Burbank Mayor Tamala Takahashi Is an Award-Winning Fiber Artist

Burbank Mayor Tamala Takahashi has won multiple awards at the L.A. County Fair, including first-, second-, and third-place honors across various fiber arts categories. That’s not a casual hobby. It’s a record built over years of serious, disciplined work.

Takahashi leads a city of roughly 105,000 residents and manages a council calendar that doesn’t leave much room to breathe. Yet she knits, crochets, and cross-stitches with a consistency that’s hard to square with the schedule. She doesn’t treat it as a break from governing. It’s closer to a parallel track.

She didn’t see it coming.

“I didn’t think of myself as artistic,” Takahashi said. “I tried other things, dance, painting, drawing, but nothing stuck.” Fiber arts weren’t even on her radar at first. She’d watched people knit and figured the mechanics were beyond her, too many steps happening too fast in too small a space. A friend pushed her into a class, and whatever resistance she’d built up didn’t last past the first session. “I fell in love with it immediately,” she said.

At the time, she was deep in early parenthood, filling weeks with the usual rotation of parks and playdates, and creativity wasn’t something she’d carved out time for. Knitting was different from the other things she’d tried. It’s got a mathematical quality, a structure that rewards precision, and that clicked for her in a way that painting and drawing hadn’t. It stuck.

Her first project is still around. She redid it roughly ten times before she’d call it finished, and it shows. “It’s got a little wonky bits here and there,” she said. But she won’t retire it. It lives in what she calls her project library, an ongoing archive of finished and unfinished work that documents where she started and how far she’s come. She doesn’t wear it. That’s not the point. It’s a marker.

Not everything in the library worked out. One blanket, designed with triangular panels, needed precise stitch increases to lie flat. The math was wrong early on, and the fabric started to ripple and cinch. She caught it too late. Starting over wasn’t something she was willing to do by that point. “It can look really nice and be fun to make,” she said, “but if the math is off, it won’t lay flat. By the time I realized it, I wasn’t going to redo it.” The blanket stays in the library as a reference, not a regret.

That willingness to sit with a flawed outcome and keep it visible says something. Burbank’s planning commission has a packed agenda in 2026, and city hall doesn’t offer controlled conditions. Contested development decisions, budget constraints, and the daily grind of running a mid-sized California city don’t resolve as cleanly as a finished project. The same patience that keeps a miscalculated blanket in the library rather than the trash isn’t a bad quality to bring into a council chamber.

For a fuller picture of how Takahashi talks about her craft and her path into it, MyBurbank’s profile of the mayor covers the subject in depth and is worth the read.

Her work in fiber arts has also drawn attention outside Burbank. Through the California League of Cities, she’s become something of an informal example of elected officials who maintain serious creative practices alongside their public roles. Working with yarn isn’t a talking point for her. It’s not a campaign story or a humanizing detail rolled out before an election. She’s been doing it for years, earning competitive recognition at one of the state’s biggest fairs, and she’d probably keep doing it whether anyone wrote about it or not.

“Like solving a puzzle with your hands,” she said, describing the feeling of knitting, the rhythm and the structure of it. That’s the part that got her. The math of it, the way tension and increases and row counts build something functional and sometimes beautiful out of nothing but a long strand of fiber. She can’t always control how a blanket lies or how a council vote lands. But she keeps showing up to both.