Fiber Monday - Something different

I don't have anything to show you this week. My inlay weaving project from my class is still on the loom at Fine Line because I have a little bit left to finish. I'll do that on Wednesday, so I can share it with you next week. I did manage to finally get my loom fully warped and have started weaving, but it's going to be the same guest towels over and over and you only need so many pictures of those. 

Instead I want to share a couple of podcast recommendations and a book, specifically those podcasts and the book having to do with Kandahar Treasure.  

As you know, I go through spurts of listening to podcasts while I clean the barn. During one of those spurts, I was working my way through the previous episodes of the Long Thread Media podcast where Rangina Hamidi, the founder of Kandahar Treasure, was being interviewed. I had never heard of either of them before. Kandahar Treasure is the organization that Hamidi (who is Afghan) founded in Kandahar, Afghanistan to employ women to create their native embroidery for sale in both Afghanistan and to the wider world. It was fascinating. 

Then I kind of moved along and forgot about it until last week when I had entered another round of needing to listen to podcasts while working in the barn. In a bit of desperation, I looked at my very favorite podcast, Fiber Nation, to see if they had made more episodes. They hadn't and I knew it was a long shot. But still feeling vaguely optimistic, I scrolled down to see if there were any episodes I managed to miss. There was one! It was titled Not What I Expected. This is the type of podcast where I didn't even bother to read what the episode was about because I knew it would be interesting and I was listening to it regardless. 

The episode happened to be about a woman, Mary Little, who has traveled a lot and written books about different indigenous forms of fiber art. And suddenly, here was Kandahar Treasure again. Littrell had visited Hamidi in Afghanistan and helped to create a book about the organization. Well, now I really needed to read the book. 

The book, Embroidering within Boundaries: Afghan women creating a Future by Mary Littrell and Rangina Hamidi, was not in my library's network. This is just an inconvenience because I have been around libraries long enough to know librarians can find and get just about any title you need. So after a brief chat with the librarian, the book was requested. 

It arrived last week and I have been enjoying it. The pictures are beautiful, the embroidery is stunning (because how could something with nearly 60 stitches per inch not be stunning?), and the story is balanced, giving the women who are written about a sense of dignity rather than just being hapless victims. I highly recommend it. I also checked out another book by the same publisher and also highlighted in the Fiber Nation podcast. It's Rug Money: How a Group of Maya Women Changed their Lived through Art and Innovation. I haven't read it yet, but the rugs that are in the photographs are gorgeous. If fiber is your thing, I would search for these two books.

And let's go back to Fiber Nation. It is truly the best podcast I have listened to. And while fiber is the thread (pun intended) that holds the episodes together, it is far more than that .. history, science, sociology. You will find them fascinating even if you have never held a ball of yarn and never intend to. Listen and then write them begging for more episodes. This request is completely self-serving because I really want them to produce more.