About

Lesley Armstrong at the loom.

Thank you for visiting Lahave Weaving Studio. My name is Lesley Armstrong and I run a weaving workshop in the small community of Conquerall Bank (Pleasantville), Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia.

Originally born along the LaHave River, Nova Scotia, I have finally made it back, full circle, to about 2 km. from where I was born.

These days my work focuses in two main areas--weaving accessories, home products, and design projects and the second area is natural burial shrouds. Designing with different natural fibres and the use of colour, texture and pattern continues to be stimulating and most enjoyable, no matter what the product. The natural burial shrouds are woven by me and are named for a wild bird that is commonly found in Nova Scotia, more on that below. 

I will be closing the "retail shop" part of LaHave Weaving Studio & Shop for drop-in visits at the end of September 2026 and it will become primarily a studio space and welcome customers by appointment. I occasionally sell at the Lunenburg Farmers Market and I encourage customers to make an appointment to see our woven pieces and to view our natural burial shrouds. I can reached by email, text, or a phone call.

More on the natural burial shrouds--I have been involved in weaving natural burial shrouds, learning about the natural burial principles, and how to serve those principles to enrich the earth rather than harming it.  You can browse our Where Wild Birds Sing, Natural Burial Shroud Collection here.

The Shrouds

Lesley's natural burial shroud work, featured by CBC News, click here to read the article.

The shrouds began, of all places, with two pieces of art. In 2013 I wove a piece called Body Bag Series: the Titanic, 1st Class, commenting on who was saved first and who wasn't, later shown as part of an exhibition called Titanica. A couple of years later I made a second body bag, a quiet protest about the war in Afghanistan, woven from strips of children's pyjamas.

Almost offhandedly I said to my husband that I could just be buried in one of these and save everyone a lot of money. The moment I said it, something clicked. But I quickly realized those art pieces could never go in the ground because I'd woven them with commercially-dyed yarn and sewn in a big industrial zipper and none of that would decompose. So I started over and asked a different question: what would it actually take to make a real shroud for a real natural burial?

That's when I asked my friend Kate Delmage, an artist and apparel designer, to help turn the idea into something real. We spent a year or more prototyping the design, working out exactly how a shroud needed to hold a body and how to build it with zero waste. I wove the very first burial shroud, ten or twelve yards of wool on the hand loom, and handed it to Kate. From there, the Where Wild Birds Sing natural burial shroud collection was born.

Our Osprey Natural Burial Shroud.

When we are born we are swaddled in soft cloth immediately, for warmth and comfort, and when we leave this world, it seems like the most natural thing to be gently wrapped in, as well. Because the yarns we use are natural they don't just decompose but they give back--linen returns to the soil it grew from and wool feeds the earth the way gardeners use it to feed their beds.

My natural burial shroud work was recently featured by CBC News. Read the full feature here.

If you'd like to read more our 12-week series on natural burial goes into much more depth-- on the shrouds, the fibres, the principles, and everything else that goes into this work. And if you'd like the fuller story of how I came to weaving in the first place, Fifty Years at the Loom tells it in full.

All of the weaving is done on one of several wooden hand looms or on our vintage cast iron power looms, circa 1940, built in England for the Harris Tweed trade. Visits to see the looms in person can be arranged by appointment.

What has been absorbing me over the past several decades is design and construction of woven textiles. It has been endlessly captivating to work with these unassuming strands of yarns that, through the act of weaving (this repetitive practice that has taken place for tens of thousands of years), can be transformed into a cloth in some form, dimensional unto itself. German art theorist and critic, Bazon Brock, refers to the textile as "a secular form of eternity".

Occasionally I have the opportunity to delve into the less restrained realm of art projects. The challenge of realizing, usually in a three-dimensional form, one's concepts on paper or in one's head has never lost its' appeal. And so the weaving continues.

By Appointment

Appointments can be arranged by email. lesley@lahaveweavingstudio.ca
or text or phone me at (902)-220-5430