Worcester Democrat and the ledger-enterprise. (Pocomoke City, Md.) 1921-1953, 1941-06-20
Home Weaving
On Hand Looms
Is Increasing

The war, helped along by the Farm
Security Administration and numer-
Gus private art schools and artisans,
is kindling new interest in the art of
home weaving on hand looms.
FSA's interest sprang from the de-
sire to provide additional sources of
income for persons on resettlement
projects and on marginal farms, the
small farmers of the uplands and
hills. Here the art of weaving was
a hold-over from the days when every
farm produced not only food for the
farmer but the materials out of which
his clothes were woven on the farm.
Long before FSA entered the scene,
samples of hand weaving flew in
every breeze that whipped through
the Ozarks, the Great Smokes and
the Blue Ridge. Bedspreads, hooked
rugs, aprons, Haunted an invitation
to every passer-by. But until the
war closed down on shipments of hand
woven goods from abroad, the work
was pretty well held to the hills
where it had been done through long
generations. And it held, too, to the
time-worn patterns of hill ancestors,
stretching all the way back to colon
ial days, and beyond into the shadows
of Elizabethan England.
There FSA found the answer to
its quest for new source of income
for marginal farmers, an answer that
flew in the winds on a hundred hill
sides. Miss Doris Porter, it's assis-
tant chief of Home Management, was
sent to Europe by private founda-
ton to study new weaving patterns.
In the spread of hand weaving that
has followed, new looms have been
installed in homes from West Vir-
ginia to Texas. Women operators
have been trained by weaving ex-
perts, going out themselves and train
ing others.
Miss Porter predicts that thou
sands of looms will be in homes with
in the next two years. She says a
trained weaver on a hand loom can
turn out a suit for herself out of
the best wool in four hours at a cost
of about $3.50. Material that would
cost SIG at store.
But the activity is not restricted
to FSA. Small, exclusive shops in
many areas of the country handle
hand-woven materials. Particularly
is this true in New England, New
York, California, Michigan and in
various other sections of the Middle
West and the South. Massachusetts,
New Hampshire and Vermont have or
ganized their crafts into statewide
commercialized units.
In this upswing, many loom makers
are finding a renewed demand for
their long-nurtured skills. In Mich
igan, in San Francisco, in Batavia,
N. Y, in many other areas, they are
to be found, many of them selling
looms as fast as they can make them.
Richard P. Raseman, executive Sec
rotary of the Cranbrook Academy of
Art at Bloomfield Hills, Michigan,
says weaving is the only art that
benefited materially from the de-
preston. He says, too, that weaving
on hand looms makes good hobby.
1T can be an avocation for many
people," he say, "but vocation for
only few.
There are not more than half
dozen competent designers of fabric
in the United States. Two of them,
Marianne Strength and Lola Saari-
men, are at Cranbrook. Designers
must not be just weavers, although
there are few enough of them. They
must also know the limitations of the
material with which they are work.
ing. They must know manufacture
ing form, the utility of the fabric,
lighting and shadows. These are
just as important to the weaver as
to the artist"
At Hartland, Michigan, every sum-
mer a conference is held of weavers
and persons who earn their living in
teaching or making hand-woven ar
ticles.
Those who are helping to promote
the new interest in this very old sub
ject see a twin objective. 1t will help
to provide goods or limited source
of added income to many of those
who take it up, and out of the whole
process may be developed a new ar
fist of pattern design.