January 18, 2025 STATE MEETING
Open: Rug Weaving: What I’ve Learned along the way
Guest Speaker: Stephanie Morton
Stephanie will share her rug-weaving journey with us, starting with her college experience weaving knotted pile with Tibetan refugees in India through the various types of rugs she has woven over the past 50 years. These include weaving with wool, alpaca and rag, and employing weft-faced, double-bind and lately, krokbragd weave structures. Along the way she has picked up many useful techniques and tricks relating to warp, weft, sett, headers, materials, heddles, types of looms that are best for rug weaving and finishing ends. If you are interested in trying your hand at rug weaving then bring your notebooks! She will share a lot of relevant information that she teaches in her rug weaving classes that you won’t want to miss.
Mini #1: Carve, Print, Repeat: An Introduction to Block Printing, Claudia Mathison
Learn basic block printing techniques. Draft, carve, and print stamps on textiles and paper goods to create unique patterns and designs. Participants do not need to bring supplies.
Materials fee: $20 Class size: 6
Mini #2: Make a Mini Basket, Elisa Kessler Caperole
Make a mini basket with multi colored round reed, finished with a braided or looped rim. It can be a hanging basket, or stuff it and make a pin cushion from your handwoven fabric.
Teacher will supply all tools necessary for basket making, dyed and undyed basket reed and stuffing and cotton fabric for the pincushion.
Participants should bring: Scissors, any bulky yarn to add to the basket, or a handwoven square approximately 6” x 6” to personalize a pincushion.
Materials fee: $7 Class size: 12
Afternoon Program
Harriet Hanson Robinson and the American Industrial Revolution
Dr. Jamie Eves, Interim Director / Senior Curator / Co-Windham town Historian
The Mill Museum, Willimantic, CT
The American Industrial Revolution began in 1793 in Pawtucket, RI, quickly spreading to Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. It focused on the manufacture of textiles using imported British technology powered by falling water. There are a few first-hand accounts about what it was like to work in these early factories as "mill girls." The best and most complete is Loom and Spindle, a memoir written by Harriet Hanson Robinson, a doffer, spinner, and "drawing-in girl" at the big textile mills in Lowell, MA, in the 1830s and 1840s. While working as a "mill girl," Robinson joined with other young female operatives to produce the Lowell Offering, the first periodical publication in history to be entirely edited and written by women. Although Robinson wrote her memoir decades after she left the mills, it is the most complete and accurate account of life as a "mill girl." This illustrated talk uses examples from Robinson's life to illustrate the birth and reality of the early textile industry.