The interlacing of two elements at right angles most often used in the construction of
cloth. A loom is used in weaving to provide tension on the vertical, or warp, units while
the horizontal, or weft, element is passed over and under the warp.
The weaving of cloth developed as one of the household arts and has been seen
primarily as women’s work in Western culture. However, when weaving evolved into the
textile industry, males took over the occupation. In weaving, many currents exist
simultaneously and intertwine. Woven textiles are either utilitarian or decorative and can
be both. Weavers may use equipment as simple as a piece of cardboard and a stick or
may employ complex looms and mechanisms. Weaving has been produced for personal,
domestic use and manufactured for commercial sale. A weaver must have considerable
skill to get a product at all, let alone be proficient at the craft. So, while other household
arts have survived as popular hobbies, handweaving is practiced by relatively few when
compared to the number of quilters or knitters.
Weaving encompasses a wide world from dish towels to huge narrative tapestries.
Certainly weaving first began to supply functional items, but, like other crafts,
embellishment made the use of these functional items more pleasing. Even the humble
dish towel presents a wide range of options for the weaver. The weave structure may be
the simple over-one-thread-and-under-the-next construction of a plain weave, or a
diamond pattern created by varying the number of threads passed over and under in the
repeated sequence. A waffle weave, the name indicative of the miniature indented grid
created by the thread interlacement, combines function with design by increasing the
absorbency of the towel. Desiring a greater visual effect, the weaver might choose a
Damask structure, in which a warp-faced satin weave opposes weft-faced satin elements.
Weave structures provide both decorative and functional qualities to the product.
Besides patterns created by combining the vertical warp elements with the horizontal
weft elements, the weaver may employ color to enhance the towel. The towel can be a
single color in both warp and weft, but decorative elements may be increased by weaving
the body of the towel in a single color and switching to another color for a patterned
border. Stripes of different colors in the warp produce striped towels if woven with a single color in the weft. When the striped warp is crossed with weft stripes, a plaid fabric
is created. A checked towel results if uniform warp stripes, such as two light threads
followed by two dark threads, are then woven with the same sequence of light and dark.
Fiber content and yarn size present other decisions to the weaver that will greatly
affect the product. For the dish towel, the practical choice would be linen or cotton
because of the absorbency of the fibers, wear potential, and reasonable cost. The function
of the product, ease of construction, and decorative aspects all figure into the selection of
yarn texture and size.
Continuing to use the dish towel as an example, this item would need a minimum of
finishing after cutting from the loom. Most likely the towel would be woven vertically
with selvages forming the two sides. A selvage is the edge of the fabric where the weft
yarn reverses direction to combine with the warp in the next interlacement in the
sequence. The resulting edge is firm and will not unravel. Hemming to a desired length or
fringe completes the top and bottom of the towel. Warp left unwoven creates fringe, and
the weft is secured with a locking stitch to prevent raveling.
Even for the very modest dish towel, a great number of decisions must be made in the
production, widi all affecting the usefulness and aesthetic qualities of the item. Other
utilitarian weaving has at least as many functional and decorative considerations, and,
most of the time, more. In your own home, walk from room to room and examine how
and where textiles appear. Looking into the bedroom, you can catalog rugs on the floor,
curtains at the window, and the bedcoverings—sheets, blankets, and spread. When you
open the closet door you will see woven cloth in most of the garments. Textiles are so
much a part of our daily lives and so easily and cheaply available that litde thought is
given to how diey come to be. And since most of diis fabric comes from machines in
factories far away from sight, the significance and complexity of the process is not
understood. The development of textiles coincides with the history of civilization at many
important points. Domestication of animals for wool and the cultivation of crops for
fibers led up to the Industrial Revolution, which began with the invention of the spinning
jenny and continued with teaching machines to weave.
Very early in their histories, most cultures of the world discovered weaving
independendy and developed very complex structures for combining two elements.
Carbon-dating of a piece of calcified fabric from near the headwaters of the Tigris River
in what is now southern Turkey places the oldest cloth found at an age of 9,000 years.
Archaeologists from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago identified the
cloth as composed of linen fibers, but they also suspected that domesticated sheep and
goats supplied wool.
Weaving is among the oldest crafts, predating even pottery. Baskets formed out of
reeds probably represent the first weaving. While efficient for carrying multiple small
items, baskets did not lend themselves to the transportation of water. Clay pressed inside
the basket functioned better to contain liquids, as indentations of reeds in shards of
prehistoric clay pots attest. A happy accident of civilization occurred when a clay-lined basket caught fire and burned away the reed, thus firing the clay into a
vessel.
Before weaving can begin, the elements to weave have to be amassed. Reeds, grasses,
vines, or other plant material constituted the earliest substances woven, used in baskets
and mats. Twisting or spinning short fibers gathered from plant and animal sources
produced a pliable element very suitable for weaving. Spinning can be accomplished with
easily improvised equipment. A potato with a pencil stuck in it can function as a simple
drop spindle. The weight assists in keeping the element turning, while the spinner feeds
the fibers into the strand. A stick with a rock bound to the bottom served early spinners as
a drop spindle. A spinning wheel speeds up the process. The actual twisting of the fibers
occurs only at the very tip of the spindle, with the wheel simply being the mechanism for
turning the spindle. In the United States, two major types of wheels have been used. The
Great Wheel, or Walking Wheel, is a large wheel that the standing spinner keeps in
motion with an occasional thrust from her hand. She draws out the fiber and lets it twist,
taking three steps in the operation. The spinner sits on a stool for the smaller Flax Wheel
and works a treadle with her foot, keeping the wheel turning to drive the spindle.
Spinning is a time-consuming activity, taking many spinners to keep one weaver supplied
with yarn. Unmarried women put to the task engendered the word “spinster,” which
although somewhat archaic still persists as a term for the unattached female.
The preparation of fibers for spinning depends on the source for the material. Natural
fibers come in two basic types: cellulose from plants and protein derived from animals.
While many other plants produce fibers that can be spun, cotton and flax have proven the
most versatile and the easiest to grow. Linen or other long plant fibers draw directly from
the distaff attached to the Flax Wheel in the spinning process. The term “distaff” to
denote female lineage derives from this piece of spinning equipment.
Although the hair of most animals can be spun, wool from sheep is the favorite
because of the early domestication of the animals and the rapidity with which the sheep
grows a new coat. Carding prepares the wool fibers for spinning. Hand cards with rows
of bent teeth comb the fibers in opposite directions to align them. Like wool, silk is also a
protein fiber; it comes from the cocoon of a silkworm. Silk, although it can be spun, more
often is unwound as a single filament from the cocoon after exterminating the worm
inside. Rayon is a man-made fiber, of a cellulose base. Synthetic fibers, such as nylon,
acrylic, and polyester, manufactured from combinations of chemicals, mimic properties
of natural fibers. When spun, the synthetics reach the market under a variety of trade
names like Orlon, Dacron, or Trevira.
Even though some fibers have color in their natural state, the tendency has been to add
color. Dyestuffs to color yarn come from many natural sources, and throughout history
the less accessible colors have had tremendous value. Royalty chose purple because of its
scarcity, and brown fell to the common man because of the easy availability in many
different tree barks. Most dyestuffs come from plants, although the red of cochineal
derives from an insect, and the regal purple from a shellfish.
Specification of substance and time and temperature combine in natural dyeing
formulas that passed down in families. The process first involves boiling yarn in a
mordant, a chemical with a metal base. In the dye bath, the mordant unites with the
dyestuffto form a tighter chemical bond than the dye alone would produce. Indigo does
not require a mordant, because in this chemical process the indigo oxidizes when the
fiber is exposed to air after being removed from the dye bath. Other than onion skins that
give a golden brown color, most dyestuffs are very toxic. Pictures of dyeing for home use
usually show a large iron kettle over a fire. The metal pot supplied the mordant while the
open air dispersed the toxins. Since it is extremely difficult for large quantities of yarn to
be dyed with natural dyes, the formulation of chemical dyes was of major significance to
the textile world.
A loom may be a very large complex device or a small hand-held one such as the
pronged metal, or now plastic, square that thousands of children have used to weave pot
holders with cotton loopers. The function of a loom is to hold the warp, or vertical,
threads at equal tension. Down through history some ingenious devices to do this have
come into being. In ancient Greece, the vertically suspended warp was weighted with
rocks. Several different peoples have come up with a loom in which the weaver is part of
the warp tensioning. With various regional differentiations, the warp is stretched between
two rods, with one end tied to an immovable object like a tree and the other rod secured
around the waist of the weaver by a strap. With this back-strap loom, the weaver adjusted
the tension by leaning back.
While the main purpose of the loom is to keep equal tension on warp threads, many
other features contribute to the efficiency of the process and assist in pattern formation.
The standard loom for the American handweaver is a foot-powered, four-harness jack type, constructed of maple and capable of weaving fabric 40 inches wide. The foot
pedals, or treadles, activate the harnesses, which raise threads through a counterbalance,
countermarch jack, or dobby mechanism. The number of harnesses determines the
complexity of the weave structures possible on the loom. With more harnesses, more
complex structures can be attempted, but more is not necessarily better; only different in
kind. On a four-harness loom, thousands of patterns can be woven within four-harness
weave structures. When combined with variations in color and yarn weight and texture,
the possibilities are endless.
Before the weaver begins the actual weaving process, the loom must be dressed or
warped. After planning the project, the weaver needs to put the exact number of warp
threads needed to the same length. Winding threads in the desired color sequence around pegs on a warping board or rotating them around a reel measures
and arranges the threads. Although methods of putting the warp on the loom differ, all
threads are separated through the reed, pass in the planned order through heddles on the
harnesses, and are stored on the warp beam at the back of the loom. The long and tedious
process of warping must be done accurately. A mistake will either make weaving
impossible or show as a very visible defect throughout the entire fabric. A warp may be
the length of a single project or long enough to accommodate many items. To return to
the dish towel example, the threading of the loom takes the same time for one item as it
does for 100. Because the weaver has options to vary the pattern and choose weft yarns
of different kinds and colors, the resulting 100 towels may be identical or each one may
be unique.
When the warp is finally tied to the cloth beam of the loom, the weaver is ready to
begin the actual process of weaving. A treadle is depressed, bringing up threads and
creating a shed; the shuttle with the weft yarn is thrown through the shed; and the weft is
packed into place by the beater before advancing to the next shot or pick. The treadles
activate the harnesses according to a desired sequence for the pattern.
Weavers save patterns in a system called a draft. Drafts from the early American years
use long strips of paper that have lines drawn on them similar to a music staff. Tally
marks denote the positioning of the warp threads on the harnesses in the sequence in which the warp thread must be placed to achieve the pattern. Usually,
the old draft rolls have tiny holes where generations of weavers have placed pins to keep
their place during the warping.
The early American colonists led a frontier life, but the colonies were not intended
from their inception to be self-sufficient. The parent country wanted raw materials from
its satellites and also desired a market for finished goods. Unfortunately, a very large
ocean lay between parent and child. And while this economic model worked well on
paper, the practicality of transporting goods caused many problems, including increasing
the cost of those goods. So one could assume that fabric production that could have been done in the home would have been. However, the colonists imported most of the textiles
they used. Fashion, habit, and the extent of the skills required in home fabric production
account for this. In some of the colonies, attempts to establish commercial textile
manufacturing met with laws forbidding their establishment. When the Industrial
Revolution advanced in the mid-18th century, with the invention of the spinning jenny
followed by the automation of the loom, the secrets were jealously guarded and export of
machinery forbidden. Although the colonial powers curtailed the development of a
domestic commercial textile industry, methods for the construction of power looms found
their way to America in the minds of immigrants. Although not of fine quality, local cloth
manufacturing grew rapidly.
Individuals who came to the New World did know how to prepare fibers and weave.
With an understanding of the weaving process, they were able to make spinning wheels
and looms using simple woodworking tools. During the Revolutionary War, the wearing
of “homespun” even gained fashion as a defiant and patriotic gesture. After the war,
handweaving continued as a home art, most often in isolated areas where people had very
little possibility of earning money to purchase necessities. Frontier life included weaving,
but frontier settlers readily abandoned the tedious work when options to purchase textiles
became available.
With increased migration to the United States in the 19th century, different peoples
brought their skills in textile production with them. When ethnic groups concentrated in
rural areas and farmed, the likelihood of continuing some weaving increased. Hispanic
families wove rugs in the Southwest, and Scandinavian peoples brought their weaving to
the Midwest. While household necessity played some role in the weaving, decorative and
traditional cultural items proved more popular. Examples of weavers’ work can be found
in ethnic museums throughout the United States. While some of this has a tradhional
base, as seen in the folk costumes in the Lithuanian Museum in Chicago, most items defy
specific cultural identity.
Since the rigidity of the weaving process imposes conditions on the product, and since
the history of woven textiles is extremely long, the attribution of different weaving
techniques to specific ethnic groups is very tricky. It is not even possible to trace to a
specific European country the lineage of the most admired American woven item, the
overshot coverlet. Found in hundreds of individualized patterns, coverlets, unlike totally
utilitarian items, have been saved rather than discarded when signs of wear appeared. The
older coverlets employ a linen warp, while the ones from early in the 20th century use a
commercially spun bleached cotton yarn. Handspun and naturally dyed with the blue of
indigo or red of madder, wool creates the pattern in the weft. Although coverlets can be
found in many weave structures, overshot is by far the most common because it could be
produced in the home on a four-harness loom. While some names like “Whig Rose” or
“Lee’s Surrender” refer to specific designs, others like “Pine Tree” or “Snowball” denote
specific pattern figures. Weavers named patterns as they ordered design elements in new
combinations, so similar patterns may have very different titles, or the variation may
carry the same name as the original.
Besides handweaving items for home use, during the 1800s handweaving existed as a
commercial venture, with the weaver producing commissioned items. Sometimes the
customer would supply some of the material, such as handspun weft yarn. Primarily in
the South, itinerant weavers traveled from plantation to plantation setting up looms and weaving with the help of slave labor. As in the Revolutionary War, the South considered
it patriotic to wear homespun during the Civil War. Although the South produced cotton,
the North owned the mills that turned it into cloth. By the mid-19th century, most fabric
came from industrial looms. Although the names of some handweavers in the 1800s are
known, many more worked outside the historical record with only an occasional product
surviving to attest to their existence. Through her diary, we know that after her husband’s
death, Narcissa Erwin Black ran a thriving weaving business on the family plantation in
McNairy County, Tennessee. An African American woman, Chany Scot Black, owned
her own loom and assisted Narcissa Black in all phases of the weaving process both
before and after Emancipation.
In the latter part of the 19th century, thousands of looms were sold to farm families in
the Midwest, marketed as a vehicle for providing supplemental income. Many of these
looms featured a fly-shuttle, a spring mechanism for propelling the shuttle through the
open warp, or devices to control the raising of harnesses in set sequences. Rag rugs rolled
off looms by the thousands and became quite fashionable as a floor covering in Colonial
Revival interiors. Many customers salvaged fabric from used clothing and worn
household items to supply their own rags cut into strips and sewn together ready for use
as weft. The weaver calculated the cost by the inch for the weaving of the rug.
In Britain, in reaction to Victorian industrialization, John Ruskin and William Morris
started the Arts and Crafts movement to promote handcrafted items. When these ideas
traveled across the Atlantic, eager converts enlisted in most major American cities. As a
leader in the Arts and Crafts movement with Tiffany and Stickley, Candace Wheeler
promoted home decoration and the textile arts and established cooperatives for women.
She first learned weaving as a household art during her childhood in upstate New York.
Max West, in a 1904 Department of Labor bulletin details the activities of the many
centers that promoted weaving as part of philanthropic efforts to help diverse
populations. The Acadians of Louisiana, the Mothers and Daughters Industry of
Plainfield, New Hampshire, the Southern-mountain weaving around Asheville, North
Carolina, organized by the Presbyterian missionary Frances Louisa Goodrich, and several
dozen other cooperatives received his notice. Jane Addams included spinning and
weaving demonstrations as part of the Hull House Labor Museum designed to emphasize
the dignity and importance of labor while providing links to the European cultures of the
Chicago immigrants. The Shakers wove for their own use in their communities in New
England, Ohio, and Kentucky and for commercial sale.
Late into the 19th century in some parts of the Appalachian Mountains, women
continued weaving, supplying many of the textile needs of their homes as part of a
subsistence lifestyle. In 1892, shortly after assuming the presidency of Berea College at
the western edge of the Appalachian Mountains in Kentucky, William Goodell Frost
received the gift of a coverlet. He believed that encouraging women to weave would have
two major benefits as he promoted the college in the North. First, the beautiful designs
would stand as testament to the worthiness of their creators, overcoming the negative
stereotypes of mountain people as barely civilized and lazy. Second, the sale of the items
would provide much needed “cash money” to the weavers. When President Frost tried to
commission half a dozen coverlets from a local woman, he received a detailed lesson on
preparation of fibers and the dyeing and weaving process. The weaver estimated it would
take twelve months to complete the work because many of the steps in the process could be performed only at a specific time of the year. In 1911 Berea hired Swedish-born Anna
Ernberg to manage the Fireside Industry that provided parttime employment to women
working in their own homes. Ernberg not only expanded the home-based production, but
also developed weaving as one of the Berea College student industries. Hundreds of girls
paid their tuition to high school and college by working in the log buildings that housed
the weaving on the Berea campus.
During the early part of the 20th century, more than 150 settlement schools sprang up
in the remote areas of the Appalachian Mountains, not only to educate children, but also
to provide for the social and health needs of the families. While Protestant denominations
sponsored most of these schools, women’s organizations ran some of the most successful
of the programs. Women of the Pi Beta Phi fraternity moved into Gatlinburg, Tennessee,
in 1912, and by 1915 looms followed as part of the industrial program at their school. In
1925 Winogene Redding assumed management of the weaving, and the number of
women working in the cottage industry grew rapidly. In the ten years between 1935 and
1945, no less than ninety weavers worked for Arrowcraft, the shop named for the Pi Beta
Phi symbol. Hundreds of women learned to weave, many of them setting up shops of
their own or working in others that appealed to the increasing tourist trade promoted by
creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Other early school-based weaving programs prospered at Hindman and Pine Mountain
in Kentucky, Crossnore and John C.Campbell in North Carolina, and Tallulah Falls and
Berry in Georgia. Although Lucy Morgan started the Penland Weavers and Potters as a
Fireside Industry of the Appalachian School in North Carolina, it became independent of
the school during the Depression. Edward F.Worst, the manualarts coordinator for the
Chicago public schools, demonstrated linen weaving to the Penland Weavers in 1928.
Weavers around the country heard about the Worst visit through an article by Paul Bernat
in the Handicrafter and requested to be included in the next workshop. The annual
summer weaving institute expanded rapidly and, with the addition of other crafts,
developed into the Penland School. Penland; the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts,
which is still maintained by Pi Beta Phi in Gatlinburg; and the John C.Campbell Folk
School at Brasstown, North Carolina, that grew out of the craft work of the settlement
schools form the leaders in workshop-format craft education.
The women organizers who revived weaving in the Southern Highlands stated their
two major goals as keeping alive a vanishing craft and supplying employment to local
women. The weaving could be done at home while tending children, house, and farm.
The settlement activity served as a model for other mountain craft businesses. In Berea,
the Matheny Weavers and the Churchill Weavers; in Asheville, the Spinning Wheel; and
at Russellville, Tennessee, the Shuttle-Crafters all began in the 1920s and turned out
thousands of hand towels, placemats, and baby blankets, as well as the traditional
coverlets.
The settlement workers met yearly in Knoxville, Tennessee, at the Conference of the
Southern Mountain Workers and discovered that diey shared similar problems in their
craftproduction activities. After an organizational meeting in 1929 at Penland, the schools
and the craft-production centers joined together under the banner of the Southern
Highland Handicraft Guild. The new organization addressed the common problems of
publicizing work, marketing, quality control, and upgrading skills of workers.
Mary Meigs Atwater, often referred to as “The Dean of American Handweaving,”
published her first issue of the Shuttle-Craft Guild Bulletin in 1924. Through this
subscription service for weavers, she shared her extensive research in weave structures
and her pattern designs. Swedish weavers Margaret Bergman and Mama Valborg
Gravander taught weaving and led the weaving community in their respective adopted
homes of Seattle and San Francisco. Anni Albers brought the philosophy of the German
art school, The Bauhaus, to this country. From her handweaving design studio in San
Francisco, Dorothy Liebes produced fabrics that enlivened the use of color in weaving.
Within a locality, the usual pattern was for there to be one principal teacher with guilds
developing as groups of students desired contact and sharing with other weavers. Elsie
Gubser led the handweaving community in Tulsa, Oklahoma. LouTate published the
Kentucky Weaver Newsletter and taught weaving at her Little Loomhouse in Louisville.
By the mid-20th century, most handweavers owned a copy of Marguerite Porter
Davison’s A Handweaver’s Pattern Book and subscribed to Mary Alice Smith’s quarterly
Hand weaver and Craftsman.
Within most cities of any size and quite a few rural areas, weavers have organized
themselves into guilds. Weavers are by far the most organized of the crafter, and
weavers, disproportionate to their numbers, assume leadership roles in craft
organizations. Weavers Guilds hold regular meetings, sponsor workshops with weaving
professionals, organize exhibitions, and engage in community-service education projects.
Different parts of the country have eidier separate organizations or federations of guilds
diat sponsor regional conferences. On the nadonal level the Handweavers Guild of
America (HGA) sponsors Convergence, the major conference every two years that draws
an average attendance of 2,000. The HGA, founded in 1969, offers many services to its
members induding the quarterly publication Shuttle, Spindle, andDyepot.
The bimonthly Handwoven and the quarterly Weavers aim their fiill-color magazines
exclusively at the handweaver. The magazines concentrate on techniques, improving
skills, and how-to-do-it projects, with an occasional article on textile history. Interweave
Press, Dos Tejedoras Fiber Arts Publications, and Lark Books publish textile books,
many of them of a technical nature aimed at the experienced handweaver.
Handweaving is practiced throughout the United States primarily by women. The
typical weaver is in her late forties, married to a professional man, mother of two
children, holds a degree, and has done some graduate study, most often in the sciences.
Her weaving may be the major focus of her life or may fill leisure hours. She may weave
as a commercial venture or be a serious investigator of her craft. She may weave
garments and functional projects for her home or use weaving for artistic expression. She
may have learned to weave at a craft school, a professional art school, or a college, but
most probably it was at a recreation program or from an experienced weaver. However
the introduction to weaving occurred, she has an extensive library of weaving books and
takes an occasional workshop.
Philis Alvic
References
Atwater, Mary Meigs. 1961. The Shuttle Crafi Book of American Handweaving. New York:
Macmillan.
Burnham, Harold B., and Dorothy K.Burnham. 1972. “Keep Me Warm One Night”: Early
Handweaving in Eastern Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, in cooperation with the
Royal Ontario Museum.
Eaton, Allen H. [1937] 1973. Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands. New York: Dover.
Goodrich, Frances Louisa. [1931] 1989. Mountain Homespun. Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press.
Gordon, Beverly. 1980. Shaker Textile Arts. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, in
cooperation with the Merrimack Valley Textile Museum and the Shaker Community Inc.
Meany, Janet, and Paula Pfaff. 1988. Rag Rug Handbook. St. Paul, MN: Dos Tejedoras Fiber Arts
Publications.
Personal Stories: Handweaving in America between 1920 and 1960. 1990. Handwoven 11 (3).
Wilson, SadyeTune, and Doris Finch Kennedy. 1983. Of Coverlets: The Legacies, the Weavers.
Nashville: Tunstede.
Worst, Edward F. 1918. Foot-Power Loom Weaving. New York: Dover.