My Mother's Hand-woven Skirt and Vest

My grandmother once told me that, before she got married she had to have a "hope chest" full of sheets and towels she had woven by herself - enough to meet the needs of a small household over the winter months, when sheets and towels weren't laundered. She smiled at the memory - it was so easy to simply go out and buy towels and sheets in Canada fifty years later, in the 1950s! And she could wash and dry bed linens even in winter!

Spinning and weaving, essential skills for any woman when she was young, had in 50 years become a lost art: none of her children had learned them.

But a few years after she died, my mother began to teach a course in hand crafts. And before long, she had taken up spinning and weaving, in order to teach them to her students. My grandfather lived to see my mother's interest in spinning and weaving. In fact, he even made her the spinning wheel pictured above. My father, a self-taught mechanic and inventor, also made her one, using a modified bicycle wheel rather than a wooden wheel. (I don't have that one: it was donated to a weaving and spinning guild in Kelowna when my parents moved into their Bernard Avenue condo.)


















My mother also had a large weaving loom in the back porch of their last house. They sold it when they downsized. I do, however, still have a few small table runners I made on it (like the one above), as well as some larger items my mother made.



















The most impressive thing she ever wove was this skirt and vest. The product of a weaving course she took one summer, it must now be over 30 years old. She wove the fabric (no doubt with the end product in mind), then she sewed it into this wearable outfit. I wonder if she spun and dyed the wool as well. Spinning and dying yarn were skills she also taught.

For my mother, this was a hobby - but, to think - back in my grandmother's day, at the end of the 19th century, weaving was an essential skill! Most clothes were hand-woven (or knit) by family members!