ABOUT KAREN DONDE ~ Weaver, Teacher, Writer
THE BEGINNING
I suspect I have always been a weaver, I just didn’t know it. With a college degree in journalism, my early career was spent working newsrooms of community newspapers, editorial cubicles for a business magazine publisher, public relations and advertising departments in the real estate field, and, after my kids were born, free-lance writing for business clients. In the process, my husband’s career took us on a tour of the eastern half of the U.S., landing in Southern New Jersey, near Philly, in 1998.
In the newspaper one Sunday morning, I saw a large photo of a lovely woman weaving at a beautiful loom. Although I had been sewing since my teens, my only weaving experience to that point was with a potholder loom. Naomi Cannon was coordinator for the South Jersey weaving guild and was inviting potential new weavers to a meeting. Call it fate, destiny, or simply being in the right place at the right time, but when Naomi put a shuttle in my hand for the first time, it just felt right. After weaving three picks, I knew there was no turning back.
A few years later, I arrived a little late to my regular Thursday weaving class, which included Naomi, other local weavers, and our teacher Doris Boyd. I had gotten tied up with a writing client before class, so was stressed and distracted. After about 15 minutes of weaving, my heart rate settled. I took a deep breath and announced to the class, “I am never more my true self than when I am weaving.”
That hasn’t changed. I never tire of watching woven patterns reveal themselves on the loom simply by raising some warp threads and leaving others down while I throw the shuttle back and forth.
WHO KNEW I WAS A TEACHER?
In 2006, I was asked to teach a beginning class. I thought it was simply my way to pay my weaving education forward. Turns out, I loved it almost as much as weaving. Since then, my teaching practice has expanded in subject complexity, geographic range and technological adaptation. I have taught for guilds around the U.S., in addition to several regional conferences and HGA’s Convergence. When travel was limited by the pandemic, I learned how to teach what I know online. Even though traveling to teach has resumed, I continue to present workshops and seminars online for guilds and conferences.
My journalism training was not wasted. Rather, it has expanded opportunities to share what I have learned with other weavers. I write for and about weavers for weaving and fiber magazines, and a book is in the works.
THE JOURNEY CONTINUES
With two sons grown and on their own, I moved with my husband in 2009 to Asheville, NC, attracted partly by the natural beauty, the area’s long weaving tradition and Haywood Community College’s Professional Crafts program. I enrolled as soon as I could and spent three years learning, not only more about weaving, but the skills needed to succeed as an independent craftsperson. I also decided that my particular niche, rather than production weaving, would be teaching, which allowed me to continue guiding new and developing weavers in their learning journeys, while discovering structures, techniques, and ideas to add to my teaching catalog.
While in Asheville, I also partnered with a weaving friend to manage a weaving/teaching studio in the Asheville River Arts District for five years, became a juried member of the Southern Highland Craft Guild, and was a founding member of Local Cloth Inc. I was elected president of Complex Weavers in 2022 and continue to serve on the CW Board. In 2021, I was honored to be invited to join Cross Country Weavers, a North American weaving study group with a long and storied history.
