Wearing tradition on their sleeves

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Hand fashioned

Liz Spear wears one of her own handmade garments.

To be a member of the Southern Highland Craft Guild is not simply to be part of a crafting circle. Yes, members weave and whittle, forge metal and throw clay pots. But they’ve also been inducted into the guild by a committee who, through multiple juried selections, determine that each crafter is making not just interesting and marketable work, but quality work in keeping with the guild’s more than eight decades of tradition.

And quality is not the only tradition associated with the guild. Nearly all of the craft forms it represents are rooted in time-honored artistry. Pottery, quilt making and basket weaving are not just expressions of beauty, though many modern consumers treasure these handmade objects for their aesthetic qualities. Until the 20th century, these items were necessities, providing food storage and warmth. Appalachian mountain people didn’t make crafts simply to pass the time, they crafted to survive.

{module Share this!|none}For that reason, many of today’s Southern Highland Craft Guild members became makers at the knee of a skilled parent or grandparent. “My mother taught me to sew when I was very small. Knitting and crocheting and things like that,” says Barbara Miller, a guild member since 1965. “It was for practical use, for my own clothing or if I wanted to make gifts.” These days, Miller still makes clothing, though she does so on a number of floor looms in her own workshop.

From homespun to high-end

Fiber arts is just one area represented by the craft guild, but it covers a lot of ground—from the ancestral coverlets that played an important role in the formation of the Southern Highland Craft Guild in the late 19th century, to ultra-modern techniques like Shibori weaving and contemporary garment design. But no matter how futuristic some of the wearable art might seem, most forms hearken back to traditional skills.

“Basic weaving goes back to old patterns that have been handed down for generations,” says Douglas Atchley, a Weaverville, N.C.-based weaver-turned-ceramist. “People take the old traditions and make them into new ideas, but you always go back to the tradition.” He says that as a teacher (first at Auburn University and later at John C. Campbell Folk School), he led courses in overshot weaving so students could understand the beginnings of the craft.

Atchley names Waynesville, N.C.-based weaver Liz Spear as one who takes long-established methods and makes them her own. Spear’s garments, which were sent down the runway at this spring’s Folk Art Center’s Fiber Day fashion show, are easily-wearable pieces in lush colors and clean lines. Spear herself, the emcee of the annual fashion show says, “What I make is fairly conservative. Most of my customers are women with office jobs.” Which is a long way from the conventional image of a mountain woman weaving a shawl to ward off the first chill of autumn. But Spear points out, “Nobody’s really doing traditional garments. What’s a traditional garment? Nobody’s doing homespun liberty blouses.”

What the guild’s fiber artists are doing is a wide array of jackets, lots of scarves, skirts for a range of body shapes, quirky hats, ponchos, wraps, bags and even fiber arts jewelry that incorporates felting and weaving with beads. And the wearable pieces, bright and tactile, are so appealing that they’re not only highly sought-after by craft fair attendees but by the makers themselves, who buy from and trade with each other to fill their own wardrobes.

Starting simply

Two of the artists who clothe many of the crafters at the Craft Fair of the Southern Highlands are Jude Stuecker and Jen Swearington. Both are Asheville, N.C., residents and both make youthful, body-conscious apparel—Stuecker’s pieces include hand-dyed and silk-screened a-line skirts; Swearington’s dresses and tees are hand-printed with stencils. Both Stuecker and Swearington, who are close friends, got their start as quilters.

“I was inspired by things I saw other people making,” says Stuecker. She started piecing fabrics, making her earliest quilts in a style akin to learning an instrument by ear. But it wasn’t until she was in college that she began seeking out advice from professionals.

“I never made traditional quilts, but I learned a lot from traditional quilters and techniques,” she says. “I learned that it’s really important to make something well. I was just making things creatively, but there was a point when I needed to learn the right techniques and tools so things didn’t fall apart and were presented well.”

Stuecker’s production improved, but she was still “barely scraping by” financially until Swearington suggested she start making clothing because “women always buy clothes, regardless of how many they have. It’s hard to resist,” says Stuecker.

Swearington, who studied fine arts in graduate school, moved to Asheville about 11 years ago. She immediately started exhibiting her wall pieces in coffee shops, and got into the Southern Highland Craft Guild based on that work. For her first guild craft show, she realized she needed items with shelf appeal at reasonable price points (wall hangings are large, and not exactly impulse buys). “I couldn’t have a whole booth of scarves, so I thought I’d try making a skirt and a top, and started very simply,” she says. Her efforts were rewarded with sales, so, without a fashion background, she branched into apparel.

Swearington uses silk and bamboo jersey with lycra, which she dyes herself. “It’s fun to get really amazing colors and to think about the body and the garment and how patterns line up,” she says. While Swearington’s business is predominately women’s wear these days (she even has a part-time assistant for production work), she still makes her wall pieces which she sells on crafter site Etsy.com (Etsy founder Rob Kalin bought one). She also makes sculptural quilt pieces for art shows, such as a fiber arts teapot for the National Teapots Show IV on exhibit at the Cedar Creek Gallery in Creedmore, N.C., through Aug. 21.

And Swearington carries aspects of her quilting over to her wearable art. “I make screens from my sketchbook pages for the wall hangings, and then print those on the fabric,” she says. Images that appear on her dresses and skirts—musical instruments, shoes, a light post—were once incorporated in quilts.

Warp and weft: not just for women

Tim Clark, a musician and fiber artist in Burnsville, N.C., also found a way to carry over his craft—Japanese braid-making—into wearable items. The elaborately-woven plaits, known as Kumihimo, were once used as straps for Samurai armor. When Clark discovered the craft, he fell in love with it because “there’s something so interesting about the mathematics,” he says. He was able to purchase the equipment for a flat-braid loom (a Takadai, which uses up to 100 strands) through a grant from the Arts Council.

Clark’s partner, Linda Mace Michael, designs sumptuous and fashionable handbags. The couple realized that Clark’s Japanese braids would make perfect straps for the purses. The braids feature distinct patterns such as a fan and a Hana-Bishi (a family crest).

Because the Kumihimo plaits are so time consuming, Clark realized they weren’t financially feasible for the bags, but he’s continuing his study of obscure braiding forms. He is currently at work with artist and author Roderick Owen on a book about Peruvian braid patterns.

Clark, as a male fiber artist, is a minority in the field. While men populate disciplines like ceramics, woodworking and glass blowing, their numbers are few among weavers, knitters and apparel makers. “I was at a workshop in Pennsylvania on beginning Takadai, and one other man showed up,” says Clark. And that’s for the art form of the Samuri. Peruvian round braid, he relates, were developed for making slings used in hunting. Still, he says, “Fabric, it’s interesting, is mostly women showing up for the workshops. I don’t know why.”

Atchley found the same to be true when he was a teacher. “There were one or two men in the workshops,” he says. “And there are a few guys out there weaving.” He speculates that there are fewer men in fiber arts because it’s the less financially lucrative of the genres. But there are big names in fiber arts: Among the men, Atchley names famed fiber artist Jack Lenor Larsen, who studied ancient Peruvian techniques before going on to design textiles for interiors.

Creating new traditions

But not every artist seeks fame. Miller, who also volunteers in the Craft Guild’s library, is interested in historic preservation. “The archives are documents, photographs and papers,” she says. “Guild members who have been important in their fields have left us their papers.” Miller says it’s a good resource for the public as well as living guild crafters.

In her own work, Miller says time-honored weaving is all she’s ever done. “When I started weaving, I realized there were so many ways you could go.” She took time to try different ideas and techniques before settling on the traditional (especially focusing on 18th century textiles) “to see what I could do with what has been handed down.”

Spear, who is also well-versed in traditional weaving, seems to enjoy the challenge of pushing boundaries through new techniques and collaborations. “Once you learn how to work a loom and you’ve done the scarves and you’ve done the table mats, you want to do something else,” she says. Cut-and-sew garments are one area that’s been growing in recent years, according to Spear. She adds piecing with scraps, painting woven fabric and trading textile pieces with other artists. One collaborator, Laura Simms, marbles fabric for Spear.

Another popular new technique is Shibori weaving, developed by Waynesville, N.C.-based fiber artist Catharine Ellis in the 1990s. Traditional Shibori is a Japanese method of binding, twisting and stitching fabric to achieve patterns during the dying process. Ellis’ woven Shibori is, according to the artist’s website, “a process of weaving and resist” where stitches placed in the cloth on the loom can be gathered prior to dying. During the Folk Art Center’s Fiber Day fashion show, a large number of woven Shibori pieces (from artists like Neal Howard and Teena Tengue, both of whom will be at the July guild craft fair) were sent down the runway.

Even though fiber arts are based in tradition, they’re not limited by those roots. Like in any medium, trends continually arise as crafters innovate and are inspired by numerous sources: their peers, the magazines they read, high fashion and whatever’s the rage in contemporary clothing. “Right now, felting is huge on a whole lot of levels,” says Spear. “The newer techniques, each time one comes along, spawn the next set of trends in the field.” In the past year, she’s become interested in Nuno Felting, a technique of building up layers of loose fiber, developed by an artist from New South Wales in the early ‘90s.

“I end up with really beautifully-textured soft fabric in a way that’s very different from my weaving,” says Spear. Which is not to say she’s considering abandoning weaving. “A loom is a really cool tool,” she says. Pattern-making and work with color are some reasons she suspects people are attracted to weaving.

“When you’ve got the whole hand weaving field and people who’ve been doing this for pleasure for quite awhile, there’s been a real growth of interest in the weaving field,” Spear says. “The rise of knitting, the rise of quilting. Weaving guilds have become popular again. I think we all need fiber in our lives.”

And, Spear points out, those who aren’t drawn to crafting quite enough to take it up themselves are drawn to those who do.

A Short History

Though the Southern Highland Craft Guild was chartered in 1930, its history dates back to the 1890s. It was in 1897 that Presbyterian missionary Frances Goodrich (the great-granddaughter of Noah Webster of Webster’s Dictionary fame) founded Allanstand Cottage Industries in Madison County, N.C. The business provided a means of income for Western North Carolina mountain women who wove traditional coverlets.

A decade later, Goodrich opened a showroom and retail space in downtown Asheville. The new location put Goodrich in contact with other leaders of the then-burgeoning arts and crafts movement. A 1928 meeting at the Penland School of Crafts (formed by Lucy Morgan, a Craft Revival leader who parlayed a weaving course for mountain women into a profitable cottage industry that also sought to preserve the traditional craft) planted the seeds for a crafters’ guild.

According to Western Carolina University’s well-researched online collection, Craft Revival: Shaping Western North Carolina Past and Present, “The meeting was scheduled for Christmas vacation with guests arriving on a snowy December day.” The guests, gathered around the fireplace in the weaving cabin, made up a Who’s Who of the Craft Revival, and, the collection reports, “The meeting marked a new phase of the Craft Revival, in which its leadership began to define the movement and articulate its goals.”

Olive Campbell was in attendance at that meeting. She had founded the John C. Campbell Folk School (named in honor of her late husband) in 1925. The Brasstown, N.C.-based facility was initially focused on forestry, travel, history and more, but it organized a community of carvers who operated much like the Allanstand Cottage Industry weavers. It was Campbell who initiated, according to the W.C.U. study, “the need for a ‘loose federation’ of craft producers as early as 1928.”

“A core group of craft enthusiasts continued to meet to develop the idea of a cooperative guild,” continues the W.C.U. report. “In 1930, at the annual Knoxville conference, they formally organized the Southern Mountain Handicraft Guild, today’s Southern Highland Craft Guild.”

To date, the guild represents more than 900 crafters in 293 counties across nine states in the Southeast. Its growth is just one testament to the growing and enduring craft community in the southern Appalachians. Guild members work in wood, clay, glass, metal, paper, jewelry, leather, mixed media, fiber and natural and manmade materials. Products range from quilts and baskets to sculpture and high-fashion handbags. While the output of guild members is widely varied, one thing is for sure: Each of these artists is producing top-quality pieces.

To join the guild, crafters from the Appalachian mountains of Kentucky, Tennessee, the Virginias, the Carolinas, Georgia, Maryland and Alabama can apply for membership. A successful application is followed by an image jury and then an object jury, during which a committee of experts considers the crafter’s work.

Benefits of membership include marketing opportunities such as selling work through the Allanstand Craft Shop (now located at the Folk Art Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway), Guild Crafts in Asheville, the Parkway Craft Center in Blowing Rock, Cumberland Crafts in Middlesboro, Kentucky, Arrowcraft in Gatlinburg, Tenn., and the biannual Craft Fair of the Southern Highlands which takes place each July and October at the Asheville Civic Center.