The Loveland woman who launched a craft publishing company from her dining-room table before selling to a corporation 15 years ago has now bought back three of her original magazines.
Linda Ligon started Interweave Press in 1975 (originally named just interweave, with no capitalization) and grew it to seven magazines and numerous books and websites before selling to Aspire Media in 2005. She and two longtime colleagues have formed a new company, Long Thread Media LLC.
On Aug. 1, the partners purchased Spin Off, Handwoven and PieceWork, which were put up for sale this summer as the result of the Chapter 11 bankruptcy of F+W Media. F+W’s magazines ran the gamut from weaving to construction to telescopes to military vehicles and were auctioned off in six lots.
Peak Media Properties bought the crafts and arts divisions of F+W and then sold the three titles to Ligon and her partners. Peak also took over F+W Media’s operations at 4868 Innovation Drive in southeast Fort Collins.
“They didn’t know what to do with them,” Ligon said of the three titles, in an interview last week. “They are kind of peculiar … with a small readership. And who knows anything about hand spinning anymore these days? Same with weaving.”
The name Interweave, however, won’t be coming back to Loveland. A press release from Long Thread Media said the name remains with Peak Media, which will continue to publish Interweave Knits, Interweave Crochet and the website interweave.com.
Three former colleagues
Ligon has teamed up with Anne Merrow, who joined Interweave 13 years ago and had served as editorial director of its Yarn and Fiber Group; and John Bolton and his Unfiltered Media company. Bolton had been general manager and publisher of Interweave in the past, according to the release.
“Back to the future, you know,” Ligon said.
Merrow is the new company’s creative director, and Bolton is the business director. Fort Collins-based Unfiltered Media will handle all the back-office operations such as subscriptions, circulation, advertising sales and accounting, said Ligon, who added that she doesn’t have a formal title herself.
“I’m there to advise and consent and give opinions and pitch in where I can,” she said.
On the content side of the magazines, Ligon said she has editors working from California, Indiana, New Mexico and Fort Collins — employees and people working on contract.
“It’s a very small organization, a startup,” she said.
The magazines themselves will be printed by Quad/Graphics, a Wisconsin-based printing and media company, she said. Quad/Graphics also had a Loveland connection. It bought the 60-year-old phone book printing operation formerly known as Johnson Publishing in 2010 and closed it in October 2015.
Ligon will remain the director and publisher of Thrums Books, which publishes books “that celebrate indigenous textiles and artisans from all over the world,” the release said.
In that role, Ligon has been working from a small office that she leases in desk chair workspace, a co-working facility in the historic First National Bank building at 201 E. Fourth St. in downtown Loveland.
More Loveland connections
Ligon has a long history in the 1928 building at the northeast corner of Fourth Street and Cleveland Avenue. She bought it and substantially renovated it in 1990 for Interweave’s headquarters. The publishing company stayed in the building until 2014, when F+W Media moved to Fort Collins.
Ligon and her husband, Thomas Ligon, sold the building to the owners of desk chair workspace in 2015. Those owners, including former Johnson Publishing owner Doug Erion, further remodeled and expanded the building and opened desk chair last fall.
“I love it. Doug has done such a beautiful, beautiful job of renovating it,” she said.
The three magazines that are in a sense coming back to Loveland have a long history here. Ligon said she launched Spin Off in 1977, Handwoven in 1979 and PieceWork in 1993, with Veronica Patterson, now Loveland’s poet laureate, as its first editor.
“There was a huge amount of history and old archival information that were still very valuable,” she said. And the magazines were still doing well, she said.
“There won’t be any pause in putting out issues,” Ligon said. “We’re publishing weekly newsletters and blogs even as we speak.”
Long Thread has a website, longthreadmedia.com, which links to the three magazines’ websites.
For now, the print schedule will stay the same, she said: quarterly for Spin Off, bimonthly for PieceWork and five times a year for Handwoven.
“I wish Peak Media all the best as they move forward because they also have titles that are near and dear to my heart,” Ligon said. “I hope they do very, very well with those.”
In the press release, Merrow discussed the imagery behind the new company’s name.
“Making yarn and cloth by hand is such an intimate, powerful act that links artisans to one another and to history — the long thread that connects us,” she wrote. “Having worked with Linda for years, I can’t wait to start a new old company with her.”
