My weaving guild wrote a book.
Actually, we researched, wove, cut, sewed, stitched, designed, printed, and hand assembled a gorgeous work of art. I’m one of the featured weavers in the book and contributed to the research.
It was born of a study group, exploring the history of four mid-century American weaving periodicals. The editors of those periodicals, along with other notable weavers of the era, explored textures, patterns and techniques during a period of enormous change for weaving; when hand weavers reacted to the loosening of wartime shortages and the availability of new, colorful, textured, and man-made yarns, as well as the emergence of modernist decor in the rapidly expanding new suburbias. Each issue included a draft and a handwoven swatch.
After discovering that our guild’s storage space had a number of these periodicals in excellent condition, the study group was formed. We each chose a swatch to reinterpret, learning about the weavers, the era, and the magazines, and presenting our findings – and our swatches – to each other at study group meetings.
And thus, Inspiration from the 1950s: Handwoven Swatch Periodicals. This book was a labor of love by many members of my weaving guild and it shows.
Thank you to a fellow guild member at Olive & Otis for the exquisite design. Our hard work is now a part of a hand-bound limited edition with detailed, modern interpretations of the vintage drafts along an our handwoven swatches sewn into small booklets. The book itself is hand-stitched with a coptic binding, and the whole thing comes in its own lovely portfolio case.
My piece, woven on a table loom, includes silk yarn from one of my favorite small business, Gothfarm Yarn.
I hadn’t intended to weave a swatch for this project, and instead had teamed up with another weaver. She chose a draft and did the sampling and weaving while I did a deep dive into the editors and periodical she’d chosen her draft from – the Groffs of Robin and Russ Handweavers, and their magazine Drafts and Designs. (I even did a mini presentation-within-a-presentation on the change of the unfortunate logo, though that didn’t make it into the book.) The whole run of the magazine is archived.
In the end, I decides to weave a swatch and it just so happened to come from the same magazine. In fact, it was the first draft included in Drafts and Designs (Volume 1, Number 1, September 1958) and had a Finnish origin. I couldn’t resist, and learned a lot about notable Finnish weavers, Helvi Pyysalo and Viivi Merisalo, about the Wetterhoff, as well as the kotiteollisuus or Home Industry production efforts of the time.
Anyway, I’ll be here the rest of the day, lovingly petting this book. You can order this very limited edition on the Weavers and Spinner’s Society of Austin website.