When you imagine goldwork embroidery, do you picture something flashy, glinting, and formal? You might be surprised to discover that goldwork or metalwork embroidery can be subtle and colorful. As Natalie Dupuis practices it, goldwork embroidery is as much about covering the gold or silver thread with silk couching stitches as placing the precious metal front and center.

With centuries-old traditions across Europe and Asia, goldwork embroidery thrived in guilds and workshops, where it turned heads in ecclesiastical and royal commissions. Using traditional materials, Natalie designs modern needlework for contemporary fiber artists—and teaches embroidery artists around the globe.

This episode is sponsored by Treenway Silks.

Working in the studio of a Japanese dollmaker, seventeen-year-old John Marshall learned skills for every step of the process from making glass eyes to shaping the body to creating intricately designed clothing. He developed a love for natural dyes on natural fibers, especially katazome (a paste-resist technique using stencils), as he studied dyeing and garment design for five years. Over five decades, his work in Japanese fiber techniques has followed two paths: creating traditionally inspired art-to-wear and sharing what he has learned through extensive writing and teaching.

In our lively and wide-ranging discussion, John shares stories of how lac insects are "herded" in the Himalayas, what a suit made from bagworm silk feels like, and what he plans to do with his collection of the Emperor's old clothing.

This episode is sponsored by Treenway Silks.

You may think of silk as just slick and shiny. (There's a reason we say "as smooth as silk.") But as she chased the thread of silk across Asia and through villages of Assam, Karen Selk discovered that it can be much more: It can be gold, copper, cream, and white. It can be slick or toothy, hardy or delicate. Most of all, it can be a delight for fiber artists and a way of life for men and women whose livelihood depends on worms, cocoons, and moths.

Besides what most people imagine what they think of silk, Bombyx mori, and even the less-common honey-colored tussah silk, there are a number of special silks available to today's fiber artists. They include different species, such as the shimmering gold of muga or the red or cream of eri. There are preparations from intact cocoons to pierced cocoons to mawata, top, and bricks, plus "waste" such as carrier rods, pulled sari silk, and the chocolate-colored peduncle stems of some tasar cocoons. Even within a single country—India—the variety of silk is rich enough to keep a fiber artist happily occupied.

Karen and her husband Terry founded Treenway Silks in 1977 and spend the next decades importing silk yarns from China, discovering unusual forms of silk in India, dyeing a huge palette of colors, and supplying material to weavers, spinners, stitchers, and other fiber artists. Since selling the business, she has continued teaching and writing; her book about wild silks is due out in Fall 2022.

This episode of The Long Thread Podcast is sponsored by Treenway Silks.

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, Eileen saw major shifts in the market for the company's signature product, as their target customer began to look elsewhere and their manufacturing shifted overseas.

A century ago, Eileen's grandmother saw a tradition on the cusp of changing, even disappearing. Hawaiian quilting grew from the basic stitches taught by Christian missionaries into a distinct cultural tradition, with large appliqué motifs and echo quilting lines. But the quilters who made these quilts didn't share them outside their families; some quilts were burned to keep their designs a secret. Hannah Ku´umililani Cummings Baker threw open her cache of quilt designs and taught the skill to anyone who cared to learn, creating both a wider market and a fresh generation of quilters. One of her students was her granddaughter Eileen, who wrote about her grandmother in PieceWork Summer 2021.

From her grandmother's tutelage to a career in mass-market textiles to her current studio and teaching practice, Eileen Lee's story is woven and stitched together.

Part of the Royal School of Needlework's collection is in tatters . . . by design.

The collection includes some fine examples of stitching techniques, but what makes the archive more interesting are the pieces where fraying has revealed something about the stitching of a particular piece. All of the pieces support the school's mission: to preserve traditional needlework techniques and educate students around the world in stitching well.

Whether to future needlework tutors, undergraduates, or stitchers around the world, the RSN teaches foundations in needlework that emphasize skilled craftsmanship as well as self-expression.

As Chief Executive of the Royal School of Needlework, Dr. Susan Kay-Williams oversees an institution that teaches hobbyist needleworkers around the world, offers a BA degree in needlework, creates textiles for royal occasions, and above all works to preserve the techniques of stitching for future generations.

One of the school's major initiatives has been the RSN Stitch Bank, a free online database that records embroidery stitches from around the world. To prevent needlework stitches from being lost over time, the stitch bank provides written instructions, videos, photos, and illustrations for 150 stitches and counting.

As Dr. Kay-Williams remarks, the RSN may be a small organization, but it does not have small ambitions.

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Whether it's growing and processing fiber or embroidering with handspun, hand-dyed linen thread, Cassie has always looked at traditional textiles and said, "I have to learn to do that." She's learned to split cane and weave baskets in the Cherokee style, ret flax in dew, and weave an overshot coverlet in two weeks. Having learned the old skills, she gladly teaches anyone who wants to know, just as fiber "grandmothers" did for her.

The preservation of old textile skills runs deep in the Southeast and Appalachian communities where coverlets and silk-raising and natural dyeing took root. Cassie follows in the footsteps of Craft Revival movement, which led to the founding of folk and craft schools in the Southeast, and the Deerfield Society of Blue and White Needlework, which revived interest in colonial needlework of New England.

Cassie Dickson is leading her part of a textile craft revival—and we're invited to join in.

The Vesterheim has 80 spinning wheels. Laurann Gilbertson says that they didn't really mean to have so many, but it seems that every woman who emigrated from Norway in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century came prepared to make the cloth she needed to run her household: the wool and linen krokbragd coverlets, linens for wearing and bedding, carefully embellished folk costume, and all the other textiles that a woman in a new country and generations after her would need to live comfortably. In time, she might switch to commercial cotton thread for her hardanger embroidery or stop spinning her own sheep's wool, but producing cloth was an important part of life, so it's best to be prepared. The spinning wheels are treasures (but the museum probably won't accept any more).

The museum also has rugs, coverlets, hand coverings, folk garments, knitwear (of course!), tapestries, and other Norwegian and Norwegian-American items from a Viking sword to Rosemaling chests to photographs and furnishings. Laurann shares the joys of working with, learning about, and caring for a museum's collections. as well as some of the difficult decisions that curators face. She offers expert advice on how to make the most of a museum—and how to make the most of your own family's treasures, museum-worthy or not. Vesterheim is one of many museums centered on a specific cultural or historic focus, but the elements of running a museum are shared across the field: collecting and preserving according to a policy, assisting in research for scholars, making the collection available to the public, and promoting education about the museum's area of interest.

Vesterheim Museum is located in Decorah, Iowa.

Deborah Robson is known to, even revered by, a generation of handspinners as the author of The Fleece and Fiber Sourcebook with Carol Ekarius. She has a distinguished track record as an editor—Shuttle, Spindle & Dyepot, Spin Off magazine, and books including the massive Alden Amos Big Book of Handspinning. Deborah has devoted herself to learning and teaching about the heritage of rare-breed sheep and has worked with the Livestock Conservancy’s Shave ‘Em to Save ‘Em. Her video Handspinning Rare Wools is available from Long Thread Media.

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.