Weaving a Life: The Story of Mary Meigs Atwater

by Mary Jo Reiter and Veronica Patterson
Interweave Press, 1992, 208 pages

The name Mary Meigs Atwater (1878 – 1956) is well known to many weavers but knowledge of her specific contributions to weaving are often fuzzy. Mine were, so I was glad to find Weaving a Life: The Story of Mary Meigs Atwater.

The book begins with her autobiography, written when Mary was in her 70s, which covers her life up to 1918. After the death of her husband in 1919, what is known about her life is conveyed through her letters to relatives and weaving companions.     

Mary began weaving in 1916 in Basin, Montana. She says: “I did not know at that time how important weaving would become in my life.” She started on a small table loom and an industrial arts magazine but soon established the Shuttle-Craft Guild and Weaving Shop. This was a business Mary ran until selling it to Harriet Tidball in 1946. The business sold yarn; organized traveling weaving exhibits; taught classes on-site and through correspondence courses; published monographs, the monthly “Shuttle-Craft Bulletin”, and blueprints of drafts; and did any weaving-related activity that appealed to Mary. The Bulletin and many monographs can be viewed at Handweaving.net.

The book describes many of Mary’s weaving and other activities, including a failed stint as a beaver farmer. But to understand the extent of Mary’s contribution to weaving, one must know the status of non-industrial weaving in the United States in the first half of the 20th century and this the book does not address. Nor does it go into any detail about the content of the many bulletins or monographs that Mary wrote.

We know that she was a tireless teacher, that she received correspondence from would-be weavers from throughout the U.S., and that she wrote three books: A Book of Patterns for Handweaving: Designs from the John Landes Drawings in the Pennsylvania Musuem (1925); The Shuttle-Craft Book of American Hand-Weaving (1928, 1951), Recipe Book (1957) and Byways in Hand-Weaving (1954). Certainly the extent of her activities demonstrates a quick mind, very high energy level (she sometimes slept only four hours a night) and much busyness.

It looks to me as if she can be credited, along with Marguerite Davison and probably others I do not know, with compiling many long-forgotten weaving drafts and translating them into readable formats. Mary claims that in the early 1900s weavers did not know the “art of draft writing” and the only weave structure widely known was four harness overshot.

Through Mary’s research in museums and private collections and from publishing unsolicited drafts sent to her, she surely rendered a valuable service to weavers. I can attest to the value of her “translations” of J. and R. Bronson, for example. The Bronson drafts take quite awhile to comprehend so Mary’s studies of their publication (The Domestic Manufacturer’s Assistant and Family Directory in the Arts of Weaving and Dyeing, 1817) was very valuable. Plus she taught weaving through her Guild, at institutes, at universities and conferences. She believed that it was a weavers’ responsibility to share information and she did that, over and over again.

Her many activities are described in Weaving a Life and, even though there is little detail or introspection, it is still very interesting reading. I was especially touched by her description of her life with her husband, “a wife, not a partner”, although my heart ached for her. She lived many years longer than he did and in those years came into her own through her love for weaving.