CT River Artisans

Lisa Tollefson

I have been playing with fiber since I was a small girl, and by the sixth grade, I was sewing many of my own clothes.   I grew up with the idea to use things until they were no longer fixable, and one of the things we used to say was that nothing ever worked quite right until it broke and Grandpa fixed it.

These two ideas came together when my daughter outgrew a favorite pair of jeans, and she didn’t want to throw them out. She also needed a bag for school, so I made the jeans into a shoulder bag. Since then, I’ve been breathing new life and purpose into old blue jeans, shirts, curtains, and any other interesting fabric I can find.

The problem with sewing is that it’s not all that portable, so I took up knitting as well, and after a few projects, I found that I was revising patterns, then designing my own. I’m intrigued by texture: the way the holes of lace define the fabric, and cables and the way they create roads and wandering paths through the plain background. You can find me knitting whenever my hands aren’t required for anything else: walking, watching TV, sitting in traffic, working out.

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