From an Urban Sales Executive to Suburban Weaver: Discovering a hidden passion connected to my ancestors.

Originally from Southern California, I moved to New York City in 2007 to grow a career in sales in the innovative digital media advertising technology industry. Fulfilling her dream of living in the Big Apple, I spent over 13 years in a fast-paced, high-flying sales career at the center of digital advertising, marketing technology and data & analytics technology living in Manhattan and Brooklyn. By the Spring of 2020 when the pandemic hit and everything stopped. By September 2020, her family moved to Rhode Island where her husband was raised and the comforts and chaos of the bustling city life were gone. Forced to navigate an unfamiliar suburban life in a new town feeling all aspects of the pandemic isolation I soon discovered a creative sanctuary and maker space called Woven Seas Weaving Studio in Warren, RI. The weaving studio introduced me to a whole new world of fiber art creation and learning about Rhode Island’s rich and long established textile industry history. Months into my weavings lessons, I learned that my maternal Thai grandmother was a master weaver of bed linens and sheets once living along the tropical jungle beach countryside of Southern Thailand along the Gulf of Thailand, the motherland of my cultural heritage. I never knew this ancestral connection to textile weaving so learning this fact from my mother, frankly, blew my mind. My weaving journey has taken me far and wide creatively discovering the hidden artist in myself while feeling an immediate ease and connection when weaving yarn together and follow the rhythm and repeats of a treadle sequence and shuttle throwing. It was only until my life completely upended and I was learning to settle into my new pandemic and post-pandemic suburban life that I discovered hand-weaving fiber arts. At this point weaving fiber has cemented its influence in my new life chapter in New England as I’ve settled into a new home, town, and way of life all while having a deeper connection to my ancestral heritage.