Chapter 15 - The Obsessive-Compulsive Art of Weaving (not mine)

1950 - 1955

This man, the Village Master Weaver when I took this photo, was kind enough to

 trudge upstairs in the Weaver's Studio to bring down one of the looms used by students like me.

     An appreciation for the role of crafts in early American life was an important part of the Village curriculum; weaving in particular. Mr. Ford must have believed that no student should spend a week in school without an opportunity to weave on a loom. So weave we did.

     We began to weave in kindergarten and I think I quite enjoyed it in the early years. We wove on our little looms weekly until we graduated to a larger loom in fourth grade. There were enough looms for each student.

     Our finished products became finer with age but I remember my creations as being pretty ugly. We chose our own wool and apparently I wasn’t very good at color schemes. I distinctly remember one third grade experience. I finished a band of purple and selected a similar shade of brown for my next band of color. It was so disconcertingly unpleasant to the eye that I tried to compensate with bands of yellow, orange and pink. I then ascribed the resulting discord to color-blindness inherited from my father.

     Despite the mixed results, my parents found little tables all around our living room and elsewhere to display our work. A lamp or an ashtray only partially covered up the finished weavings – at least mine. My brother was probably more productive and certainly had a better sense of color.

     As the years passed, the only pleasure I remember in the process was being told that I was done. This was followed by a brief respite from weaving while the teacher somehow wound the weaving off the loom and made it ready for the next project. Then I began again, endlessly picking the wrong wools. I think once I might have been allowed to make a bookmark, which went faster and was thus more rewarding.

     Learning the warp from the woof was not enough training in the weaving arts; we were trotted over to the Cotswold Cottage to watch the shearing of the sheep each spring; we went to the Plymouth Carding Mill to be taught the carding, dying and spinning processes. Watching the sheep being sheared was fun if the animals weren’t too unhappy, but the dirty, unprocessed wool at the mill was gross, and hand-carding is only enjoyable for about three minutes. Watching others card, dye and spin the wool wasn’t interesting at all.

     With the larger looms of the fourth grade, we were given finer materials. I think I spent all year making something yellow and brown, and which I actually hated by the time I’d finished. At least it ended my weaving career, and today when I visit the crafts area in Greenfield Village, I pretend not to wince when required to see the weaving area. I was quite excited when the Benson Ford Archives indicated an interest in donations of the actual homework and artwork of the former students. I quite happily gave every weaving I found in my “historical” fabrics pile – one of them was yellow and brown.