Coby Vandergaast
Coby Vandergaast holding handspun and naturally dyed wool skeins at her home in Queens Bay, BC | West Kootenay Bioregion
Photo by Senna Andison
September 24, 2025 | Queens Bay, BC
Where are you from?
I am from southeastern Ontario, a little place called mostly Bowmanville. My parents were immigrants from the Netherlands, and they were there maybe for a year and two months before I was born. I grew up in a small town for a while, and then my family, my dad and his brothers and his father bought some property, and they built some houses, and so then we had the sort of extended family experience.
Where do you live now?
I live in a little town, officially a town site called Queens Bay. It was a settler village, settled by mostly Brits in the early 1900s who planted apple orchards. They also tried varieties of fruit growing as well, to some limited success, but the apple trees are still producing even though we started with maybe 200 trees, and there's maybe 100 left. They fall down. The bears break them. They're starting to get rotten on the inside. And I'm going to be picking some apples today along with the bears, a Big Mama and cub we saw today.
What is the origin of your textile practice?
When I was five years old, my mother taught me to knit. My grandmother lived two fences away, and my dad built steps over the posts so we could visit without wrecking the fence. We’d go there for Saturday morning cartoons; she was always knitting.
Every fall, she knit a pair of socks for each of her eight sons, her son-in-law, and her husband—ten pairs by Christmas. My mother put knitting needles in my hands—ones they’d brought from Friesland in the Netherlands—along with hand-knit cotton camis and underpants made during the war, when anything cotton was reused.
When the underwear became too worn, my mother had me unravel it to knit eight-inch-wide strips of cotton stockinette destined for hand-rolled bandages for missionary packages to Nigeria. It didn’t matter if there were holes or mistakes. She’d check once in a while—“Oh, you dropped a stitch—pick it up.” And that’s how I learned to knit.
What materials do you love to work with?
Any natural material keeps my brain from getting twitchy. Right now I’m making mini skeins of wool singles for tapestry work. Wool is a favourite, I love cotton, and I’m partial to Tencel—it makes beautiful, drapable, reflective cloth, perfect for shawls and scarves. Silk is wonderful but expensive. Tencel, a regenerated cellulose, is the poor man’s silk—it does the job.
How has your textile practice evolved?
Every time I do more studies or try more things, I realize there's still so much more to learn. And for instance, in weaving, I feel like I'm still learning new things constantly.
When did you start weaving?
I tried a tapestry maybe when I was sixteen. I just had this small wooden frame with nails hammered into it. I strung up a warp and made this black pulled-loop circle on a bright orange ground—because it was the 60s, and it was the orange, black, red, and brown kind of time.
1975 was basically my first floor-loom weaving experience. I heard about a family living in Cherryville, British Columbia—their names were Wanya and Jack Tuan. Jack was a loom builder, and they built Swedish counterbalance looms. Wanya was a weaving teacher, and you could go and spend a week there, camping on the property and weaving in their barn workshop during the day.
We would weave a woolen blanket called an overshot piece. The pattern we did was Lee’s Surrender, and it was a communal warp because it had a fairly complicated threading. We even did some pickup. I think I came away with four pieces.
At the time, I was hitchhiking after a season of tree planting. I had connections here in the Kootenay Lake Valley—Ryan Dell primarily—and I’d heard that there was a crew up in Glacier Creek fighting fire. So I hitchhiked up there with my bag of newly woven goodies and worked on the fire crew until the cold drove us out. That was my first official weaving experience.
At that time, I was also market gardening—immersed in family life and home building, working crazy long hours trying to grow food. I began to realize how isolated I was in terms of my textile connections. So I joined the Selkirk Weavers Guild, and I felt like such a sponge. After each meeting there was a show and tell, and some of the weavers had already been weaving for twenty years. I felt like a beginner all over again.
I would ask endless questions—What set is that? What yarn did you use? How close together? How do you deal with kinky linen? I absorbed as much as I could and then tried things out whenever I could find those stolen hours to move my textile learning forward.
As my daughter got older, I decided that I would go to any workshop within a day’s drive that sounded interesting or was taught by a teacher I’d heard of and wanted to learn from. I did that for years and years.
When I eventually joined Selkirk College as a textile teacher, one of the perks was professional development funding. That allowed me to keep attending workshops and continue learning, deepening my practice even further.
What rituals guide your artistic practice, daily, monthly or seasonally?
I don’t know. I don’t have any official rituals. I’m very quickly derailed from my practice by whatever needs doing—a leaky tap, a broken-down washer. Pickleball, too, which is my main social outlet these days.
Then when you get distracted, how do you get back? How does it pull you back in? Or what are the things that remind you to jump back into your textile practice?
Well, I’m always thinking textiles. This morning, for instance, I had a container of water that I was using as a rinse bucket for skeins I’d pre-mordanted with alum. As I stepped out the door, I tilted it wrong, and it splashed right across the step in front of me.
Rather than just pushing forward, I stopped. I have the space and time right now to do that—to notice. I thought, Wow, that’s a really cool pattern. So I spent five minutes taking photographs, thinking it might make a great background for something. The splash was bisected by sunlight coming past a post, dividing it into light and dark—contrast, texture, balance.
So maybe I’ll get some rituals happening after all.
Yes, and actually—farming. When I first started at KSA, I was forty-eight, and I remember thinking, Oh no, I could have started this ages ago, and then I’d be way better by now. But once I was in front of the classroom, I realized that farming had already taught me so much about the big picture—about making plans, observing, assessing, and adjusting. It’s the same mindset, really. You notice patterns, pick up on details, and respond to what’s happening.
A good example of that happened just recently. I was cooking out some lobster mushrooms. I did a 2.5 to 1 ratio—two and a half times as much dye material as fibre—and then a second batch at 1 to 1, the same amount of each. Strangely, the 1 to 1 was darker than the 2.5 to 1. I thought, Did I make a mistake? I checked my math—no, it was right.
And then today, I started wondering if maybe when the lobster mushrooms sit for a bit, they actually concentrate more colour. Now I have to test that theory. That’s what’s so interesting about plant dyeing: there are always anomalies. There are variables I can name and plan for, but then, right in the middle of the process, something shifts.
In this case, my dye material for the second test had been sitting on the counter for two days, while the first batch—the 2.5 to 1—was absolutely fresh. So that changes everything. Which means, of course, I have to start the whole study over again.
Who are your artistic, literary or philosophical influences?
It really varies. Sometimes it’s somebody I hear on the radio. There are weavers out there in the world whose work inspires me, amazes me, and makes me want to emulate them. Elizabeth Buckley, for example—she’s a tapestry artist from Albuquerque, New Mexico—and she does truly incredible work.
What really strikes me in her pieces is the sense of transparency. There are things happening behind the background, or in the background—layers of depth behind what’s in front. That kind of visual dialogue really pulls me in.
Years and years ago, in another lifetime, there was a machine knitter who inspired me too. I went through a machine knitting phase that basically ended after an accident, and I never got back to it—other than the fact that someone later gave me three knitting machines.
Anyway, they’ll probably all end up in your space one day.
In what direction do you hope to expand your practice? What skills would you like to learn, and what materials would you like to develop, a relation, a deeper relationship with?
I’d love to make some books. I had a chance to learn marbling recently and brought home a lot of good-sized samples—enough to make a significant number of endpapers, and even some marbled cloth. So I signed up for a bookbinding course through the Canadian Bookbinders of Canada. It’s an eight-month program, so I’ll have to get disciplined about setting aside time. It’s going to be a big project this winter.
Right now though, harvest and firewood are taking over—everything that comes with making a Kootenay life.
That sounds familiar! How has the changing climate affected your seasons?
It’s interesting. I recently discovered that in the last twenty years we’ve advanced by a whole hardiness zone. We used to be 5b, and now we’re 6b. Things are definitely changing. Our growing season is much longer at both ends, and it carries further into the fall than it used to.
When I was commercially growing, I’d always think, It can snow any day now—once it snows, I’m done. The snow meant everything outside was finished and buried. That’s shifting now.
And when the garden work slows down, you turn back to weaving?
Exactly. I’m planning to weave with Tencel—it’s one of my favourite materials—and I’ve been getting into parallel threading lately. It’s a method where you have a two-colour warp, and the second thread mimics the first.
So, for example, if you thread a straight draw on eight shafts, your first thread might be on shaft one, and the second on shaft five. The colours alternate: the first colour goes 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8, and the second starts at five and goes 5-6-7-8-1-2-3-4. That’s your parallel. It’s set closer together than a standard twill, but it produces these really interesting colour interactions.
Weaving is a lot like pixelated painting—the intersections of threads create third and fourth colours, and depending on the light, one part might look green and another purple. You get shimmer and iridescence.
I’ve also been exploring network drafting. It lets you bring curves into weaving. You can take the curved line off the edge of a leaf, plot it on a grid—often a twill network—and wherever the curve intersects with the lines, that becomes your threading. Then you decide where the threads go in between. You can build curves into both the threading and the treadling to create shapes that break away from weaving’s usual horizontal-vertical structure.
That’s one of the areas I’m excited to keep studying.
I’m curious to know is, how has technology influenced or infiltrated your textile practice?
Two things. One is weaving software. It basically replaced my graph paper, coloured pencils, eraser, scissors, and tape. I used to design everything by hand—draw it out on graph paper, add colour, mark out the warp and weft—and then realize I’d missed something. So I’d cut the paper apart, insert another bit, tape it back together, make copies to preserve versions… it was a long process, but I loved it.
The software changed all that. It lets me try out multiple iterations very quickly. I can test ideas and see how they work in colour and structure without starting over each time. But when I first got it, I got so caught up learning how to use it and experimenting that I didn’t actually weave a thing for a while.
These days, I go to it especially for the more advanced types of weaving—anything involving multiple shafts. It really helps. But it’s easy to get lost in endless iterations.
The first parallel threading I ever tried was actually based on a line I drew from a topographical map. I plotted the course of Whitewater Creek between Retallack and New Denver, where it joins the Kaslo River. Then I followed it all the way up to the top of Whitewater Mountain.
I used the topo lines to mark where the creek hit the contours—those became points on my graph paper. From that, I derived a threading. There are a few flat sections along the creek, especially up in the upper basin, so those created spaces for me to experiment with different threading possibilities.
Having the software made it possible to test all of that quickly—to eliminate the versions that clearly didn’t work. But the downside is, I now have a file with about forty iterations, and honestly, I’m not sure what half of them mean anymore. You have to get really creative and concise with naming your files, but also make sure your shorthand still makes sense later.
What is your current state of mind and and what is your idea of perfect happiness?
There is no perfect state of happiness. Life is fucking rude sometimes. I’m sorry, but it is. And all you can do is yield—just go, okay, and then move on. You give yourself those happy spots.
It doesn’t take much. My daughter and I canned probably a hundred jars of pears this year. And while we were doing that, I had little pots of colour extracting from flowers on the side. That was my thread still continuing—I wasn’t letting the harvest season completely take over. There were sunflowers, too, and I thought, I could cook those up in another minute or two.
It’s those small continuations that keep me grounded.
