I, Weave
What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others. - Pericles
When I was eleven, my father did not know what to do with me.
I didn’t play football or basketball. Rugby filled me with a clumsy dread and I once ended up having both teams argue about which one had to take me. I didn’t collect the right sports cards or master the necessary bravado. I was not unhappy exactly, but I was a bit weird I guess, solitary, and solitude in a boy can look like a problem that needs solving. I spent hours in my room, alone, drawing and creating imaginary worlds, listening to The Carpenters on repeat. My father, practical and well-meaning, went looking for an answer he could hold in his hands.
One day he came strolling down our garden path with it. A magazine.
It was called The Golden Hands Encyclopedia of Crafts, a weekly craft magazine that arrived faithfully, one issue at a time. There were ninety-eight of them in total. Ninety-eight weeks. Ninety-eight small promises kept. For nearly two years, my father showed up for me every weekend, not with advice or correction, but with materials, patience, and time.
Each issue introduced a new craft. Wood. Clay. Leather. Metal. And early on, almost modestly placed, was weaving. We went out every Saturday and bought materials. My father made me a loom. Not elegant. Nails, wood, string. Functional, square, a little rough. We went to the local wool store and bought yarn. He showed me how to stretch the threads tight in one direction, how those threads had to be strong, unwavering. Warp, the magazine called them. Then came the softer thread, the one that moved back and forth, over and under, patient and changeable. Weft.
I did not know then that I was being given a language.
At first, I wove wool. Simple patterns. Blocks of color. Mistakes that became features because unweaving felt worse than continuing. I learned quickly that tension mattered. Too tight and the cloth puckered. Too loose and it lost coherence. The loom taught me something school did not: that form emerges from relationship, not dominance.
Warp without weft is just parallel lines. Weft without warp collapses into tangle. I found that meaning lives between.Long before I understood it intellectually, weaving taught me how the world holds together. Over time, I stopped thinking of weaving as an activity and started recognizing it as a pattern. The past does not disappear; it becomes structure. The present does not float freely; it must pass through what already exists. Strength comes from what holds steady. Beauty comes from what moves. This is how lives are made.
It is also how knowledge has always been held.
Long before silicon and code, the Inca recorded history, trade, and obligation using quipu: systems of knotted and strings whose meaning lived in position, spacing, color, and sequence. Information was not written; it was woven. Data did not sit apart from material; it lived inside it. Some describe quipu as a precursor to computing, an early form of data storage and processing. But it also points to something more fundamental: a time when thinking was tactile, relational, and slow.
The loom, like the quipu, does not separate logic from touch. It understands that meaning emerges through pattern, repetition, and constraint. That intelligence can live in knots and crossings. That memory does not require abstraction to endure, only care.
We like to imagine progress as linear, a straight line forward, clean and decisive. But lived experience behaves more like fabric. Threads double back. Colors reappear. Old materials are reused in new combinations. Nothing is entirely discarded. Even mistakes remain, embedded, doing quiet work.
The warp in my own life has been remarkably consistent. Curiosity. Attention. A need to understand how things connect. These threads were laid early, pulled tight by circumstance and temperament. They have held.
The weft has been far more playful. Design and storytelling. Strategy and intuition. Mathematics brushing up against poetry. Business plans threaded with memory. Questions woven through certainty, then back again. The weft is where experimentation lives. It is where the pattern reveals itself slowly, one pass at a time.
You do not see the whole cloth while you are weaving. That is another lesson the loom insists upon. You see only what is immediately in front of you, the next movement, the next decision. Over time, something accumulates. Only when you step back does coherence appear.
This turns out to be a useful way to think about work.
In design, in leadership, in building anything meant to last, there is always warp and weft. Principles and improvisation. Structure and story. Constraints that must hold, and freedom that must move. Strategy without narrative is brittle. Narrative without strategy evaporates. The work is in the interlacing.
I have come to believe that most failures are not failures of effort, but failures of weaving. Too much warp, and systems become rigid, joyless, authoritarian. Too much weft, and everything feels expressive but unstable. The cloth tears under pressure.
Good design is balanced tension, held just long enough to make meaning.
Weaving is also a way of thinking about time. The past is not behind us. It runs through us, longitudinally, quietly doing its work. The present is what we thread through it, moment by moment. The future is not a destination so much as a pattern emerging from repetition. Change the weft, and the fabric changes. Change the warp, and everything does.
This is why memory matters. Memory is not nostalgia. It is material. What we remember becomes load-bearing. What we forget weakens the structure.
In a world increasingly drawn to speed, to automation, to answers that arrive fully formed, weaving offers a counter-practice. It insists on sequence. On patience. On the dignity of returning to the work. You cannot rush a fabric without weakening it. You cannot skip the middle without losing the pattern.
Our machines now process information at a scale and velocity we can barely comprehend. They calculate, predict, generate. They do not pause. And yet, for all their fluency, they know nothing of tension. They do not feel when something is pulled too tight, or left too loose. They do not remember through touch.
The quipu returns here as a quiet counterpoint. Knotted memory. Knowledge carried, not abstracted. Intelligence embedded in material and time. It reminds us that meaning is not just stored; it is borne. That intelligence without relationship is brittle. That memory gains strength when it is carried forward by return.
I often think about those ninety-eight weekends. About the discipline hidden inside that kindness. About how showing up again and again turns attention into architecture. My father did not try to remake me into something more legible. He offered continuity. A rhythm. A place where something could slowly take shape. That may be the most important lesson weaving taught me.
Today, I no longer work with wool, but I still weave. I weave ideas across disciplines. I weave teams together around shared purpose. I weave past experiences into future possibilities. I weave numbers into narratives and narratives into decisions. I weave because it is how I understand.
The loom has expanded, but the motion is the same. Over. Under. Pay attention. Adjust tension. Continue.
Perhaps that is what my father knew, even if he could not have named it. That love, like cloth, is not produced in a single gesture. It is built week by week, through attention that keeps its promises. Through returning. Through doing the next small thing well.
I was eleven. I thought I was learning a craft. I was learning something far more enduring to weave. Not just with thread or ideas, but with time itself. Holding what must hold. Letting what must move, move. Trusting that if the tension is right, and the devotion steady, something strong and quietly beautiful will emerge.
And over ninety-eight weeks, it did.
A note about my friend Jo Zorkendorfer, the Weaver of Ideas. I first met Jo a million years ago when we worked together at IDEO and her beautiful, tactile appreciation of materials, of detail, of craft, shone through even then, When she left and started her weaving practice, the beautiful objects she created felt like the most natural of progressions. I love her work.
From Jo: I’m not a weaver in the traditional sense of the word. I don’t make fabric.
I consider myself a weaver of ideas and techniques.
To me, weaving means the reorganization of things to form something completely new, held together with structure and repetition, where the new emerges infused with time and care. To weave is to bring order and certainty into the world, and often there is a story embedded in the decisions made along the way.
A decade ago, as designers struggled to understand sustainability and how to apply its principles, upcycling, where the value of a material actually increases, felt like a mountain peak just out of reach. Inspiring, sophisticated examples were few and far between. How could a used material be refreshed, reinvented, renewed, transformed—made more desirable instead of ending up in a landfill? How could we surpass our aesthetic expectations of a recycled product?
In 2015, I met Cécilia Lusven, a weaver from France. She was interviewing with me for an internship at Olli, a small luxury craft company I had founded in San Francisco that produced soft furniture in collaboration with traditional artisans. At the time, I had become deeply interested in handcrafts that required significant investment in time—the opposite of the “scale it” culture I had been immersed in as an industrial designer in the Bay Area. I suspected that handcrafted objects retain the energy of their makers, and that living with something shaped slowly by human hands carries a different kind of value.
That day, Cécilia brought several samples she had woven from hand-cut bicycle inner-tube rubber. She wasn’t sure what to do with them, but I immediately recognized what she had created. She had transformed an innocuous material—discarded inner tubes—into something unexpectedly luxurious. Weaving became the vehicle that reorganized the rubber into the unrecognizably new.
I thought it would be provocative to create a collection of beautiful tote bags using this rubber fabric.
Cécilia was based in Paris at the time and was boarding a flight just hours after our meeting. I offered her a job on the spot, organized a work visa, bought a sixteen-harness dobby loom—\\and within seven months she had moved to San Francisco, and we were weaving.
We secured a supply of used inner tubes from bike shops across San Francisco. They were paying to send the rubber to landfill, so they were happy to give it to us for free. The material was soft and supple like calfskin, odor-free, non-toxic, waterproof, and remarkably easy to work with—and we had an endless supply.
I designed a very simple tote so the focus—and the storytelling—remained on the woven rubber. Using the French lampastechnique on a jacquard loom, Cécilia created intricate graphic patterns with black rubber, contrasted by leather off-cuts and linen thread for the weft. We produced these woven tote bags, in two sizes, for several years.
Later, Cécilia developed a new fringe construction. She hand-cut finger-sized pieces of rubber into eyelash-like strands and inserted them directly into the warp of the loom. For the warp, I sourced vintage 24-carat gold silk thread from Japan. The juxtaposition of black tire rubber and gold silk elevated the fabric into something precious. The rubber was transformed yet again, and the resulting textile moved with the suppleness of a feather cloak.
The time it took to cut the rubber into fringe was absurd. We were completely process-drunk—the more time-intensive the work, the better it felt.
Around that time, I discovered a leather braider outside Spokane, Washington, who practiced traditional Spanish equine leather techniques to create bespoke bridles, whips, and braided works for collectors. He was one of the few people in the country doing this kind of work, so I went to visit him.
He picked me up at the airport in a flatbed truck and drove me to his home in a sleepy town outside Spokane. He had partially converted the old community town hall into his house. Inside the vast, empty hall, he opened a trapdoor in the wooden floor and gestured for me to follow him down.
“This is either the last day of my life,” I thought, “or the best.”
Below was a secret Hermès-like workshop. I spent the day giddily watching him work as we prototyped complex braided leather handles. I returned to San Francisco with a new design element—another thread to weave into the bags, making them as richly intricate and desirable as possible.
Recently, a friend told me she’d seen a used Olli bag for sale in a high-end vintage shop for $800. That means this rubber has entered its third cycle of ownership—proof that thoughtful design can elevate a material beyond its original application and extend its life far into the future.
For me, weaving is a design practice—and a way of seeing—that insists nothing is finished, nothing is wasted, and everything can be reimagined through patience, structure, and care.
https://www.instagram.com/jozorkendorfer/
Images by Michael O’Neal mo@moneal.com
Quipu image licensed from Larco Museum in Lima, Peru
