In October, ATA president Marilyn Murphy delivered forty-two textile pieces to Nilda Callañaupa, director at the Center for Traditional Textiles of Cusco (CTTC) in Peru. The textiles ranged in date, from a pair of ornamental Nasca tassels from the south coast of present-day Peru (300 to 400 CE), to a man’s tunic from the Chancay culture during the Inca period (late thirteenth century to 1521). The collection, mostly fragments, represents an impressive range of techniques and had been collected primarily as examples of those techniques, with minimal concern for aesthetic quality, condition, or completeness.
The collection is from the estate of Anne Blinks (1903-1995). An extraordinary woman, Anne linked the curiosity and imagination of a child with the mind of a trained scientist—all mellowed with a lively sense of humor, a love of good food, and an ability to bring people together to encourage and challenge one another in a mutual exploration of textiles and textile-making. Anne once told me that I “had” to meet the archaeologist and ethno-botanist Ed and Chris Franquemont [two of the founders of ATA] in New Hampshire. It was a two-hour drive at dusk in pouring rain on unmarked country roads. . . but the beginning of a long and fruitful friendship.
Anne was trained as a marine biologist and worked at Harvard University Herbaria and, later, the Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University where she studied algae. Her considerable achievements in that field were honored by the University of Washington when they established The Anne Hof Blinks Fellowship in Marine Biology in her memory.1
Despite the importance of her work on algae, Blinks is best known for her contribution to the study of historic and pre-historic textiles. She first learned to weave in Stockholm under the accomplished Astri Feist during a year spent in Sweden when her husband, Lawrence, was spending time at the Nobel Institute as part of an international scientific exchange. Later she worked at the Textile Museum in Washington D.C., studying textile structures and assisting curator Irene Emery with her publication The Primary Structure of Fabrics: An Illustrated Classification (1966). Anne wove many of the samples that illustrate the textile structures described in the book.2
Lawrence Blinks travelled widely for his research and Anne travelled with him, exploring textile traditions in museums and local communities wherever they went. Early on, spending a winter at the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, she replicated a number of Roman and Anglo-Saxon textiles and realized that copying structures was not enough to replicate the textiles. As she said, “I copied pieces in machine-spun yarn, and they looked like thunder. The collapse, twist, were all wrong.”3
Anne’s experience replicating ancient textiles in Cambridge and elsewhere caused her to realize that one cannot simply replicate the structure of a textile, but must take into account the characteristics and color of the fiber, all aspects of the thread-making (direction, tightness, and thickness of the spin and any subsequent plying), dyeing, weaving, and finishing.
When Anne couldn’t find fiber that would be roughly equivalent in type and color to what she found in textiles made in Iron Age Denmark, she began experimenting with various breeds of sheep at home, on the small farm she and Lawrence owned in Carmel, California. She also began looking for a black or heterozygous ram to begin to build a small flock of brown and black sheep. There were no white sheep in Iron Age Denmark, after all. At the time, wool growers disposed of black lambs and were unwilling to admit that there were recessive black genes in their flock. It took some time, and the help of a local veterinarian, for her to find a Corriedale ram with genes for brown or black. As she built the flock, Anne was determined to figure out how to tell if a ram (or ewe) carried recessive dark genes that could appear in their offspring. She noticed that white sheep who produced black lambs after being bred with a black mate often had small black spots on their lips, tongues, or ears. From her classical education, she recalled a passage from Virgil’s Georgics III:
For the ram,
How white soe’er himself, be but the tongue
‘Neath his moist palate black, reject him, lest
He sully with dark spots his offspring’s fleece…” 4
After that, it wasn’t many years before Anne was winning awards for her flock. She had one of the first “black sheep” flocks in the country, and one with high quality wool.
In her extensive travels, Anne amassed a large collection of textiles, often with complex or unusual structures. Of all the countries she visited and textiles she studied, though, she was most enthralled by the Andes and the varied, intricate, and beautiful textiles produced by Andean weavers over more than two thousand years.
After Anne’s death, most of her collection was given to the Santa Cruz Handweaver’s Guild (now the Santa Cruz Textile Arts Guild) where it became a valued study collection. Her Andean textiles, though, were set aside as her son and, later, her granddaughter, Sally Shapiro, searched for the right home for them. In January of 2024, Sally brought the collection to the Anne Blinks Roundtable’s annual retreat, asking roundtable members to help find the right home for the collection.5 Almost two years later, the collection was returned to Peru and to CTTC where it will be available for weavers to appreciate the rich heritage of their forebears and to examine the intricate structures of these remarkable textiles, possibly finding new uses for ancient techniques. Anne would have been very pleased.
1 Anne Catherine Hof Blinks. Wikipedia. Accessed 10,23,2025.
2 Rogers, Nora and Martha Stanley, ed. In Celebration of the Curious Mind: A Festschrift to honor Anne Blinks on her 80th birthday. Interweave Press, 1983, v.
3 “A Visit with Anne Blinks”, Interweave, Spring 1978.
4 Ibid. and conversations with Anne.
5The Roundtable began in 1987 as a group of makers and scholars whom Anne had brought together. We have met since then for four days once a year to share research and new work, with new members added – and always a guest or two – as older members were no longer able to attend.
