/potholder loom/diagonal-weaving loom that anyone can make with simple office supplies, and she offers it as a free download on her site. Having created a rich weaving course that she offered for subscribers, she decided that keeping the information behind a paywall wasn't for her—and recently posted it to watch freely at YouTube.

Amy D. McKnight calls herself a motivational, inspirational weaver, and you will, too.

Mathew Gnagy has started to bring 16th-century to the streets. Wearing a hand-stitched, exquisitely tailored suit, whether inspired or patterned directly from historical sources, brings him not only the pride of a skilled maker and the comfort of perfectly fitting clothes but also a feeling of being "ten feet tall"—the satisfaction of looking terrific.

Learning to knit, sew, spin, and practice a variety of crafts as a child, and growing up in a family of artists and artisans, he is enthusiastic about mastering the techniques that have developed and been lost through the centuries. With his website, the Modern Maker Schoolhouse, and series of books, Mathew shares his methods for creating 16th- and 17th-century clothing, including handsewing, ironwork, embroidery, needle lace, and weaving trim.

In addition to historical clothing, Mathew is an accomplished knitwear designer; his contemporary knitting book, Knitting Off the Axis, presented garments with decidedly nontraditional construction methods. In his professional life, Mathew works in costume design for television, film, and theater, using his needlework skills to convey a characher at a glance.

**This episode is sponsored by WEBS - America's Yarn Store, **your source for everything you need for your next weaving project. WEBS carries a wide selection of yarns, looms, tools, and accessories. And, you can save up to 25% every day with the WEBS Discount! Visit yarn.com for more info.

Susan Druding was a graduate student at the University of California-Berkeley when she first learned to spin and weave. In the Bay Area of the 1960s, fiber interest and social tensions both ran high.

Without a business plan but with a lease on a small storefront, Susan and a business partner opened Straw Into Gold, a store devoted mostly to spinning and dyeing. Spinning legend Bette Hochberg, author of Handspinner's Handbook and Spin Span Spun, was a regular, and legendary spinning wheel maker Alden Amos set up shop in the basement. Award-winning spinner Celia Quinn ran the old carding machine that they used to create rainbow batts. They became the first United States distributor of Ashford spinning wheels and equipment.

Whether as a shop owner or storyteller, Susan Druding has yarns like nobody else.

In addition to Viking and Anglo-Saxon reenactment, which drew Penelope Hemingway to learn handspinning and other textile crafts, she enjoys uncovering what household items, clothing, and other items of daily life can reveal about the people who used them.

Exploring these items, known as "material culture," has led her in the footsteps of needleworkers from centuries ago, from the knitting needles used by the Brontë sisters to some of the last commercially handknitted gloves from the Yorkshire Dales.

People used to ask Heavenly Bresser why she had 11 spinning wheels. Not any more. (For one thing, she now has 29—and counting—wheels.) Each one has earned its place based on historical significance, adaptation for a particular technique, or scarcity. But don't imagine that she has an expensive hoard gathering dust. Heavenly turns down as many wheels as she acquires, finds them at excellent prices, and restores them to working order. Along the way she's learned her way around textile history, wheel mechanics, and power tools.

Teacher and artist Deb Menz made herself comfortable in a subject that many fiber artists shy away from. Students arrive in her classes with dispiriting stories of choosing colors that are ugly or blah, and classes on color theory may not have made them any more comfortable. But by balancing basic understanding of color concepts with permission to play, she helps her students learn that just looking and appreciating can unlock their creativity.

Rebecca Mezoff became a tapestry weaver as an adult after a career in occupational therapy, finding that it suited her artistically and let her use other skills she loved, such as teaching, dyeing, and spinning. She weaves very large pieces in her studio and very small pieces in outdoor spaces that she explores with a small handheld loom. Her popular online classes teach skills from beginning tapestry to design.