Weaving school teaching old technique finds new home in Upper Valley

NEWBURY, Vt. — On a recent warm Thursday morning, four students at the Newbury School of Weaving were performing an activity once so common it would have been widely understood: They were “dressing” looms in preparation to start weaving.

Two of the students were working in wool, making blankets, and two were working in linen, to make kitchen cloth. A dressed loom is set up with long strands of yarn or thread, called the warp, ready for the weaver to run a shuttle back and forth with the weft fibers, which are pressed together in the warp to make cloth.

“We don’t, at this school, do that set-up for people,” Justin Squizzero, the weaving school’s director, said while standing among the looms.

“Everyone packs their own parachute,” he added.

The Newbury School of Weaving isn’t exactly new, but it’s current location is. Founded in Marshfield, Vt., in 1975, what was known as the Marshfield School of Weaving moved to Newbury last year. The school had lost its lease in Marshfield.

Squizzero, a Newbury resident since 2016, heard from someone in town that he should talk to the Newbury Woman’s Club, which since the 1970s has owned the Old Village Church, on the common next to the elementary school. The club rented the church, which was built in 1829, to the weaving school.

The looms that stand in rows under the church’s vaulted roof date from around the same period, from the late 1700s through the 1800s. The form of weaving that the school teaches originated in Western Europe in the 1100s, Squizzero said. Students attend from around the country, and to an extent from around the world, to learn how to weave the way their not-so-distant forebears would have seen it. Thread and fabric are the inescapable metaphors here, signifying connection and the making of civilization out of the unruliness of natural materials.

The school teaches between 150 and 200 students a year. “The most common thread … is a desire to learn traditional weaving techniques on this traditional equipment,” Squizzero said. “There isn’t another place, certainly in North America, that teaches this.”

Practical work

Learning the old ways of weaving was the reason Katie Logue drove to Newbury from Temple, Texas, for a month-long class. She had just left a corporate job in product design and was eager to get back to weaving.

When she studied textiles at Savannah (Ga.) College of Art and Design, she was taught to use looms that are computer controlled, making her as much a programmer as a weaver. But she also has a loom that her great-great-grandmother used to weave rag rugs. The older, manual process of using a 19th-century loom is less an art than a craft.

“To me, it’s kind of less about getting artsy and super-creative,” Logue said in a phone interview from Texas. The work is instead practical and durable, she said.

Logue, 36, is originally from Illinois and it was there that she put her great-great-grandmother’s loom back together and used it to make a baby blanket for her step-sister.

The recent month-long class that Logue and another participant, Jackie Benowitz, of Brooklyn, N.Y., took is called Fleece to Fulling and takes participants through the entire process, from newly sheared sheep to a finished woolen blanket. Spinning, dyeing and weaving to the final fulling, or waulking, which cleans and tightens up the finished fabric.

“I feel good,” Logue said. “It’s a labor of love. It’s a memory for me more than anything.” The work is unrelentingly physical, and Logue struggled to put it into words.

“It’s about the process for me, more than the product,” she said.

Logue took classes in Marshfield, too. The Newbury location is more spacious, she said, and less remote.

Introduction to weaving

Last Thursday, the class of four students who were dressing their looms worked in 19th century quiet. The church’s big windows were propped open and a cross-breeze relieved the heat. The church has no ventilation system, so the school operates only from May through October.

Approaching the end of the week-long Foundations, or introductory weaving, class, students are up against it, but also are about to start weaving after hours of daunting and detailed preparation.

The weaving itself is “sort of the gravy at the end,” Squizzero said.

Student Roger Saint-Laurent, a Nova Scotia resident, was still setting up his loom and was so intent on his work, using a hook to pull linen threads into the loom, that he couldn’t talk to a visitor.

“I wish I could answer some of your questions,” he said. “I’m just in a jam.”

He had to step out of the loom to watch as Squizzero demonstrated how to load a pirn, a slim bobbin at the center of a shuttle, with thread. He and another student recorded the demonstration with their phones.

“Your first pirns will be ugly,” Squizzero said. “That’s OK. You’re going to make a lot of ugly pirns.”

Ugly or not, attention to winding the pirn was essential, he said. “A poorly wound pirn will affect your cloth.”

Maike Fillmer had set up her loom to produce linen that would be used for making napery — kitchen goods such as napkins or aprons. Squizzero checked over her work, making sure the heddles, which determine the pattern, were square to the loom, and that the treadles, the foot pedals that move the heddles up and down, were fastened property. After Fillmer made some fixes, Squizzero sat down at the loom to demonstrate how to get started.

As he passed the shuttle back and forth, each time depressing two of the treadles in a sequence that produces the cloth’s pattern, Squizzero fell into an easy rhythm. As with any complex task performed by someone with expertise, it looked at once simple and impressively difficult. He produced a couple of inches of fabric, then showed the students how to use a temple, which keeps the cloth stretched to the right width as it lengthens on the loom.

Anyone who’s going to weave at the Newbury School, regardless of their prior experience, has to take this basic class, “because the historic equipment and methods we use are not taught anywhere else,” the school’s website says. Tuition for the week-long class is $750.

Many of the school’s looms still bear tags with the letters ATHM on them. The American Textile History Museum, in Lowell, Mass., closed in 2016, heavily in debt. Many of the museum’s looms — useful ones that were in storage, rather than precious artifacts — made their way to Marshfield and then to Newbury.

“The thing that I consider one of our big strengths,” Squizzero said, is that “none of these looms are identical. … Because they’re all slightly different, the thing we’re teaching here is principle.”

Most of the looms came from New England and New York. The most ornate loom, oddly, was made by Shakers, a sect known for their love of simplicity, in Canterbury, N.H. It’s made of tiger maple.

Family threads

Students attend for a range of reasons, often because of a link to an ancestor who wove and handed down a loom.

“I obtained a loom from a school that was closing,” Brigette Manspeaker, 36, a student from Los Angeles, said during a break from setting up her loom. “I’m here trying to learn how to use it.”

Her family roots are in Central America, and visits to Mexico and Guatemala sparked her interest in weaving. She works as a physician’s assistant in women’s health. She suspects she’ll come back to Newbury for more classes.

Fillmer, a 33-year-old Utah resident, was born in Germany, where her great-grandparents grew flax for spinning. Everyone in her family knits, and she’s a student of textile history.

“I’ve been wanting to take this class for two or three years,” she said. She hopes to return to take the Fleece to Fulling class.

Squizzero’s own family dates back to the 1660s in Hatfield, Mass. A grandmother in Connecticut was a spinner, weaver, knitter and dyer. He got an 18th- or 19th-century loom as a teenager.

What he likes about the school is that it removes weaving from “the pedestal of the museum.” As a craft, it will continue only if people learn and practice it.

Students come in from Newbury Elementary School, next door, Squizzero, 37, said. The next generation of weavers is out there.

“My successor is probably in third or fourth grade right now,” he said.

The long and deliberate view of material life and culture is a kind of antidote to our dominant throwaway culture.

“We interact with cloth every day and we have no idea how it gets to us,” Emma Geddes, who moved from Oregon to work at the school as an instructor and office manager after taking classes there.

“The U.S. used to have a massive linen industry,” Geddes, 36, said, noting that it was gone not long after World War II. “People had sheep, everybody knew a weaver, everybody knew a spinner. … In less than 100 years, that’s gone.”

After the first class she took at the weaving school, she went back to Oregon with a blanket she’d made. She showed it to a colleague at the radio station where she was working as creative director. A few days later, the colleague came back in with a blanket her great-great-grandmother had made in Scotland “and it was almost identical,” Geddes said.

“It’s just such a different way of thinking about stuff.”

Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.