18 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY SEPTEMBER 3-9, 2026 www.montereycountynow.com mushrooms just before the rain starts, which she will use to dye wool hues of brown. She uses marigolds and coreopsis flowers, and scabiosa (known as pincushion flowers), which grow abundantly in her Aptos garden. Although the latter blooms are purple, they can provide a chartreuse color. “A lot of chemistry and botany is involved,” Nardello says. “There are a lot of variables—the amount of sun exposure and water exposure and the soil it’s grown in.” Nardello sometimes sets up camp stoves and dyes with friends on the beach. (It is messy work, best done outdoors.) She teaches dying classes through the Santa Cruz Arts Guild; she’s also a member of the Carmel Crafts Guild and Anne’s Web, a spinning group, and teaches various classes at Slowfiber, including Japanese Sashiko stitching technique to make elaborate decorative patterns. She shows a boro jacket on a kimono she estimates could be 100 years old. Nardello started by quilting to support the integrity of it, then adding stitching on top. “Lengthening the usability and life of a [garment] is important to me. They all have a story to tell,” she says. Nardello spent decades working as an art teacher before retiring, and continuously adopted new crafting skills along the way; she received a wheel as a Christmas gift in 1972 and has been spinning yarn since then. (She uses a more modern wheel at home, but also helped Tor House Foundation refurbish a large, old-fashioned “walking wheel” that was used a century ago by poet Robinson Jeffers’ mother-in-law on a visit.) Nardello will be demonstrating how to use a spinning wheel to transform wool into yarn at the Monterey County Fair. She prefers to start with a raw fleece that requires cleaning and combing before it’s even ready to spin. “I really like the whole process. It smells good,” Nardello says. “You get to know the quality of the yarn and the fibers on a very intimate basis.” Nardello is a maker, from spinning and dying yarn to patching jeans. She also weaves elegant rugs—naturally dyed, of course—that live on her bathroom floor. They are not just decorative, but part of life. “They are wonderful for bare feet,” she says. “People like to feel things that are natural fibers,” Nardello continues. “They last so much longer—and they are more comfortable to use and to wear. The touch factor is wonderful. I think human beings really miss that touch factor.”The touch factor may tap into something beyond creativity or comfort or style but connect us to more defining elements of humanity. Woven wool originated sometime around 4000 BCE, and could be made only from the fleece of domesticated sheep, bred first for meat then sufficiently long coats. “Anthropologists say the invention of string was even more important than the invention of the wheel,” Maeda says. “It’s part of the way we have evolved.” It’s also part of the stories we tell about civilization. In Homer’s Odyssey, Penelope—home in Ithaca, fending off aggressive suitors for years while wondering if her husband, Odysseus, is alive or dead—tricks the suitors into a timeline of her creation. She is weaving a burial shroud and they agree to wait until her weaving project is done. But secretly, every night, Penelope undoes her weaving, playing a trick on the suitors, wielding power over them. In much more recent history, Nardello says, the term “spinster”—for a woman who could spin—came with status, rather than the derogatory association of today. It referred to a woman who had a necessary skill and the ability to make needed textiles in a time when every textile was made by hand, and also the ability to produce a sellable good. What is sellable has evolved with technology, but the basic premise of spinning has changed remarkably little. Stephanie Cervi does not remember learning how to knit—it probably began as a child in her church choir with an elder trying to keep her quiet during rehearsals. But years passed and Cervi, now 33, didn’t do much with crafting. She returned to it another way, by 3D-printing bobbins for a friend’s wheel. She runs a successful Etsy store from her Monterey home, selling meticulously designed 3D-printed components of spinners and other fiber arts tools, like a heddle for weaving on a small loom. (She designed this after distributing cardboard looms at the fair to kids last year, which quickly came apart.) Cervi is a maker of tools, but also of crafts and she can spend hours spinning on her double-treadle Ashford Kiwi wheel, pumping the right and left foot evenly. “It’s a great way to self-regulate and just be present in your body,” she says. “It’s hard to be focused on anxious stuff when you are focused on this instead. My way to wind down in the evenings is to pick up a craft project and not look at a screen.” It takes hours to transform a bag of wool into yarn. Preparing an entry of lush yarn for the fair, Cervi estimates she spent four hours for each of three bobbins, then another four hours to spin them together into a three-ply. “If I paid myself a living wage, that’s a $400 skein of yarn,” she observes. The equivalent length of acrylic yarn would probably sell for about $35 to $40. “Hand-spun yarn is considered very precious,” she says. But it’s not too precious for Cervi to deploy technology freely. Besides embracing YouTube as a learning tool—something she thinks has helped bring in a new generation of fiber artists—she also uses e-spinners that run with a motor (but deploy the same basic technology of creating tension and wrapping wool around a bobbin). Cervi also uses the oldest version, a Turkish drop spindle, that uses gravity rather than a wheel to spin. Cervi considers herself a spinner, a knitter and a nalbinder (a single-loop technique older than knitting or crocheting). She also has a functional knowledge of other fiber arts (like weaving) in part so she can design 3D-printed solutions to problems, such as a tool to protect fingers while tatting, an intricate needle art. Cervi’s mother, Melanie, is entering nine tatting pieces into the fair. “I just want to let people know what tatting is,” Melanie says. Stephanie Cervi, above, works in a variety of fiber arts modalities and also designs 3D-printed tools to help. Above left, she designed a heddle, a weaving tool for a loom. Center: bags she made and yarn she spun (at the front). Right, spinning yarn using a 3D-printed bobbin to wrap it. Over 60 people showed up for Knit in Public Day, an event organized by the Monterey Knitting Social Club and the Monterey Public Library, outside Colton Hall. DANIEL DREIFUSS DANIEL DREIFUSS DANIEL DREIFUSS CELIA JIMÉNEZ
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