Meet Katie Strano

Katie Strano is a local weaver who is helping us create our textiles. She has her own studio, Heddle Over Heels in Southbury Connecticut where she creates pieces that she sells online or works on collaborations. She also shares her love of the loom by offering weaving workshops locally.

How are you involved with Wear Wool New London?
I hand weave locally sourced yarns into fabric yardage.

What excites you about Wear Wool New London?
I’m excited to be working with local farmers, yarn mills, and designers to create garments that are completely made within the Connecticut fibershed. So often these days production of our clothes is, and seems, so far away. We don’t know where our clothes come from apart from a small “made in” label. But even with that “made in” location information we still have no idea how those factory workers were treated. Are they paid fairly? Are the working conditions safe? Is the factory taking care to protect the environment? How were the fibers grown and/or created? Were the farmers paid fairly? And on and on.

There are so many questions that could easily take months to fully research the answers to for one garment. It’s exciting to be involved in this project and to know the answers to all the questions. To be able to talk to the farmers, to see where the animals live, to know for certain that everyone involved is being paid fairly and that their physical and environmental needs are being considered.

What is one idea that has fundamentally changed you/your life trajectory?
Trajectories have a way of ricocheting. My “ah-ha moments” don’t usually come all at once in a tidy book passage or shocking revelation, but rather through the build up of experiences and feelings. After years of working in a retail setting, it gradually became very apparent to me that I would be much happier making the things, rather than ordering and selling them. It was basically an 8 year build up to learning how to weave that changed my course.

What analog object or activity do you enjoy?
Looms. Thankfully hand and foot powered looms are still very much around and operational.

If you could live in another time period when/why?
I would love to have the opportunity to live and work in a Shaker community, on a temporary basis. Perhaps Hancock Shaker Village sometime between 1800-1840. I greatly admire the Shaker’s philosophies on the beauty of usefulness in design and in life. I also admire the innovations they made in so many tools and processes.

What has living during a pandemic taught you?
It has taught me that we are more resilient than I would have thought — That we, en masse, are adaptable.

In one sentence your positive prediction or hope for the future. My hope for the future is that society will grow to one day reach a baseline level of common decency towards each other, ourselves, and the environment.

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