Morning Has Broken
My sister Jean was a very competent spinner and weaver. She started her spinning journey in Wales, to where she was evacuated in WWII. She was staying with my mother’s family in Ogmore Vale, South Wales and in those days everyone walked everywhere. Every time she came across bits of fleece from the local Welsh Mountain ewes attached to fences and brambles, she collected it and taught herself to spindle spin, using a stick and a potato.
Fast forward to the mid 1960s and she was living in Dorset (UK), a teacher, and in her ”spare” time a spinner, with eyes on getting a weaving loom. She was an active member of the Dorset Guild of Weavers Spinners & Dyers which met in Dorchester, and also belonged to a local group of spinners meeting regularly in a nearby village.
In due time she acquired several looms, including one large floor loom, which was set up in her workshop.
By this time, Jean had prepared and spun fleece from various breeds of sheep, making scarves and “twit” hats (I think they are called “beanies” these days) from Jacob fleeces. She progressed through various types of tops purchased from Wingham Woolwork on several of their visits to the Guild bringing with them vast amounts of their stock. These were a wonderland of opportunity to see and purchase all sorts of ready prepared and blends of fibres, not easily seen unless you lived in Yorkshire. In those days fleece and fibre festivals were only a glint in wholesalers’ eyes! I do remember that she spun and wove sufficient Welsh Black and silk tops into a length of fabric large enough for me to make her a skirt.
Eventually Jean turned to spinning silk tops with the idea of making sufficient fabric for a jacket.
At about that time the idea of using music as a basis for fabric design was circulating amongst the weaving fraternity. There were articles in the Journal – the magazine produced by the Association of Guilds of Weavers Spinners and Dyers – and also the American magazine Handwoven. Jean decided that she would design the fabric for the jacket by making a threading draft and subsequently a draw down based on the hymn “Morning is Broken”.
I daresay that these days there will be umpteen video clips on YouTube with step by step instructions on how to do this. It is a bit complicated to explain unless you’ve got a couple of hours – especially if you haven’t done much in the way of weaving on a loom with a minimum of 4 shafts. Basically you assign each letter of the alphabet to each shaft in turn, having numbered the shafts 1-4. The simplest “code” is AEIMQUY = shaft 1; BFINRVZ = shaft 2; CGKOSW = shaft 3; DFILPTX = shaft 4.
Then you translate your phrase or title into numbers accordingly. However, just to make life more difficult, you can’t have the letters on the same shaft adjacent to each other (don’t ask) so you need to add a different shaft number between them. This gives the threading sequence on the loom for the warp threads.
To see what your phrase will look like when woven, you can draft it out on a piece of graph paper, making what is called a draw down. This will have on it not just the threading sequence but also the lifting sequence of the shafts when you are actually weaving the fabric.
I don’t have the draw down which Jean made for her fabric, but I do have some which I made when we were playing around with other ideas and making name drafts.
I suppose it must be possible to look at a woven pattern and work out the words the pattern represents. Perhaps this is one way that textiles may have been used to pass secret messages, though it’s not likely to be a quick way of getting information back to base!
Anyway, Jean designed her draft and draw down for Morning Has Broken and dressed her large floor loom so that the pattern would appear in bands throughout the fabric she wanted to weave.
Once the fabric had been removed from the loom and any loose ends woven in, Jean passed it to a friend who had offered to make up the jacket. In the meantime, Jean used some of the left over yarn to make some lengths of kumihimo  braid. From this braid I made some “Monkey Fist” buttons and braided fastenings sewn onto the jacket fronts. Unfortunately the jacket, not having been lined, did not really hang properly or keep it’s shape. Jean asked me to take it apart and, using habotai silk as a lining, put it together again, which I did and included some hand made shoulder pads.
  
 
 I tried to take different angles to show the range of effects.
 This photo show how fluffy that mohair really is!
 When I tried on the scarf, I realised that I had made it a little too wide to make it into a comfortable scarf. So it was at this point, I decided that rather than using it as a scarf, it would work better as a stole. However, this now presented me with another need…
 I did try to add some sequins as way of creating more sparkle, but as they were so small, I found them difficult to sew on (my fingers are not so nimble as they used to be!). I tried gluing them in place, but that didn’t work either! So in the end, I just left him as he was. I do intend making him some antennae, but I haven’t had time to add those in yet. He is attached to a large kilt pin, so he can be used to hold the stole in place.
    