Handspun Photo Gallery

I've been a textile person my entire life. I come from a textile-oriented family, grew up in a textile-oriented world, and have been spinning, weaving, crocheting, knitting, and more, since I was very small.

When I was very little in Massachusetts, my father had already been bitten by the textile bug, drawn to it initially while he was laid up from knee surgery and my maternal grandmother got him started weaving. Somehow or another I guess the interest bloomed for him, and by the time I could walk I remember following my father anywhere I could get away with, which included his weaving studio. And my mother, of course, being unbelievably accomplished, was constantly making things by hand, all sorts of things! Living as we did then, on a farm during peak hippie years, there were many things done by hand. Being a little kid, I didn't do much -- just finger-knitting, playing with an inkle loom, learning to do simple braids, and that sort of thing.

My parents were also both anthropologists specializing in Peruvian culture. My father told me in later years that as he became increasingly interested in textiles, he started reading up on stuff from Peru, and found that there was a wealth of Peruvian textiles around, and a few books about them, but although he remembered seeing people there weaving while he and my mother did undergraduate fieldwork, there had not been really anything in the way of direct study of existing weaving. By the time I was five years old, circumstances conspired to lead us to the Peruvian weaving town of Chinchero, near Cusco.