Rosie Hyde

Working with fiber is important to me. Because it grounds me in the past. I can relate to 1000s of years of people, women, including women, working with fibre... I'm conscious when I'm reading works of literature or watching movies, obviously historical ones. I look for mentions of the fibre arts stories about our passages even about people weaving and spinning. And I relate to those so much more than I would be able to even if I had never had those experiences myself. It is a real tangible connection to the past and to where we came from... And I think there's a value in remembering where we came from.

Rosie Hyde is a professional engineer and works in research funding at a large consulting firm. Her interests in fibre arts come from being attracted by the textile art displays in science museums when she was a child. In her teen years, Hyde was fascinated by depictions of fibre arts and the mechanical aspects of looms in history books. 

She joined the Kingston Handloom Weavers and Spinners in 2010, when she moved to a village near Kingston. She had been weaving before she joined the Guild. In 2002, she found a Dorothy loom at a garage sale and began to try some of the patterns from a secondhand book on weaving. She also acquired a Schacht Baby Wolf Loom, which is an eight-shaft loom, from a friend of her mother's. She now has a 60-inch loom that she weaves big blankets on. 

From 2019-2021, Hyde served as Vice President of the Guild. Together, with Johanna Amos, she developed the "Threads of History" project to preserve and acknowledge the heritage of the Guild.