Vibrantly colored skeins of hand-spun and dyed skeins of wool punctuate the retail space at Headles & Treadles. Contributed Photo

From fiber to fabric, the creation of textiles is an art for the people.

Ever since Arachne challenged the goddess Athena to a contest of weaving skills, we have have spun, dyed and woven fibers. Women may have been first at spindle and loom, but spinning and weaving today are activities that easily cross lines of gender and culture.

Headles & Treadles is the Bay Area’s Heritage Textile Arts Guild, with a membership of 55 people who range in age from teenagers to grandpas. The guild is located within North Bend’s Pony Village Mall and is an Aladdin’s cave of vividly colored garments against a backdrop of spinning wheels and looms.

High on a shallow shelf along one wall sits the Ashford Charkha spindle.

The Ashford is notable, says guild member Laurie Foster, because it is similar to the spinning wheel developed by Mahatma Gandhi. His innovative double-wheel drive made the box charkha portable, encouraging self-sufficiency and a booming cottage industry among the people of India.

Gandhi’s devotion to teaching the art of spinning is mirrored in the activities of Headles & Treadles. Like affiliated organizations throughout the country, Guild members are committed to sharing information, demonstrating techniques and assuring that future generations are schooled in the arts of textiles: weaving, spinning, dying, knitting and crocheting.

Guild president Gloria Hall has been spinning since 1986, when her husband presented her with a wheel. Today, she is an artist and a teacher, having earned Certificates of Excellence from the Handweavers Guild of America at both Level I: Technical Skills and Level II: Master with Specialized Study. “It’s like a small doctorate,” she laughingly reports.

Anyone visiting the guild’s retail shop and studios is welcome to give spinning a whirl. The space is crowded with more than a dozen looms and spinning wheels, and Guild members welcome and approve of hands-on questions.

An enormous, AVL Production loom, capable of large pieces and with the potential for computerized operation, rests just inside the shop’s wide entrance. A tapestry loom sits opposite.

It is Laurie Foster’s favorite.

She’s been a spinner since she was 15 years old and tells me that together, she and her mother learned to weave tapestries.

“I wanted to do something functional,” she says. “It takes time; I do about an inch an hour... I’m not good at crochet or knitting — too soft. I spin tightly and I pound it in, so tapestry is great for me.”

I decide I’d like to try my hand at spinning, and Foster grabs one of the studio’s handheld drop spindles. She sits down next to me, and carefully demonstrates how to draw out the fiber from a hank of baby-soft wool. We twist the fibers, drop the spindle and set it spinning.

The fiber breaks.

It doesn’t matter, we begin again. And pretty soon I’m stretching the fiber and watching the spindle as it rotates and spins and people have come into the store — they want to purchase fuzzy hats or skeins of hand-dyed wool, so Foster moves away.

I am transfixed by the process of spinning. I think of Penelope ripping out her weaving each night as she waits for Odysseus, and I think of Sleeping Beauty’s life-altering spindle.

The textile arts have been with us since before recorded history, the warp and weft of culture and civilization. Hall says the Headles & Treadles studios are like “a working museum.

“We want,” she said, “to keep the old ways alive.”

Teri Albert reviews art and artists for The World. Comments on or story ideas for this column are welcome, and can be e-mailed to malbert@uci.net.