In a time when the average screen time in the U.S. is nearly one-third of the day, a growing number of people are expanding hands-on skills in some of the oldest art forms.
Fiber arts have seen an uptick in recent years. Historic guilds, newer clubs and local libraries are bringing people together, turning what can be a solitary activity into a group project where people can connect, learn new skills and brainstorm ideas.
“It grows every year, more and more and more and more,” says Jaki Canterbury, owner of Slowfiber, a textile supply shop in Monterey that offers workshops and a space where local crafters build community.
Canterbury says that through Upcycle Camp, an annual four-day sewing retreat at St. Francis Retreat Center, and other workshops she offers, people have found their village, and many continue to gather and create their own communities. “We have friendships that have come together and are meeting in people’s homes, but they started here,” Canterbury says. “People want experiences.”
For Canterbury, the best thing about her store hasn’t been a specific fabric or vintage piece, but social bonding. “The community-building was the miraculous part. People needed each other so much more than I thought,” she says. “I didn’t realize how much people needed each other in this world.”
Avery Gould, 32, a fiber artist and member of Monterey Knitting Social Club, learned how to spin by watching YouTube tutorials. After joining the spinning group at the Carmel Crafts Guild, she says her technique greatly improved. The Guild, which started in 1948, claims to be the oldest fiber arts guild in the country, and many members have been active for decades. Now, it is drawing new members.
“One thing I really love about the guild is the multi-generational factor,” Gould says. “I’m meeting people who are much older than me, people who are much younger than me and we’re all connected over this thing that we really love.”
THERE ARE FIBER ART PIECES THAT ARE FUNCTIONAL – rugs, blankets, sweaters – and those that are decorative. Each handmade piece is unique. “One thing about fiber arts is I love the way it moves, the way it drapes,” says 33-year-old J. Kai Maeda of Pacific Grove, who got into crochet during the pandemic. He creates large tapestries that tell stories, many about birds. “It may be on a dowel, but it is still able to move. It looks delicate,” he says. “Although it has its limitations – painting has all the colors – the beauty of this is unmatched.”
Maeda also makes wearable pieces such as sweaters. While every handmade fiber piece is different, crochet in particular stands apart because the stitching cannot be replicated by a machine. Factories can make knit sweaters at a dizzyingly fast pace but only humans with a hook (and some patience) can crochet, even with modern technology.
That means every article of clothing that is crocheted is handmade. “That was one of the things I was drawn to with crochet,” Maeda says. “Especially as we are moving into an AI future, handcrafting is kind of a resistance to that – it’s slowing down, it’s being mindful, it’s not being so consumed with productivity.
“If I were to charge money… it would be so much money because [it takes] so much time. But I’m not doing this to make money, and that’s the point. It’s kind of like fiber-punk.”
Maeda sees this not just in the creation and the wearing, but also the mending and laundering of a garment. “When you create with your own hands, you learn how to take care of things,” he says. “You can tell when something has been truly cared for or crafted over a long period of time.”
Unlike fast fashion that’s able to withstand a cycle in the washer and dryer, many handmade pieces need more delicate attention to maintain their color, shape and integrity. Focus even while laundering becomes an act of resistance, a reminder that objects can be art.
“Slowing down is what I really appreciate about the craft,” Maeda says, “especially in a world that is trying to speed things up in a way that is unsustainable.”
Slow fashion as an act of resistance to fast fashion has become a way of life – and a thriving business – including at Slowfiber in Monterey.
PUSHING BACK AGAINST FAST FASHION, Canterbury started offering “mend bars” and clothing swaps to upcycle garments and make them wearable for longer. She realized there was a demand and opened Slowfiber as a brick-and-mortar in 2020.
For many people, sewing has become a thing of the past. But Canterbury says that in less than two generations people lost sewing skills, but along with other fiber arts – knitting, crochet, weaving, nalbinding, tatting and more – it’s making a comeback. She sees a wave of younger people motivated to learn a new skill, save money on clothing or to oppose the fast fashion trend that is impacting the environment.
While Slowfiber is a shop where people can obtain craft items or enroll in a workshop, Canterbury says her clients’ main goal isn’t buying new supplies. Many people are seeking to build connections and memories while learning a new skill or sharing their hobbies with others.
In a world where sustainable brands are having a tough time surviving and fast-fashion has taken over, Canterbury and others are betting on caring for the environment. “My ultimate goal is sustainability,” she says. “It’s the community that comes from removing the need for new as much as possible.”
BEYOND MENDING AND UPCYCLING EXISTING CLOTHES, many fiber artists are making new things from scratch – and a growing number are going even further, making the supplies to make the clothes, spinning yarn from wool and dying yarn themselves.
Kris Nardello looks for Pisilothus mushrooms just before the rain starts, which she will use to dye wool hues of brown. She uses marigolds and coreopsis flowers, and scabiosa (known as pincushion flowers), which grow abundantly in her Aptos garden. Although the latter blooms are purple, they can provide a chartreuse color.
“A lot of chemistry and botany is involved,” Nardello says. “There are a lot of variables – the amount of sun exposure and water exposure and the soil it’s grown in.”
Nardello sometimes sets up camp stoves and dyes with friends on the beach. (It is messy work, best done outdoors.) She teaches dying classes through the Santa Cruz Arts Guild; she’s also a member of the Carmel Crafts Guild and Anne’s Web, a spinning group, and teaches various classes at Slowfiber, including Japanese Sashiko stitching technique to make elaborate decorative patterns.
She shows a boro jacket on a kimono she estimates could be 100 years old. Nardello started by quilting to support the integrity of it, then adding stitching on top. “Lengthening the usability and life of a [garment] is important to me. They all have a story to tell,” she says.
Nardello spent decades working as an art teacher before retiring, and continuously adopted new crafting skills along the way; she received a wheel as a Christmas gift in 1972 and has been spinning yarn since then. (She uses a more modern wheel at home, but also helped Tor House Foundation refurbish a large, old-fashioned “walking wheel” that was used a century ago by poet Robinson Jeffers’ mother-in-law on a visit.)
Nardello will be demonstrating how to use a spinning wheel to transform wool into yarn at the Monterey County Fair. She prefers to start with a raw fleece that requires cleaning and combing before it’s even ready to spin.
“I really like the whole process. It smells good,” Nardello says. “You get to know the quality of the yarn and the fibers on a very intimate basis.”
Nardello is a maker, from spinning and dying yarn to patching jeans. She also weaves elegant rugs – naturally dyed, of course – that live on her bathroom floor. They are not just decorative, but part of life. “They are wonderful for bare feet,” she says.
“People like to feel things that are natural fibers,” Nardello continues. “They last so much longer – and they are more comfortable to use and to wear. The touch factor is wonderful. I think human beings really miss that touch factor.”
THE TOUCH FACTOR may tap into something beyond creativity or comfort or style but connect us to more defining elements of humanity. Woven wool originated sometime around 4000 BCE, and could be made only from the fleece of domesticated sheep, bred first for meat then sufficiently long coats.
“Anthropologists say the invention of string was even more important than the invention of the wheel,” Maeda says. “It’s part of the way we have evolved.”
It’s also part of the stories we tell about civilization. In Homer’s Odyssey, Penelope – home in Ithaca, fending off aggressive suitors for years while wondering if her husband, Odysseus, is alive or dead – tricks the suitors into a timeline of her creation. She is weaving a burial shroud and they agree to wait until her weaving project is done. But secretly, every night, Penelope undoes her weaving, playing a trick on the suitors, wielding power over them.
In much more recent history, Nardello says, the term “spinster” – for a woman who could spin – came with status, rather than the derogatory association of today. It referred to a woman who had a necessary skill and the ability to make needed textiles in a time when every textile was made by hand, and also the ability to produce a sellable good.
What is sellable has evolved with technology, but the basic premise of spinning has changed remarkably little.
STEPHANIE CERVI DOES NOT REMEMBER LEARNING HOW TO KNIT – it probably began as a child in her church choir with an elder trying to keep her quiet during rehearsals. But years passed and Cervi, now 33, didn’t do much with crafting.
She returned to it another way, by 3D-printing bobbins for a friend’s wheel. She runs a successful Etsy store from her Monterey home, selling meticulously designed 3D-printed components of spinners and other fiber arts tools, like a heddle for weaving on a small loom. (She designed this after distributing cardboard looms at the fair to kids last year, which quickly came apart.)
Cervi is a maker of tools, but also of crafts and she can spend hours spinning on her double-treadle Ashford Kiwi wheel, pumping the right and left foot evenly. “It’s a great way to self-regulate and just be present in your body,” she says. “It’s hard to be focused on anxious stuff when you are focused on this instead. My way to wind down in the evenings is to pick up a craft project and not look at a screen.”
It takes hours to transform a bag of wool into yarn. Preparing an entry of lush yarn for the fair, Cervi estimates she spent four hours for each of three bobbins, then another four hours to spin them together into a three-ply. “If I paid myself a living wage, that’s a $400 skein of yarn,” she observes. The equivalent length of acrylic yarn would probably sell for about $35 to $40. “Hand-spun yarn is considered very precious,” she says.
But it’s not too precious for Cervi to deploy technology freely. Besides embracing YouTube as a learning tool – something she thinks has helped bring in a new generation of fiber artists – she also uses e-spinners that run with a motor (but deploy the same basic technology of creating tension and wrapping wool around a bobbin). Cervi also uses the oldest version, a Turkish drop spindle, that uses gravity rather than a wheel to spin.
Cervi considers herself a spinner, a knitter and a nalbinder (a single-loop technique older than knitting or crocheting). She also has a functional knowledge of other fiber arts (like weaving) in part so she can design 3D-printed solutions to problems, such as a tool to protect fingers while tatting, an intricate needle art. Cervi’s mother, Melanie, is entering nine tatting pieces into the fair. “I just want to let people know what tatting is,” Melanie says.
Stephanie wryly adds that she was inspired by her mother: “I figured I should follow in her footsteps and pick up another esoteric fiber art nobody has heard of.”
Increasingly, people are hearing about fiber arts, and picking them up.
EVERY MONTH, members of the Carmel Crafts Guild meet in the Wool Room at the Monterey County Fair and Event Center, where they bring a finished project or one they are working on for show-and-tell. In addition, they offer workshops and study groups at members’ homes for various fiber arts including tatting, weaving and spinning. Also at the fairgrounds, the spinning group Anne’s Web meets the second Saturday of each month.
The fairgrounds becomes a stage to showcase projects during the Monterey County Fair, which features 52 categories for fiber arts, from tatted jewelry to Sashiko stitching to patriotic needlepoint. (For details on the fair, which runs Sept. 3-7, see p. 24.)
Many local crafters – including Maeda, Cervi and Gould – will be entering pieces in various categories this weekend. But year-round venues for fiber arts extend well beyond the fairgrounds. Group meeting places include houses of worship, as well as virtual convenings, and coffee shops. The Monterey Knitting Social Club meets every Sunday at East Village Cafe in Monterey and on Thursdays at a rotating list of breweries. Members bring projects to knit or crochet, and talk about patterns they want to make, yarn choices and if they need or not to make a swatch before starting a new garment.
Club Founder Colleen Durkin says that crafting and handmaking is “a really nice antidote to the sometimes draining experience of our digital lives.”
The group setting motivated Durkin to follow patterns for the first time. “Being around other people helps me learn about different stitches and different approaches to knitting and also crocheting,” she says.
She waited for a few years to find a club with similar interests until 2018, when she realized she could be more proactive. “I was hoping somebody would start one, and then after a few years of waiting, I just realized I had to be the one to start it,” she says. (A disclosure: One of the authors of this story, Celia Jiménez, is a member of the Monterey Knitting Social Club.)
The group started with Durkin as the only member knitting by herself at local coffee shops; then other knitters and crochets started to show up. The club shares upcoming gatherings on MeetUp and Instagram. In the past three years, the membership has grown exponentially.
“It’s really wonderful to have so many people interested and wanting to meet each other,” Durkin says. Her largest gathering drew 25 people.
At the Monterey Knitting Social Club, Cervi says, “Pretty much the only rule is there is no gatekeeping. Bring whatever you are working on and expect a good time.”
Increasingly, libraries are also offering workshops where people can learn how to sew, crochet or knit, or simply providing a space where crafters can meet. The offerings emerged from a mix of community interest and crafters working on staff.
On a Wednesday afternoon about a dozen people, including kids, teens and adults, show up to a crochet class Gould is teaching at the King City branch of Monterey County Free Libraries (where she works). There are colorful yarns and several crochet hooks to get people started. Gould guides them through the basics of how to make a slipknot, chains and single crochet.
Some are ambitious. Sharlene Hughes, who is just learning how to crochet, is hoping to make 2,000 crocheted footballs by November to add to donation boxes for kids overseas.
Nine-year-old twins Pamela and Perla Martinez already knew how to crochet and quickly started working on their project. “I’m making a blanket for my cat,” Pamela Martinez says of a striped pink-and-white fabric for her stuffed animal.
At the Seaside and Castroville library branches, sewing machines are available for people to reserve for use in the library. They recently have started mending circles, where people at different skill levels can meet, learn the basics and work on projects.
Besides reclaiming or gaining skills, participating in these gatherings is an opportunity to meet people. “It’s kind of like the old days. People get together. You feel like other people are with you and they like the same things,” says Kelly Henderson, a sewing coach and library assistant at the Seaside library.
Businesses also can serve as hubs for creativity, gathering and even healing. Cervi hopes to open a brick-and-mortar yarn store for her business, Starfish Fibers, in 2027.
“I want it to not just be a store, I want it to be a community space,” she says. “I have seen friends use fiber arts as part of recovery from trauma or to help with sobriety. One person uses crochet to keep their hands busy so they don’t pick at their skin with anxiety. We all come to it for different reasons, but we stay in it for the community.”