- If you're constantly touching things in your environment and making things by hand, you're just gonna notice different properties about them.

- I always would say to my students like, you know that you're hooked when you're working on one and you're planning the next one.

- A lot of these techniques that we're using have been used for ages and there's something about doing that and working with your hands and also knowing that humans have also done this -- hundreds and hundreds of years ago -- the same exact action.

- It's hard to find places where it feels like we can intersect from different walks of life, from different races, genders, classes, and still come together and have something in common and feel like connected.

And one way you can do that is just through a craft.

- My name's Erin Carlson.

I'm the owner of Red Cottage Fiber Studio.

At Red Cottage Fiber Studio, I'm focused mostly on weaving, felting and gardening.

And I love teaching.

The majority of my classes are complete beginner friendly.

My most popular class happened during the pandemic.

That was through Contemporary Craft, and it was the bird of the month class and I think we ended up going for 18 months, a bird a month.

And I would do illustrations, so like step by step illustrations and then we would all be together on Zoom, felting the bird together.

Red Cottage has just allowed me a lot more freedom to explore and kind of go down different avenues.

I'm interested in sharing knowledge about raw materials and local materials.

I grow vegetables.

I do a lot of pollinator gardening.

We have a meadow, dye plants, and I grow flax.

The Rust Belt Linen Project is within the Rust Belt Fiber Shed, so it's 250 miles kind of in a circle around Cleveland.

They provide the seeds, then you save 25% of it, then you let it go a little bit longer so that the seeds completely ripen and become viable and then they collect back those seeds and the idea is that they'll have a seed bank.

It's very experimental.

They're kind of looking at different growing conditions.

'cause people are growing it from Michigan to Ohio to you know, Pennsylvania.

They're getting information back about how we could potentially start growing more flex.

It was really easy to grow.

And so what we're doing now is just breaking that thin outer woody... the thin outer woody layer.

So the stuff falling down is called the boon.

Okay.

So I'm pretty happy with how that's looking.

So hackling, the idea is you just start at one end.

It's much like working like knots out of your hair.

For spinning, there are specific flax wheels, so there's often a place on the wheel to hold a distaff.

And what a distaff is is kind of like a stick and you can arrange the fibers on it and then you're actually just pulling the fibers down from the distaff as you're spinning.

And when it has spin in it, that's the point where you start calling it linen.

The cool thing about it is that I have all these tools.

There's been so many different ways that people have done it.

Like the first people that were processing wild flax, they were like stepping on it or hitting it with rocks and then they were like beating it against the tree.

There's so many ways to accomplish this and you don't have to have like these very specific tools to do it.

- I met Erin through the Rust Belt Fiber Shed.

The way that I became involved is through the One Year One Outfit Project.

It's a project that organization hosts where you want to source your raw materials for fiber processing within the Rust Belt Fiber Shed.

You take that through the processing stages all the way up until creating an outfit in one year's time.

I wove this on a table loom and wove about six yards of it to get the fabric that I needed to sew this pattern together.

What I really find enjoyable about this project is sourcing the materials.

The materials themselves have stories.

You know, maybe I have gotten a fleece from a farm and maybe I've seen that sheep and I know the farmer has been caring for that sheep and that fleece kept that sheep warm over the winter and she's been sheared and now I have that fleece and I'm starting to work with it.

All those stories are kind of in those fibers.

I also grow and keep a dye garden too, and I use some of my natural dyes and with the things that I like to make.

When you get a final piece, you're looking at it and say like I've, I've made something that I feel pleased with or I feel is beautiful, but also remembering all those pieces that have gone into it every stage of the way.

That's exciting for me and that's why I would wanna do it again.

I've grown coreopsis flowers and made that into different dye baths and dyed these bats of wool, different colors.

I'm particularly excited about this one because all of these different colors have been made here all come from the same plant.

And I've done a a stripes motif here to kind of showcase that color.

- I grew up with a fiber artist mother.

I have always been interested in fiber, but never really knew what our natural fibers, what are non-natural fibers, where do they come from, how are they made.

My mom was always working in her studio and sewing every day, all day, and I was always very curious to participate.

- My background as a fiber artist is that basically it's my life.

I read an article in Ms.

Magazine about quilt making as a woman's art form, and I saw how important quilt making was to the women's community.

I knew right away that that's what I wanted to do.

I am currently the object of an exhibit at the Heinz History Center.

It's called Louise Silk: A Patchwork Life.

I decided I wanna make a plan for myself to complete my work.

First thing I did was I wrote a book.

It was called A Patchwork Life, and I talked to the curator at the Heinz History Center about what was possible.

It follows a patchwork life and that takes you through exactly how my life developed in terms of quilting.

I've learned a lot about myself from the exhibit in each stage.

No matter what I was doing, I was also documenting.

So there's not only the quilt, but there's the workbook, maybe there's a publication, maybe there's some writing.

And why the exhibit is really successful, I think, is because you can identify with so many parts of it according to what you've been doing in your life.

- I am wanting to weave more because I love Contemporary Craft and the people there.

I am really amazed by just how many skills there are.

When you have a fiber community that really cares, everything is up for discussion.

- I have never been turned away from a fiber artist wanting to share what they do.

It is great to have the community that we're learning together, and if everyone's following their own interests, then you just get to share everyone's knowledge.

- People are becoming more and more aware of what they've been missing.

- I think one thing that's really empowering about the fiber community is that you don't need money or knowledge or even a family history or even a connection, anything to get started.