I grew up in Australia in a time when it was very normal for girls to knit, to crochet and to sew. We were taught by our mothers, our grandmothers, our aunts, our friends. We watched, listened and later joined in as they talked, shared patterns, swapped gossip.
This site draws on the traditions and skills that I learned from those generations of women in my family whom I’ve come to think of as Women of Fibre. I’m passing on many of their stories originally collected and researched by my mother Esmé Johnson.
More recently my work has been influenced and encouraged by my contemporaries, by my daughter, grand-daughter, daughter in law and their friends – the next generation of Women of Fibre.
The opening menus of the site feature galleries, stories, designs and techniques from the present back to the 1980s when my knitting and stitching started to change from domestic garments and decorative items to pieces included in exhibitions, textile workshops, friendship and community group activities. Next are the family history menus featuring family trees, stories and photographs that are mainly based around the women of the family.
Since 2013 I have been contributing knitting articles to Yarn magazine and Women of Fibre history articles to Vintage Made magazine. These magazines are put out by the Art Wear Publications group in Australia who also publish Felt, Embellish and Textile, the latter for TAFTA – the association that has fostered the textile and related arts in Australia so comprehensively since the 1980s under the leadership of Janet de Boer.
WEBSITE RECONSTRUCTION
This website is having a major makeover and will be doing so for a while yet. A list of the completed pages, plus major sections still to be worked on, can be seen in the Sitemap.
If you would like to get in touch, whether to make a comment, to point out a mistake, or to ask a question, we would be very pleased to hear from you. You can contact me, Lynne, at:
And if you would like to be notified by email when major sections are finished [three or four emails a year], enter your email details on the Contact us page.