Hilary Crowell
The Cultivated Thread
Photo taken by Mercedes Arnold
Photos by Mercedes Arnold
Article is a 5 minute read.
Maine Vibes Magazine: Hi Hilary! Tell me about your background and what brought you to weaving?
Hilary Crowell: In January of 2007, I moved to Maine to be an apprentice on a horse-powered farm. I was working with Paul Birdsall at Horsepower Farm in Penobscot and we were cutting pulpwood and bringing it out of the woods with horses. Our days ended around 4:30 PM when it got dark, so I spent my evenings weaving on a table loom. I was introduced to weaving in elementary school but it was those evenings on the farm that solidified my interest in the craft.
MVM: How many horses would it take to do that?
HC: We were doing it with teams of two, because then they would pull this thing called a scoot, that's a sled for wood and you can maneuver it through the woods better with two.
MVM: Did you live on the property? Because you were an Apprentice, so you had to do everything they were doing?
HC: When I was at Horsepower, I lived by myself in this sweet little apprentice house across from the sheep barn. There was no internet or running water but it was cozy and homey. And, because I was new to Maine, I didn’t know many people. It was the perfect setting to relearn a somewhat tedious process (preparing projects and dressing a loom).
MVM: Did it take you long to get back into it?
HC: No, I don’t remember it feeling difficult. I had a good book with clear instructions that I worked my way through. Plus, at that point I was just playing around, no stress, no pressure, no production goals.
MVM: How long did you do that before you started thinking about making a business out of it?
HC: After Horsepower, I continued to farm for 13 years. I really loved farming but there was something about the shift in the seasons and the change in pace that was really, really hard for me. Fall, a season I had loved during other parts of my life, became a really challenging time of year for my mental health. At the end of 2019 I finally decided, even though I loved the work of growing food, that it was wearing on me too much. I left the field at the end of that year and started The Cultivated Thread in 2020.
In the years after Horsepower, I had upgraded my table loom to a floor loom and was starting to sell my work in very small ways. The Cultivated Thread was born on the validation from the people who bought a towel at a school craft show. I felt there was a home for The Cultivated Thread in the world. Stacy from TREATS in Wiscasset approached me about selling towels in the shop which added to my confidence in taking the risk of going into business.
I was starting a business in this really slow paced world, and everyone was pivoting and starting different things. It wasn’t easy, but it was a lucky time to be starting a business. It felt like I had a spaciousness that I wouldn’t have now.
MVM: Are you still farming? Do you garden?
HC: I'm doing battle with invasive species in the front yard and continue to work at the Portland Farmer’s Market with Dandelion Spring Farm (this is my 10th year there!), but otherwise I'm not in the field anywhere.
MVM: Have you noticed a difference in your current work when fall comes around versus farming?
HC: I have noticed a big difference and I think I’ll always be learning and adjusting. There’s still a seasonality to my work, and my seasonally driven farmer brain is always looking for the parallels and differences between TCT’s seasons versus a farm’s seasons. The fourth quarter is my busiest time, so the fall is like my former spring in some ways. In ramping up for holiday shows and sales I noticed in myself that the fourth quarter is not generating the same mental darkness that the fall in the field did.
And I think the big lesson I learned from my cyclical fall mental health struggle is that I will need to pay attention and make changes. I think it’s important that I’m my own boss. As the decision maker, I can make changes in real time to adjust to how the work is impacting me, on a personal level. I’m very driven, I work all the time, so I have a lot of opportunities to observe what does and doesn’t work. And, the decisions I make only impact me, which is so helpful. If I made a bad decision in the field, it could cost the farm thousands of dollars and that’s a lot of pressure.
MVM: It’s eye-opening, and scary, and terrifying at the same time, but rewarding.
HC: There’s no rule book. Everyone does business their own way, and that is totally fine.
[enter Dumpling, Hilary’s cat]
I get side-tracked when her cat enters the room and I start taking photos. Seeing a cat in a room full of thread is an exciting time, what’s the cat going to do? CAT PEOPLE UNITE !
Dumpling, Hilary’s cat sitting in her studio
MVM: Thinking about your farming experience and how it translates into weaving, I read that when you are weaving, you get into the same rhythm as farming. Can you explain that feeling?
HC: I was doing organic veggies, and so there's a lot of hand work in that. I think about weeding carrots, you're close up and you're repeating the same thing. There were these moments when I was farming that if we had done a day of weeding carrots, as I was going to sleep that night, when I closed my eyes I would see rows of carrots. So that repetitive motion of weeding, it’s different than throwing a shuttle back and forth, but it’s a repetitive motion. With any motion, it’s important for me to keep pace. I try to think of it like running, of constantly moving forward at a steady pace. That’s a physical body carried over between farming and weaving.
Another important crossover is how to care for the body when doing repetitive tasks.
To be able to do this work for years to come, I need to protect my body. I'm constantly seeking the balance of doing a task long enough so that I don't spend all of my time in transition from task to task but short enough so that I can wake up again and do it all over the next day. I’ve found that it is really helpful to have projects on multiple looms to switch between. Because the looms are different manufacturers and sizes, the body ergonomics are different. So I can keep weaving but use slightly different muscles and posture.
MVM: How do you currently structure your day?
HC: I'm a morning person, my most productive time is 6am to 10am and so I do the thing that's the most important to do during that time, which is often weaving. If website orders have come in, I pack those up and get them to the mailbox by 10. Mid morning I take a short break, either go for a walk or do some gardening. Right now, I’m trying to take better care of my eyes so on my break I try to spend a lot of time looking into the distance, to counteract all the detail work. After the break, I usually return to production, likely weaving, but maybe hemming or prepping the next warp.
The afternoon is a little more free form. Often, I’ll continue weaving but if it is too hot I’ll retreat to the kitchen to catch up on bookkeeping, emails, website maintenance, social media engagement, or other business admin tasks. I’m currently producing two craft shows so there’s always a vendor to communicate with or some logistical detail to do.
In the first half of the year I take a lot of classes, usually through The Women’s Business Center, so my schedule works around when I need to be on Zoom.
There are a lot of steps in the production process of making cloth and a lot of tasks to do to run a business so there are days that I don’t touch a loom at all. It’s hard for my brain to switch between admin and production. I can do both, and love doing both, but not simultaneously! If there are important deadlines coming up I create more structure for my day to make sure I can get everything done.
MVM: Where do you think your drive comes from?
HC: I’m very process oriented and love seeing something finished. I also really like data, so now that I've had four years of business, I can see the progression and the growth of the business and that energizes me. And honestly, I think a lot of it is genetics.
MVM: I always wonder about nature versus nurture and how that folds into people’s personalities and the work they do.
HC: I am an only child and my parents put a lot of energy into me as a kid. I did Girl Scouts, took music lessons, played sports. In third or fourth grade I was really into whales, as most kids were in the 90’s.
MVM: Same, I definitely wanted to be a marine biologist!
HC: Me too! In 4th grade, I designed notepads with a small drawing of a whale on them, and addresses at the bottom of nonprofits that protect whales. With the help of my mom, we went to Kinkos and had them printed. I then went around and sold them to the neighbors and I sponsored whales with all the proceeds. I was entrepreneurial at a pretty young age.
MVM: Incredible! Do you still have any of the notebooks?
HC: I think I might still have one somewhere. The print store printed them wrong the first time, and we got double the amount because they had to do an entire reprint of them, so we had a lot of extras.
MVM: With your business name, The Cultivated Thread, I read that it is an homage to farming. With cultivating, there are many things you can cultivate. I’d love to hear you talk about what it means to cultivate, and how that’s intertwined and weaved into your life. See what I did there?
HC: Yeah! It can be a very literal crossover term :the process of dressing the loom is a matter of getting all the threads lined up, very much like a cultivating tractor turning the carpet of greens into rows of crops. There can also be a much more abstract way to use the word: I love collaborating with other small businesses and the synergy of combining people’s skills to make something greater than the sum of its parts. I know I’ve learned a lot of things along the way from really great resources, and it feels good to me to not hold those tight in a secretive way, but to pass them on and share what I know, so that’s a way that cultivating feels really good. I’m curious in the future, can there be more of that?
MVM: I think that is definitely a possibility! Is there something you want readers to know about TCT?
HC: It feels important to know that I design and make all of TCT’s textiles and my goal is to make something that's beautiful and useful. The functionality part comes in at all stages of the production process starting with the materials that I choose and continuing at the loom. With every beat of the beater, I am weaving in functionality. I am thinking about the end product at every step. I want these to work. I want them to be used and to bring people joy in that process. I know people are sometimes afraid to use a hand woven thing for messes and stuff but I really focus on making a great product that is both beautiful and useful.
MVM: Thank you, Hilary! I’ve enjoyed our conversation and time with you and Dumpling.