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The Long Thread Podcast

The artists and artisans of the fiber world come to you in The Long Thread Podcast. Each episode features interviews with your favorite spinners, weavers, needleworkers, and fiber artists from across the globe. Get the inspiration, practical advice, and personal stories of experts as we follow the long thread.

The treasure in a handmade life isn’t just mastering skills and making goods, Melanie Falick says—it’s the power in creation, connection, and expression along the way.

When Melanie Falick started to knit as a young adult, she fell in love with everything about it: the creative potential of yarn and color, the meditative process, the useful finished product, the community of fellow makers, and the stories it can tell us about lives past and present.

She has spent the years since then sharing her passion for knitting, and handwork generally, through roles as an author, editor, and creative director. Her books and creative collaborations all reflect her belief that craft is a pathway to wellness for all of us—as individuals, community members, and citizens of this planet.

Melanie would like us to celebrate what we make with our hands with pride. Through the process of craft, she says, we can connect to our ancestors, our environment, the people around us, and our inner selves. And when we share our skills and enthusiasm, we can help to bring more beauty, contentment, and empathy into the world.

This episode is brought to you by:

Treenway Silks

Treenway Silks is where weavers, spinners, knitters and stitchers find the silk they love. Select from the largest variety of silk spinning fibers, silk yarn, and silk threads & ribbons at TreenwaySilks.com. You'll discover a rainbow of colors, thoughtfully hand-dyed in Colorado. Love natural? Treenway's array of wild silks provide choices beyond white.

If you love silk, you'll love Treenway Silks, where superior quality and customer service are guaranteed.

Cultivating Place

Gardens are more than collections of plants. Gardens and Gardeners are intersectional spaces and agents for positive change in our world. Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden is a weekly public radio program & podcast exploring what we mean when we garden. Through thoughtful conversations with growers, gardeners, naturalists, scientists, artists and thinkers, Cultivating Place illustrates the many ways in which gardens are integral to our natural and cultural literacy. These conversations celebrate how these interconnections support the places we cultivate, how they nourish our bodies, and feed our spirits. Take a listen.

This week to welcome February we revisit a favorite conversation from our last season – a good reminder to mind the way you spend your days – added together they are what will grow your life. ENJOY!

Melanie Falick is a maker of many things by hand, and in her work from knitting to gardening, welding to baking, she explores the connection between what we do with our hands in our own lives and our quality of life and sense of wellbeing.

In 2015, Melanie left her 15-year corporate career in the publishing world without a completely clear sense of what she would – or wanted to do- next. Her intuition told her that whatever it was, it would involve engagement with the handwork – knitting, sewing, time in the garden – that she loved, but that she had moved away from personal direct contact with in her career.

In the course of making many things following her “retirement” of sorts, it while crafting a simple folded paper box, a box of incredibly basic utility, that she had an epiphany: “in a circuitous way” in all her creative making, she was trying to connect to her own survival – and that impulse was tied inextricably to her own sense of self, capability, and connection to others – ancestors, descendants, community. In these past few months of shelter in place, I think many of us, male, female, old and young across the globe, have had a renaissance in our own psyches of this same impulse.

Melanie and I actually chatted in February, before the shut-down, which seems prescient somehow in hindsight, and I think speaks to the fact that this growing global dissatisfaction with what we have been told “success” is, has been in the making for a very long time. Enjoy this conversation about her newest book, “Making a Life, Working by Hand and Discovering the Life You Are Meant to Live” (Artisan Press, 2019), in which she explores how others have been manifesting this impulse and leading lives of great connection and meaning long before Covid-19, and how they might be role models for any one of us in making our own lives.

MAKING A LIFE, with MELANIE FALICK BEST OF

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A Brave New Podcast

Great marketing is all about making smart decisions, developing your discipline, understanding and meeting the needs of your prospective customers, and putting in place the right systems to make the whole process easier. A Brave New Podcast, with brand and marketing strategist Josh Dougherty, is here to teach you how to truly unlock your business potential through the power of marketing! Each episode will bring you insights, best practices, and top strategies from a variety of business leaders and marketing & sales experts. Tune in to A Brave New Podcast to learn how to build a more memorable brand and accelerate your growth with bold marketing.

Melanie Falick is an independent writer, editor, and creative director–and a lifelong maker. She is the author, most recently, of Making a Life: Working by Hand and Discovering the Life You Are Meant to Live, named one of the best books of 2019 by Publishers Weekly. She is also the host of Making a Life: The Conversation, a new online series designed to generate lively and inspiring discourse about making by hand—and creative expression more generally—and their vital impact on our well-being in the 21st century. She is the former publishing director of STC Craft/Melanie Falick Books, an imprint of Abrams, where she published works by many of the DIY world’s most esteemed authors. She lives with her family in New York’s Hudson River Valley.

A Message From Melanie:

“If we write down the whispers in our head about the different things (big and small) we really want to do, then we can refer back to that to remind ourselves what we really want. But what if we went further? What if we marketed and advertised those ideas to ourselves? We can make signs and post them around the house or on a sticky note adhered to our phone. What else?

Right now we are so responsive to the marketing of others telling us what we want/need (from coffee to cars to Netflix series to watch). We can counter that by marketing to ourselves. This idea fits into a new book idea I’m working on but I figured I’d share it with you because it seems like something that might resonate with you personally as you try to slow down and take a break.”

What you’ll learn about in this episode:

Melanie outlines how early lessons from her family impacted her views on marketing, handmade items and crafts, and creativity
How Melanie made the important realization that the need to feel connected to her own survival by doing things for herself and making things by hand was key
How Melanie researched and wrote her book Making a Life: Working by Hand and Discovering the Life You Are Meant to Live
Why our modern expectation that we work at the pace of machines has had a major impact on our lifestyles and wellbeing
Melanie highlights the sense of community the African American Quilt Guild of Oakland has developed between its member makers
Why expressing your creativity by creating something is a crucial way to feel connected and give yourself a creative outlet
Why we too often internalize stories about our lack of skill and talent when the enjoyment of our own creativity is the important thing
What advice Melanie has for marketers and business professionals about reclaiming their creativity and rebalancing themselves

Additional resources:

Making a Life by Melanie Falick: https://amzn.to/3fUzkMX
Website: https://melaniefalick.com/
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/melanie-falick-7011a36/
Instagram: www.instagram.com/melaniefalick/
Mailing List: https://bit.ly/3hmHWwa