Tag: crafting

My favorite podcasts

I love podcasts.

It’s like making my own radio station but with shows that only I like.

Some news in German (Deutsche Welle), French (RFI), and Spanish (Caracol) and lots of crafting and historic crafting podcasts.

Below are some of my favorite crafting and historic crafting podcasts

FiberTalk

By Gary Parr and special guests. Twice weekly (usually) on Wednesdays and interviews with embroidery artists on Sunday. There are live stitching sessions on YouTube every now and then.

The Embroidery Podcast (@theembroiderypodcast)

By Masako Newton and Marg Dier. Versions in English and Japanese. These RSN (Royal School of Needlework) graduates talk about different embroidery topics.

Sew What?

By Isabella Rosner, textile historian. Explores all types of needlecraft (embroidery, knitting, weaving, etc.)

It is well researched with lots of references.

Salón de Moda

By Laura Beltrán-Rubio, Sandra Mathey García-Rada, etc. These dress historians from the Parsons School of Design talk about fashion from a social science perspective centered in Latin America. In Spanish.

Haptic & Hue

By Jo Andrews. Very interesting epidoses about artisans creating textiles. From Maison Sajou to the British farmers turning previously wasted wool into boutique products, very good.

Fiber Nation

By Interweave. Episodes about fiber types such as the origins of Spandex, the people trying to save the Manx sheep, etc.

El podcast de Duduá

By Duduá. Duduá is a crafting store in Barcelona, Spain. The epidoses interview different artists that Duduá works with. In Spanish.

Dressed: The History of Fashion

By April Calahan and Cassidy Zachary. Fashion historians talk about interesting eras in fashion history by interviewing other fashion historians. Very informative.

Crast Industry Alliance

By Abby Glassenberg. Interviews with crafting business owners.

Advertisement

Re-discovering Embroidery

I embroidered this thimble in broderie anglaise. Design by Zinaida Kazban

Why Embroidery?

A couple of years ago, my cousin mentioned to me that she was re-learning to knit.

The idea of taking up a crafting hobby sounded good to me, I was looking to unplug from my phone and my computer, and keep my hands busy, so I decided to give embroidery another try.

Having attended a school run by nuns in Colombia during my childhood, we had a manual arts class (along with algebra, history, geography and computer science) where we had to learn to embroider.

When I was a child, I hated embroidery. I loved computer coding, it was what I wanted to do. But now, 30 years later after a career in IT, I was going back to embroidery to get a break from technology.

Apparently I am not the only one. Doing a search on crafting, knitting, or embroidery, yields many posts. People are showing off their projects on Instagram and Pinterest. They are teaching others how to knit, crochet, weave, and of course, to embroider.

I rejected the fiber arts when I was a child because I wanted to dedicate myself to technology, which promised progress and riches. But now that I am older, I am reconnecting with the crafts of my youth, which promise calm and a connection to the past.

In the olden days, the fiber arts were one of the few spaces where women could express themselves, and that was the reason I rejected them when I was young; I saw embroidery as repressive.

But now I can see that the fiber arts are not repressive. The times when women were ONLY allowed to sew, embroider, weave, knit, and spin were repressive. Those women created beautiful art, developed mastery, and built a sense of identity.

Despite having today more career opportunities than my grandmothers did in their days, I am revisiting their art to enjoy what they enjoyed and connect with them.

%d bloggers like this: