colonial overshot manufacturer

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.

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.

It is a popular and well know weave structure with well known motif designs such as Honeysuckle, Snails trails, Cat’s Paw, Young lover’s knot and Maple leaf. Overshot means the weft shoots either over or under the warp.

The Treadling for Overshot is a 2/2 Twill. That is 1-2, 2-3, 3-4, 4-1. Overshot is woven with a thick pattern thread alternating with a thinner tabby thread. The pattern block may be repeated as many times as you like to build up a pleasing block. So it will be pattern thread, tabby a, pattern thread, tabby b. Lift 1 and 3 for tabby a and 2 and 4 for tabby b.

Monks belt, so called because a monks’ status in the monastery was indicated by the pattern woven on the belt is different from the other Overshots motifs as it is woven in 2 blocks on opposites. A block will be either 1 and 2, or 3 and 4. The pattern is created by the varying size of the blocks.

It is not difficult to design your own overshot pattern. A name draft is just one of the ways to do so. The above tablecloth was made by a group of weavers, each wove a square and many of them designed their own name drafts.

Is it old Colonial blankets, usually white background with blue, black or red wool pattern and large, large designs? A corner box with the weaver"s initials and a date.They bring to mind an image of early residents of colonial America and also the British Colonies, later to be called Upper and Lower Canada.

It is thought that overshot was brought over from Europe with the early arrivals to the New Land. Settlers brought many ideas and tools with them and adapted them to the new life here. With a colder climate and long winters, overshot blankets meant you had a thick stable cloth, woven on four shafts, that kept the sleeper warm and also served as a decorative bed covering.

I have seen some stunning coverlets quietly doing their job in movies: "The Patriot" with Mel Gibson and Heath Ledger. I had to watch it again and freeze frame the movie to get a good look! It was a natural setting for a colonial coverlet. The coverlet that was wrapped around Dakota Fanning in "War of the Worlds", featuring Tom Cruise was a pleasant surprise! Are you one of those weavers who"s eye scans movie scenes for textiles and gets excited when you spot something handwoven ?

Lets get back to our weaving with overshot and some of the basics with the four shaft variety. I need to point out here that these are simple guidelines and by no means complete. Just a small primer to pique your interest. I will post reading / study material list at the end. These notes are based on an overshot study I undertook some years ago.

Most new weavers are introduced to overshot at an early newbie weaver stage and usually start with a draft from Marguerite Davison"s classic: A Handweaver"s Pattern Book.Itsstill available to purchase after all these years. The drafts in this book are for sinking shaft looms such as counterbalance looms. You can flip the tie up for jack looms. If you don"t, it means you will be weaving the pattern upside down, which isn"t a problem but it would be nice to see the front as you weave. This little detail would make it confusing for new weavers starting on overshot for the first time, in addition to handling two shuttles!

Overshot is a twill derivative using two threads to create a unit block. This means you can have four blocks on four shafts. One thread in each block, is shared by the next block. This one thread in common creates half units in between blocks of either all pattern or all tabby. (This can be expanded through to eight shafts but we"ll stick with four shafts for this post) See what I mean by this in the picture below:

Overshot is actually two pieces of cloth, being woven simultaneously; one is a tabby or plain weave cloth, the second is the pattern that "over-shoots" the plain weave. You throw one shuttle for the plain weave and a second shuttle for the pattern weft, beating *very* firmly between each shot. If you were to take away the pattern weft, you would find a perfectly balanced 50/50 plain weave cloth. The pattern weft should compact well but be "lofty" to cover and produce blocks of solid colour with no plain weave peeking through. Normally the pattern weft is twice the size of the tabby yarn. Traditionally, cotton for tabby and with wool for pattern.

I keep the "odd" tabbies of treadles one and three to enter from the left hand side, and the "even" tabbies of treadles two and four from the right hand side. Also I work with both shuttles, tabby and weft, on one side of the warp. If you end up with divided shuttles then you have a treadling error to find!. The shuttles can be awkward to coordinate at first but you soon develop a rhythm. Be aware that many overshot drafts may say "use tabby" but don"t show it in the treadling. Then there are some that don"t mention the tabby at all. They are assuming you know to insert it.

The majority of overshot is woven "as drawn in" which means you repeat the exact threading as your treadling. Old drafts say "tromp as writ" which is the same thing.

Twill fashion is where you treadle a block over again to produce exact squares. This may be more repeats than is in the threading. You can also follow twill treadlings such as: rosepath ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 4, 3, 2, 1), point twill (1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 1) , or broken twill (1, 2, 4, 3). Its then called overshot treadled as rosepath, or treadled as summer and winter. There are many other ways to vary the treadling and these all make very pretty borders! The following examples are from my first level of the Guild of Canadian Weavers Test. I took portions of the treadling and created these border patterns. They had to have a purpose for being woven. Click to enlarge...

When designing overshot patterns you can place many identical units together and then continue through to other blocks but the turning point block in your design will have an uneven number of threads. When treadling, the turning blocks are treadled one extra repeat.

So besides bed coverlets, what else can you make with overshot? I have seen beautiful modern looking table runners, scarves, overshot style borders on placemats and towels. I saw a beautiful (apparently) plain weave table cloth that had inlaid overshot motifs scattered like stars! They looked like snowflakes on the royal blue cloth.

I always thought it would be a neat challenge to weave overshot and have it look totally modern and comfortable in today"s home. ( Its on my "to-do" list..)

So if you have followed me through to this point and are now thinking it might be nice to try some overshot study yourself. Perhaps try inventing some borders for towels? Here are a few books on overshot that are on my library shelf:

Water has been used to power simple and complex mills since antiquity. In colonial America, mills were powered by wooden waterwheels, but as technologies and manufacturing changed during the 19th century, water turbines began to be used more and more. In the period of 1850-1880 dozens of American manufacturers made cast iron turbines of nearly every conceivable configuration. Turbines could be readily ordered in different sizes that were suited for the specific water flow, shafting, and gearing needed for a particular mill. Turbines aren’t as susceptible to reduced flow when the water levels in the turbine pit are high or flooded. Perhaps best of all, turbines were iron and therefore did not require constant repair of a wooden waterwheel that began to rot from intermittent soaking even before installation was complete.

Welcome to Episode 25 – Historical Weaving. When you think of weaving in colonial times, do you imagine a farm wife sitting by the fire weaving on her loom? Come learn the truth about the weaving in early America from noted weaver and historian, Marjie Thompson. After that we’ll talk with Fireside Fiber Arts, a modern day loom manufacturer who manages to bring old world charm to their looms through custom wood carvings. In the end essay, Finishing Matters, I talk about a little problem I’m having with my weaving and the reason I envy 18th century weavers.

MT The other one is that in every house there was a loom, sitting right there next to the fireplace, and in every spare minute of the day the colonial housewife was sitting there weaving.

I’ve seen the notebooks where they are working on one and they’re coming down, and they’ve got it, it’s working beautifully, to turn it into four shaft float work – overshot – and they get to the point and it’s combined blocks and it won’t work and there’s a big “X” through it and it says “won’t work, do not print”.

Our musical guest this episode was Tris McCall with his song “Colonial Williamsburg”. Tris generously makes his work available on the PodSafe Music Network.

Overshot is one of those magic structures that appeals to both historical-minded weavers and thoroughly modern ones alike. Whether you want to re-create historical coverlets or create something stylish and new, overshot has you covered. As both a former historian and a millennial, I love all aspects of overshot, and if you’re like me, you’ll love our new eBook featuring ten 4-shaft overshot projects from the past decade of Handwoven.

When choosing projects for this new eBook, we wanted to let weavers see the progression of American overshot weaving. You’ll find projects based on traditional designs and drafts of old, projects featuring the miniature overshot of Bertha Gray Hayes, and wonderful—and modern—interpretations of this timeless weave structure. When you weave through the projects in this book, you get to weave through history.

Of course, you don’t have to take my word for it; just take a look at some of the fabulous projects featured within! There’s the fabulous Prim Rose Table Runner by Norma Smayda and Ann Rudman based on a draft from Weaver Rose, the Wandering Vine Table Runner from Tom Knisely (this also happens to be my all-time favorite Tom Knisely project, which is saying something), Tracy Kaestner’s Sweet Little Wedding Towels that pay homage to that famous weaver of “little” overshot, Bertha Gray Hayes, and oh, so much more.