Henderson Studios
Expertly Crafted Fiber Art Made in Mendocino County from Start to Finish
by Torrey Douglass
When weaver Jennie Henderson and her husband Michael were building their home and looking for carpeting, she knew what she wanted. “I went from place to place, asking for wool. They kept trying to talk me into the synthetic carpets, but I kept asking.” The pair have enjoyed that same wool carpet in their home for 25 years, and Jennie notes, “My sister down in Sea Ranch has regular carpeting and she’s had to replace it twice during the same amount of time. Mine still looks like new.”
Jennie’s love of wool began well before her hunt for carpeting. It has brought her around the world to England, New Zealand, and Mexico, but the first spark was lit in Denmark. A college student at the time, she was ostensibly in Denmark to study International Relations—at least that’s what her parents understood. But she spent all the time she could spare (and maybe more) learning about weaving instead. “I mostly hung out in craft shops and weaving studios and took a class at the Tomtex weaving studio/shop,” Jennie recalls. She even cashed in her return ticket to purchase her first loom by the Swedish company Glimåkra, the gold standard for weaving looms, which she shipped home to southern California. Once back on home soil, she jumped into weaving, guided by nothing but how-to books and her artist’s intuition.
This passion for working wool was a natural extension of Jennie’s lifelong love of creating with fiber. Her grandmother lived with them when Jennie was young, and she passed along her skills in both knitting and tatting (a delicate craft where thread is knotted and looped, sometimes to make doilies). By the time she was in high school, Jennie was sewing shirts and dresses she had dyed herself.
While she was a student at Whittier College in Los Angeles, Jennie met Michael Henderson at her dorm, which had once been a hospital—the very hospital in which Michael had been born. They were introduced through friends and they connected through their love of art and the outdoors. After they married, Jennie worked as a teacher in El Monte while Michael completed his Masters in Counseling. They took trips into the desert whenever they could to escape the traffic and pollution of Los Angeles.
In 1977, Jennie’s family purchased the campground at Anchor Bay, and they invited the couple to move up and manage its operations, leaving Los Angeles behind for good. Jennie’s weaving output at that time consisted of handspun sweaters she would sell at local craft fairs, woven with mail-order fleece from New Zealand, since local products could not compare in quality. In 1980, she visited family friends on a sheep ranch in New Zealand, and Jennie’s original spark of interest in weaving wool turned into a blaze.
“I love the process from beginning to end,” shares Jennie. “I like all the touching and feeling involved.” She’s spun everything from pet hair to dryer lint, but she landed on sheep wool as her preferred material and now uses it exclusively, finally able to source good wool locally. Alder Creek Ranch in Manchester raises Icelandic sheep, a breed known for producing fleece that is strong, beautiful, and soft. Jennie also enjoys using wool from Romney sheep, a New Zealand breed, whose fleece is the perfect balance of soft and durable with a long staple, and common enough locally so it’s easy to find.
Jennie exudes the embodied energy of a creative person who has found her groove. She strides around her studio and a high-ceilinged living room with a large stone hearth, clearly the heart of the home. Looms, spinning wheels, baskets of wool, and works in various stages of progress are everywhere. Not unlike pianos, many of the looms made their way to her when the original owners passed away and the heirs needed to re-home them. Her quick laugh, inviting warmth, and obvious enthusiasm for weaving all speak to a person who finds deep satisfaction in doing her work.
Jennie’s creative process relies heavily on her artistic intuition. She does not sketch out designs, instead opting to just get started and see what happens. She weaves in one direction for a spell, then will change course when the time feels right. In the past she has dyed her fleece with natural dyes made from foraged plant matter like bark, lichen, moss, and mushrooms, but today she likes to let the natural colors of the wool form the design. The bulk of her work includes throws, shawls, and rugs, though she plays around with smaller items like scarves to round out the offerings during open studios. Sometimes she’ll wash the fleece, sometimes she’ll card it, but usually she prefers to “spin in the grease with flicking but no carding”—in other words, she uses unwashed, uncarded fleece that has had the ends combed out to remove tangles. Jennie elaborates, “Holding the staple (the length of sheared wool) by the sheared end, you flick out the curl or snarled weathered ends in order to easily spin directly from the staple. Very long, low crimp wool like a nice Romney fleece is great to do this way, and you can get a beautiful worsted spin with very little work.”
Jennie can rely on her intuition since it’s rooted in deep experience informed by a broad study of different weaving traditions. She learned the techniques of Navajo weaving from friend and neighbor Jacquetta Nisbet, and she attended workshops at Pacific Textile Arts in Fort Bragg with renowned rug weaver Jason Collingwood from Colchester, England. One of her most treasured periods of study was in 2013 in the artisan pueblo of Teotitlán del Valle in Oaxaca, a village of traditional Zapotec weavers, where she studied with Master Weaver Erasto “Tito” Mendoza and learned weaving methods that are centuries old. On the wall of her studio is a gift from some of the weavers she worked with during her stay—a small rug incorporating the three primary traditional patterns used by Zapotec weavers to remind Jennie of what she learned there.These experiences have developed a deep well of inspiration and ability on which Jennie can draw when she sits down at her loom, not unlike a singer training their voice to reach new octaves so they can perform a broader array of songs.
The undyed fleeces of Jennie’s rugs result in a muted palette of creamy white, varied browns, and soft greys. Yet the pieces use clean lines, bold shapes, and contrast between light and dark to create striking designs in spite of the softness of both the hues and the medium. In some rugs the forms are sharply geometric, while in others they are organic. Yet in all of them, the abstract compositions evoke the natural world, bringing to mind light reflecting off water, or the silhouette of hills on the horizon during the colorless hour before the sun restores vibrancy to the landscape.
For people looking to warm up their space with a stunning hand-woven wool rug, Jennie sells her work through twice-yearly open studio tours on the coast, on the FiberShed Marketplace website, and at The Discovery Gallery Cooperative in Gualala. Useful and beautiful, a rug from Henderson Studios is a genuine Mendocino artifact, made from locally grown wool in the hills above Point Arena, with Jennie’s love for her craft and her home woven into every one.
Henderson Studios
Point Arena, CA
HendersonStudiosPointArena.com
FibershedMarketplace.com/merchants/henderson-studios
Photos by Torrey Douglass