Description
Atwater, Mary Meigs. The Shuttle-Craft Book of American Hand-Weaving: Being an Account of the Rise, Development, Eclipse and Modern Revival of a National Popular Art. Together with Information of Interest and Value to Collectors, Technical Notes for the Use of Weavers, & a Large Collection of Historical Patterns. (New York: Macmillan Company, 1959) Revised Edition, fourth printing.
Octavo. xv, 341 pages. Hardbound in grey, cloth-covered boards with black stamping on front cover and spine. Dust jacket is present and printed in a grey and beige weave design with black printing. Endpapers reproduce a coverlet design and within are dozens of draughts of warp and weft for many early American coverlet designs. A textbook for the serious weaver of early American textiles.
Condition: Ex-Library from the Berkshire Farm Trade School in Canaan, NY in Columbia County. Stamped on the verso of the FFE with the library stamp, no other indications on the book. DJ shows edgewear, top edge shows spotting. This is my personal copy.
Mary Meigs Atwater (28 February 1878 – 5 September 1956) was an American weaver. She revived handweaving in America by collecting weaving drafts, teaching and writing; Handweaver and Craftsman called Atwater ‘the grand dame and grand mother of the revival of handweaving in [the United States]’.
“Atwater studied art at the Chicago Art Institute and in Paris, France. She lived in several western states, Bolivia and Mexico. When living in Basin, Montana, she began weaving as an artistic outlet and to provide business opportunities for the women in her community. She organized a weaving guild and published The Shuttle-Craft Book of American Hand-Weaving (Macmillan, 1928). She wrote monographs on specific weave structures as well as an instructional course in hand weaving (Cambridge, 1923). The artistic endeavor of handweaving nearly disappeared in America except for Weaver Rose (William Henry Harrison Rose) and his sister Elsie Maria Babcock Rose in Rhode Island and isolated women in the Appalachian Mountains. Mary Meigs Atwater researched patterns and collected forgotten weaves and through her efforts restored weaving in America as an artistic endeavor. As she states in The Shuttle-Craft Book of American Hand-Weaving , ‘There are actually more hand-looms in operation at the present time than there were at the time of the Revolution when all textiles were woven by hand.'” – Wikipedia
