By: Living Traditional Arts
As a young girl, Kathryn Ashley-Wright moved with her mother Lisa Ashley from New York to Wisconsin where farm life became their life, and Kathryn learned to spin wool on her mother’s wheel. She learned to knit at Pleasant Ridge Waldorf School, and later as a student at the University of Wisconsin she studied rural sociology, and she bought three bred Merino ewes, who soon became ten sheep.
Fibers hold it all together. Now Kathryn Ashley-Wright is the proprietress of a yarn shop . She and her husband Keith Wright have two children and a small farm where they raise sheep and the cattle, horses, llamas, donkeys, dogs and cats that accompany the sheep. The warp and the weft form the fabric of our lives; we wend our way, try to avoid the tangles, and tie knots to keep things from ...
By: Living Traditional Arts
Rosa Smiley was born in 1901 in southern Kentucky. Her father was a farmer and a banjo player. She learned the skills of cooking, sewing, planting, harvesting, and preserving food at an early age, and spent most of her life close to the red clay, rocky land along the backwaters of the Cumberland River.
A few years ago I revisited the old home site I remember that sits above the bluffs of Buck Creek. Although the house is gone, there are the remains of the spring house where Rosa cooled milk from their cow and drew the pure water she carried back to the house. She was the post-mistress at the little Hail, Kentucky post office that was in a small shed beside the house. And she quilted.
Rosa left a great legacy of beautiful hand-sewn quilts, and she taught ...
