overshot rug factory

Overshot is a weave structure traditionally used for patterning coverlets. It is wonderful for table runners and placemats and other applications where a decorative fabric can be used. Pillows and throws can be woven using overshot and with the proper yarns and careful planning overshot works well as a tough little scatter rug. If you have never woven overshot before this is a great first time introduction to this weave structure. Students will weave rugs on pre-warped looms. Each student will be able to weave two small rugs. The looms will be threaded to two different overshot patterns. One group will be threaded to Star of Bethlehem and the others to a single Snowballs pattern. You can choose to weave on one loom for both rugs, or trade with another students to weave a rug in a different pattern. Either way you will love your rugs. All materials included with tuition.

Overshot: The earliest coverlets were woven using an overshot weave. There is a ground cloth of plain weave linen or cotton with a supplementary pattern weft, usually of dyed wool, added to create a geometric pattern based on simple combinations of blocks. The weaver creates the pattern by raising and lowering the pattern weft with treadles to create vibrant, reversible geometric patterns. Overshot coverlets could be woven domestically by men or women on simple four-shaft looms, and the craft persists to this day.

Summer-and-Winter: This structure is a type of overshot with strict rules about supplementary pattern weft float distances. The weft yarns float over no more than two warp yarns. This creates a denser fabric with a tighter weave. Summer-and-Winter is so named because one side of the coverlet features more wool than the other, thus giving the coverlet a summer side and a winter side. This structure may be an American invention. Its origins are somewhat mysterious, but it seems to have evolved out of a British weaving tradition.

Multi-harness/Star and Diamond: This group of coverlets is characterized not by the structure but by the intricacy of patterning. Usually executed in overshot, Beiderwand, or geometric double cloth, these coverlets were made almost all made in Eastern Pennsylvania by professional weavers on looms with between twelve and twenty-six shafts.

America’s earliest coverlets were woven in New England, usually in overshot patterns and by women working collectively to produce textiles for their own homes and for sale locally. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s book, Age of Homespun examines this pre-Revolutionary economy in which women shared labor, raw materials, and textile equipment to supplement family incomes. As the nineteenth century approached and textile mills emerged first in New England, new groups of European immigrant weavers would arrive in New England before moving westward to cheaper available land and spread industrialization to America’s rural interior.

Southern coverlets almost always tended to be woven in overshot patterns. Traditional hand-weaving also survived longest in the South. Southern Appalachian women were still weaving overshot coverlets at the turn of the twentieth century. These women and their coverlets helped in inspire a wave of Settlement Schools and mail-order cottage industries throughout the Southern Appalachian region, inspiring and contributing to Colonial Revival design and the Handicraft Revival. Before the Civil War, enslaved labor was often used in the production of Southern coverlets, both to grow and process the raw materials, and to transform those materials into a finished product.

I am planning to weave Tom Knisely’s Overshot Rug (March/April 2007, pages 32–34). His warping instructions are for front-to-back warping, but I usually warp back to front (I’m a new weaver, though, so would be willing to learn other methods for how to warp a loom).

The warp of the overshot rug is all one color with one working end (2 strands used together) of 8/4 cotton. Since each doubled end is sleyed 1/dent, warping should be very simple and straightforward no matter which method is used.

Super color and complex graphics in a pattern I have had only once or twice before, suggesting it was either published for people to hooked themselves or was available custom hooked through a rug company cataloque. Angled motifs joining the alternating pattern squares look like paddles and add a dynamic quality

RM2A2K2NR–Coverlet, 1825/35, United States, Cotton and wool, plain weave with supplementary patterning wefts (overshot), one loom width, 225 x 114.3 cm (88 x 45 in