Maggie Casey and Judy Steinkoenig are well known as teachers and writers. Almost every day for 28 years, you would have found one or both of them behind the counter or helping customers at their store, Shuttles, Spindles & Skeins in Boulder, Colorado. The retail store closed in early 2020, and as they plan their next projects, they sat down to tell us about the behind-the-scenes truths of owning a yarn store. Is it as delightful or as difficult as people might imagine? What’s the strangest request they ever got? What was the hardest decision they ever faced together? We got the inside scoop.

When you picture weaving, does the image of a big floor loom come to mind, or a heddle that holds the threads in place? How about a stack of perforated cardboard squares? Author, instructor, weaver, and spinner John Mullarkey came across the ancient craft of tablet weaving (also known as card weaving) and fell in love with the possibilities of the technique.

Visiting museums and archaeological sites in the American Southwest, Louie García finds inspiration to revive the fiber techniques of the past. But where others might see ruins, Louie sees connections to the Pueblo heritage that is part of his daily life.

It's easy to fall under the spell of Norman Kennedy as he shares stories of the old ways of spinning and weaving, which he learned from some of the last practitioners of their crafts. Growing up in Scotland, Norman was fascinated by the stories that the older spinners and weavers told—and even as they thought he was crazy to want to learn, they gladly explained what they knew: how to make durable cloth efficiently as part of a life of hard work.

While he picked up textile knowledge, Norman also picked up songs in many languages. Spinners and weavers may claim him as our own, but Norman's first visit to the United States came in 1965, when he sang at the Newport Folk Festival (the same year that Bob Dylan scandalized the crowd by plugging in an electric guitar). Returning to the United States the next year, he continued to sing while eventually serving as Master Weaver at Colonial Williamsburg. In the 1970s, he moved to northern Vermont and founded the Marshfield School of Weaving. The school continues to teach traditional spinning and weaving techniques and houses the largest collection of working 18th and 19th century looms in the United States.

Norman has taught classes, given concerts, and led waulkings around the world. In 2003, he was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship, which is the United States' highest honor for folk and traditional arts.

As an author, color expert, and publisher, Keith Recker's path returns over and over to handmade textiles. From the colors of turmeric and indigo to the resurgence of ethnic color in a former Soviet republic, he shares some of the amazing places his love for color has taken him.

Recovering from a health crisis, Charllotte Kwon needed to find a new career as well as an outlet for her love of color. She fell in love with the designs, hues, and pace of India, and she founded Maiwa to partner with textile artisans. Beginning with embroidery and printing, she cultivated relationships with families working in longstanding craft traditions, then worked to develop markets to create a livelihood for villagers who work with natural color. Maiwa's latest project is a new website that includes an exhaustive list of dyestuffs and how to use them (including 8 different methods for dyeing with indigo). In this episode, she reflects on how the scope of her project has changed over the decades—and what she hopes uncertain times will bring.

The first issue of Handwoven, which appeared in 1979, included an article by Debbie Redding, "Your Weaving Teacher." Your Weaving Teacher became a regular column full of practical advice until Deborah Chandler (as she was then known) left her writing and teaching pursuits to enter the Peace Corps. She found her way back to weaving, of course. In this conversation with Linda Ligon, she shares her best advice for any weaver—the tips and tricks that make weaving more accessible and enjoyable.

A self-described "spinner who weaves," Sara Lamb works in a wide variety of media: leather, embroidery, dyeing, and knotted cut pile, to name just a few. You might see her in one of her signature Japanese-style jackets, which she makes entirely from scratch, spinning white silk for a year or two before dyeing, weaving, and sewing the fabric into a simple shape. The slow yet intense process takes a year or more—and she has a closet full of them. Sara's willingness to make mistakes (and see them through) has led to a rich library of samples and series of projects.

Sara is the author of Spin to Weave, Practical Spinner's Guide: Silk, and Woven Treasures. She's also the instructor of the workshops Spin to Weave and Spinning Silk.

American-born weaver Deborah Chandler is the author of the bestselling Learning to Weave, an essential book for generations of beginning artisans. She has lived in Guatemala for 20 years, working with Maya weavers and helping them find markets for their work. In this episode, she addresses the complex issue of cultural appropriation as it affects the indigenous weavers she knows: What is a fair price for handmade work? Who should have control over ethnic designs and motifs? How do we determine what's a fair arrangement—and who gets to decide? Deborah and Linda discuss the intersection of ethnic craftsmanship, upscale marketing, and Western consumers.

Deborah Chandler is the creator and director of Weaving Futures, where she has had the pleasure and honor of working with many Maya weavers. She leads cultural tours to communities in the Guatemalan Highlands, with a focus on indigenous artisans and their work. She is the author of two books about Guatemalan textiles, Traditional Weavers of Guatemala and A Textile Traveler’s Guide to Guatemala (both published by Thrums Books). She lives in Guatemala City.

Sarah Wroot brings a reverence to her work with cloth, whether it's spinning, weaving, or stitching. This issue explores her passion for making and preserving textiles. Cloth can derive value from the care that went into its making, the emotional resonance of using it, its connection to the past, or its physical and symbolic protection.

Sarah developed and stitched a hat inspired by a brightly colored hat from Uzbekistan. She spun the yarn for weaving the cloth and embroidering the motifs on it. She describes the process in "Uzbekistan by Hat," Spin Off Summer 2014.

After seeing a historic textile collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Sarah embarked on a quest to recreate an 18th-century fabric called cassemire. You can find her articles about spinning for the fabric and finishing the woven cloth on the Spin Off website.

You can find more details about these explorations and her other pursuits at her website, wroot.com.