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The Weaving Roses of Rhode Island

by Isadora M. Safner
Interweave Press, 1985
154 pages

The Weaving Roses of Rhode Island
is an odd little book. It incorporates a bit of arcane New England colonial history, even-more-arcane Northrup family history and short, cryptic letters from the Roses to a Laura Allen of Rochester, New York. The heart of the book consists of weaving drafts in eccentric formats ranging from modern (i.e. understandable to a present-day weaver) through condensed #1, #2 and #3 to “stacked” and another format called “ones”. In the conclusion, drawdowns of the Rose drafts are presented using custom software written in the days before weaving programs proliferated.

The truly noteworthy feature of The Weaving Roses is the drafts and the non-industrial textile history represented in them. The Roses in the book are brother and sister, William Henry Harrison Rose (1839—1913) and Elsie Maria Babcock Rose (d. 1926). They descended from handweaving ancestors on their mother’s side, the Northrup family, and both chose to continue that legacy even when mill-woven fabrics were readily available.

The Roses’ maternal grandparents, who died in 1822 and 1848, wove at home in Rhode Island and even had apprentices. Several great uncles were also weavers. One, called Weaver John, specialized in coverlets; another made looms. In the next generation, a Rose aunt, Hannah Northrup, owned a patented loom and another, Eunice, used a flax wheel.

The Northrups accumulated all the necessary weaving equipment throughout the 1800s and much of it was part of the Roses’ estate when they died in the early 1900s. Weaver Rose, as William was called, remembered names of the makers of many of these items. For example, his spool was made by Landworthy Pierce, a veteran of the American Revolution War. John Congdon made reeds and the Roses had 70 or 80 of them by the end of the 1800s.

Not only were these weaving tools revered and passed from Northrup generation to generation; stories accompanied many of them along with knowledge of the handweaving environment through the decades of their use. In 1898, Weaver Rose knew exactly how much several spinners and weavers produced in a day and how much they were paid for those products made 80 or 90 years earlier. “It took a woman one week to weave a coverlet 3 yards long and 2½ yards”; Slippery Eber, who died in the War of 1812, had a widow who “worked at spinning for 25 cents per day and supported herself and one son well on that wage.”

The house William and Elsie lived in was built for the family in 1816. It eventually grew to include the weaving loft, three rooms with a loom in each. One of the looms was made by Weaver Rose himself. William and Elsie lived and died in this house.

Throughout this multi-generational weaving history, weaving drafts were essential and the family treasured them at a time when mechanized weaving mills nearly eradicated small scale handweaving operations. The Roses had 245 drafts on cardboard, old newspaper, on the backs of advertisements for brooms or coffee—a haphazard but significant collection. The Roses kept their family drafts and also collected drafts from others as they were able to find them. They shared the drafts with anyone requesting them. Rose paid for drafts he found and was paid by others for his. Some of these drafts appear in Marguerite Davison’s groundbreaking A Handweaver’s Pattern Book first published in 1944. Check out p. 154 that shows Weaver Rose’s coverlet no. 60 and Weaver Rose no. 142. In fact, Rose dominates as the source of Davison’s large overshot drafts and is included in other sections as well.

The Weaving Roses of Rhode Island is concise even though it includes interesting contextual information. (The section on Rhode Island history doesn’t add much.) The drafts are carefully rendered and the idiosyncratic format of them explained so that a weaver today could reproduce the cloth Roses’ ancestors wove. There is an interesting bibliography that identifies some of the old weaving publications such as the Weaver’s Enterprise, 1893, from Battle Creek, Michigan and the The Weaver’s Herald and Household Magazine from 1899 published in Lyons, Kansas.

The Roses are one of the sturdy links in the chain of handweaving history from the earliest days of written drafts to today when we can access more drafts than we could weave in a lifetime. That The Weaving Roses of Rhode Island is odd is simply a reflection of its subjects who treasured the past and lived as their ancestors lived. While detailed information about their lives does not exist, enough remains and is captured in this slim little book to insure that the Northrup/Rose knowledge is secure for many generations of weavers to come.