The Land, Then and Now, wool on linen, 72in L x 28in H, completed 2008.

Pull The Thread and It Will Sing: The Making of the San Juan Ridge Tapestries 2016-2027

In collaboration with the San Juan Ridge Tapestry Project, Nevada City, California

We are making something beautiful to describe how the land shaped us when we were a new wave of settlers, how it continues to shape us, and how we, too, shape the land. We honor this place, hoping to redeem some of it’s painful history of exploitation, though we are creating only a glimpse of our wonderful home. It is an offering of thanksgiving for our lives here.

Marsha Stone, on the making of the San Juan Ridge Tapestries

Weaver and project visionary Marsha Stone was browsing in a bookstore when she saw a book about the renowned 1000-year-old Bayeux Tapestry that depicts the invasion of England in 1066. She saw how embroidery could chronicle complex events, bought the book, and began organizing her community to stitch their 50-year story of celebrations and struggles living sustainably on the San Juan Ridge, 20 miles outside of Nevada City, California. This was a gift to her community.

I first met Marsha Stone and Mary Moore in 2016 when I took my class to stitch with them at the North Columbia Schoolhouse Cultural Center. I knew that day that I wanted to make a film about their amazing San Juan Ridge Tapestries. Marsha and I began to organize our collaboration. Through a circuitous route, I had come to meet this community first-hand after hearing tales of this innovative group of back-to-the-landers through Annie. Greensfelder, an old friend who grew up on the Ridge in the 1970's. Marsha’s trust in my initial vision for a film is one of the treasures of my career. Through lush images and aural histories, the film creates a thirteenth tapestry, weaving together the unique collective culture of the San Juan Ridge, skillful rendering in thread, and the poetic dynamism of storytelling.

Completed in 2022, the San Juan Ridge Tapestry Project is a contemporary example of traditional women’s handwork that has frequently, and often subversively, documented community life, political upheaval, and the natural world through thread. Initially inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry, this project's ambition, scale, and cultural significance embody the ethos of the back-to-the-land community that arrived in California’s Sierra Mountains in the 1960s. Their stories, stitched in wool on linen, narrate the community’s history, voice ecological and political concerns, chronicle the bioregion’s flora and fauna, and celebrate the communal nature of their existence; likewise, the tapestries offer a blueprint for sustainable futures.

For close to sixteen years, hundreds of volunteers stitched twelve distinct embroidered panels, totaling eighty-four feet. The creative effort to bring the tapestries to fruition exemplifies the ideals of collective action, which has enabled the community to persist through numerous challenges, including their fight against the resurgence of gold mining, the damming of the Yuba river, the denuding of old-growth forests, and wildfire. Underlying their story as settlers is their commitment to land stewardship and acknowledgment of contemporary Indigenous peoples.The film explores the tapestries through an ethnographic lens informed by years of conversation with residents of the ridge and project leads—founder Marsha Stone, lead embroiderer Mary Moore, and designer Jennifer Rain Crosby.