Thoughtful designs. Simple shapes. Create unique fabric and garments you'll want to wear again and again. In this garment-weaver's handbook, author Marilyn Murphy offers guidance for weaving scarves, wraps, and more. She also provides advice for designing garments, cutting and sewing fabric, adding edgings and closures, and combining woven fabrics with other techniques. In addition, nine contributing designers share their working philosophies. Garment designs in Woven to Wear are influenced by a global melting pot of traditional folkloric costume and ethnic fabric, in which silhouettes are roomy, layered, and flowing, and the cloth takes center stage.

Fun and wearable weaving patterns! Simple Woven Garments is both a pattern book and an idea book for creating simple woven shapes and turning them into everyday, highly wearable fashions. Readers will enjoy classic woven styles and nods to today's style trends in a collection of 20 woven garments (and 4 variations) for the "what's next" weaver. This guide will help weavers create fabric that works for the intended garment, is easy to weave, and is above all beautiful. Authors Sara Goldenberg and Jane Patrick explore techniques such as yarn usage, spaced warps, felting, pick-up weaving patterns, finger-control weaving techniques, and embellishments. Shapes are simple rectangles and sewing requires minimal skill. Weavers will enjoy creating garments including wraps and tops, ranging from easy shawls with a twist to woven sweaters. Woven squares, rectangles, and strips are assembled into easy-sew garments with minimal finishing.

Weave*Knit*Wear dispels the myth that you need expensive equipment, a large space, or special threads to weave. The directions for all 30 projects, from the narrowest boa to a 55" wide serape, are tailored to the most basic equipment--the 20" wide rigid-heddle loom--making it affordable, portable, and intimate. Judith Shangold's designs turn what might seem to be the limitations of this loom into a strength. She pairs simple shapes that reflect the ease of current fashion, and require little cutting and sewing, with the long tradition of ethnic garments created from narrow strips of handwoven fabric. The book offers guidance on the basics of weaving and the minimal hand sewing and knitting techniques used, as well as primers on choosing yarns, designing warps, planning garments, finishing the fabric, making Weave*Knit*Wear a resource that aids in planning and constructing one-of-a-kind woven or woven-and-knit projects.

Clothing from the Hands that Weave is a remarkable book that traces the history of weaving and fashion from the beginning of time through the modern era. Part memoir, part weaving instruction, part historical textbook, Clothing from the Hands that Weave will educate and inspire you. Detailed descriptions and analyses of ancient clothing styles and construction techniques are combined with wildly creative and exciting ideas for updating and adapting them. From simple loom-shaped rectangles to a stunning, entirely hand-woven wardrobe, this book has got it all. Filled to the brim with notes, tips, patterns, and more, Clothing from the Hands that Weave is truly one-of-a-kind among weaving books.

The Quechua people of southern Peru are both agriculturalists and herders who maintain large herds of alpacas and llamas. But they are also weavers, and it is through weaving that their cultural traditions are passed down over the generations. Owing to the region's isolation, the textile symbols, forms of clothing, and technical processes remain strongly linked to the people's environment and their ancestors. Heckman's photographs convey the warmth and vitality of the Quechua people and illustrate how the land is intricately woven into their lives and their beliefs. Quechua weavers in the mountainous regions near Cuzco, Peru, produce certain textile forms and designs not found elsewhere in the Andes. Their textiles are a legacy of their Andean ancestors. Andrea Heckman has devoted more than twenty years to documenting and analyzing the ways Andean beliefs persist over time in visual symbols embedded in textiles and portrayed in rituals. Her primary focus is the area around the sacred peak of Ausangate, in southern Peru, some eighty-five miles southeast of the former Inca capital of Cuzco. The core of this book is an ethnographic account of the textiles and their place in daily life that considers how the form and content of Quechua patterns and designs pass stories down and preserve traditions as well as how the ritual use of textiles sustain a sense of community and a connection to the past. Heckman concludes by assessing the influences of the global economy on indigenous Quechua, who maintain their own worldview within the larger fabric of twentieth-century cultural values and hence have survived everything from Latin American militarism to a tidal wave of post-modern change.