Margo W Hanson - Weaving

Weaving and Looms

In 1973-4 when we lived on Washington Island, WI my fellow teacher, Tom Sykes, offered a night class for adult women to learn woodworking. The project was for each to build a 4-harness table loom. Tom recruited me to help as he thought that using power saws and such needed some extra hovering for folks unfamiliar with them. Maybe 10 folks signed up and both Margo and I built nice looms from a design by Walter Schutz, a retired engineer type whose wife was into weaving and so he started designing looms as a hobby. The class was fun, the looms were quite wonderful and Margo got hooked.

The next three years we lived in a tiny town on Hwy 8 over on the far east part of WI where Margo bought two more looms, one a folding 6 harness one that needed a little repair from me, and another a 2 harness rug making loom from a man in his 90s who had made it and used it to make rugs from old bread bag wrappers as a hobby and to make a little money. He had two. Both cost about $100.

Margo had Scott the fall we went to Goodman, and stayed home those three years with him and the weaving got to be her hobby. With the big loom she could weave 4 foot wide cloth. For those of you who are not familiar with looms, with a 6-harness one you can weave unbelievably complex patterns. She did mostly wool yarn and made coverlets, table runners, wall hangings etc.

Margo made this on the 6-harness floor loom.

Weaving the pattern above is done by threading the 4 harnesses correctly, connecting the foot pedals to the correct harnesses and then pedaling them to the pattern in the "musical score" below.

Margo bought this 2-harness loom made by an old man in the Michigan upper peninsula when we lived in Goodman, WI in the mid 1970s. He had two looms, and at age 92 was cutting back to one. He made some extra retirement money making house entry rugs made from cotton warp and old plastic bags like bread wrappers. He had been a miner and told us the story of when the river broke through into the mining tunnel below. Margo used this to make rag rugs. It was made from 2x4s and 2x6s, crude, but easy to use. We have it in the barn, stored away.

At Pine Island, Margo enlists neighbor boy Mike Curlie, to help her thread the rug loom. It took patience to thread 100s of cotton strings thorugh tiny heddle openings and through the reed. Then one could weave maybe 100 feet of rugs.

An almost endless number of weaving patterns could be made on a 6-harness loom. Here she had used 4 of the 6 harnesses to make a pattern. One could design their own or find 1000s of them in books on weaving. Computer programs are available to help design and look at new patterns. We tried some of that too. The brown warp threads are all the same color here, but one could have varied that too. The weft or woof are the yellow cross threads and one could vary those too. Margo made many different patterns and many different colors and sold most of them as table runners, sometimes making fancy wool bed coverlets etc. It was a way of making money from a hobby that she enjoyed.