I’ve been collecting archival information about my grandmother, Bessie Murray, and the Nova Scotia Tartan. I found this Macleans cover from 1957 in an old email from my dad, that I think really gets across the “tartanism” of the time. The tartan was just four years old at this point, and apparently, already plastered all over everything– thanks in large part to the initiative of premier Angus L. Macdonald.

Despite its name, Nova Scotia at this time, and since its founding was actually not predominantly Scottish. Apparently Ontario had a larger Scottish community. The Extremely Scottish version of Nova Scotia seems to have been largely an invention of tourism marketing, designed to capture the business of Americans seeking a “foreign” experience, without the hassle of going overseas. The province already had the rolling hills and the sea, and Bessie’s tartan arrived at just the right time to serve as an emblem for the movement, and increasingly, for the province itself.

Long before it was Nova Scotia, this place was home to the Mi’kmaq. The colonising settlers that arrived thereafter were not only from the UK, but also France (hello, Acadians) and Germany. It was also home to a significant number of Black loyalists, and workers from the Caribbean. So there are some people missing from this extremely white cover image. (Everyone’s hair even seems to be redder in the “after” image.)

For further reading on this topic, I’ve found a pair of very interesting articles, from historian Ian McKay, and art historian Hilary Doda. I’m sure I’ll return to them many times, as my research continues.

I asked my dad about it, and he said “it was a different time”– an incomplete statement, but I suppose not inaccurate. This particular issue of Canada’s biggest national magazine also included this two page opinion piece about how one guy finds all women dishonest. You would need to work in the manosphere to write a piece like this today!

Okay, so the times are not actually that different. But still, I think of my grandmother, an artist and master weaver, founding and running her business at the time, and I wonder just how she did it.

The post Tartan mania appeared first on Jill Murray.

Not so fast.

Not only do I not have yarn, but the loom is missing some parts, and I don’t know enough about looms to know what’s missing.

I momentarily wonder if I’ve made a huge mistake. What if I never figure out what this thing needs, and it turns out to be a lemon?

You Can Weave doesn’t have anything specific to say about what to do with the funky old loom you bought at a bike repair clinic. But I can pick out cases where Bessie and Mary have outlined what to do, if you don’t have exactly the thing you’re meant to have.

I’m especially fond of the illustrated explanation on page 20, suggesting how to make pegs out of an old broomstick, or a few plain metal bookends. (Bookends! How exciting. I’m not sure it’s easier to find plain metal bookends than pegs, in 2025.)

Weaving is an old technology. We can apparently find suggestions of weaving as far back as the paleolithic age, 27,000 years ago. It shows up in ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian art, the Inca civilization, and tombs from the bronze age, in China.

There’s no known causal link between all our cultures and learning to weave. It’s a primordial tech solution everyone figured out independently, in response to having both fibre, and a need to wrap something– usually people, either the living or the dead.

People have been improvising looms for centuries (and still do today), using whatever they had around, in whatever way made sense in their culture. Seen through that lens, my incomplete loom is a head start, not a hinderance.

How much of a head start do I have? Let’s evaluate.

A table loom mainly has the job of using multiple shafts to raise and lower x-axis strands of yarn on a z-axis, so that y-axis strands of yarn can be passed back and forth through it on the perpendicular, at user-defined intervals, to create an interlocking weave that becomes fabric. The x-axis strands must be held with tension, and they need to advance from the back to the front of the loom on rollers, so you can control your materials, and gather up your product.

How well your loom performs each of those functions has a bearing on the physical and aesthetic quality of the fabric produced. But it’s not the only factor. You, your ideas, skills, and consistency, are part of the equation. This relationship between person and machine is one I already know, from playing musical instruments, and operating an espresso machine. I’m comfortable with it.

My loom appears to have the most important bits. Maybe not in an ergonomic configuration, possibly not calibrated precisely, but fine for learning. My attention to the loom will become a third factor in what I’m able to make.

Now let’s take a look at the nonstandard features of this loom:

It doesn’t have levers to help raise and lower the shafts. It has four holes, and makeshift hooks. The previous owner appears to have been using yellow yarn to control the shafts. It seems like yarn would brake frequently and be fussy to use here.

The shafts also don’t have tracks to sit in. They just kind of dangle and bump into each other.

There’s no back beam. It has a big turny thing instead (technical term), which doesn’t seem to match any tutorials I can find so far. I think I can work with it, but the Big Turny Thing ™ also doesn’t have a brake. I’ll need to improvise something for tension.

The rods in front and back appear to be made of wooden dowling. I expect this means it will bend more than a metal rod, creating uneven tension, in places. And the front rod is attached to the front roller at uneven intervals.

It’s tempting to try to fix everything, but I don’t want to do that, before I understand how the machine works. I also read more than once, that many weavers fall so deeply into the hole of fixing or perfecting their looms, that the loom becomes the project and no weaving gets done.

This sounds exactly like something I would do, so I resolve not to do it. To brake the back roller (Big Turny Thing), I’ll experiment with various cords, bungees and wooden stakes until I find something that works. I’ll focus on improving the shaft control mechanism.

I work out a hack where I replace the yellow yarn with stronger-yet-terrible nylon cord from the dollar store, and loops of zip tie, so I can more easily hook and unhook the cords when I raise and lower the shafts.

This single fix takes me a couple of hours to orchestrate, after trying a few kinds of knot that don’t work. I ultimately have to melt the nylon a bit to get it to bind to itself and stop unwinding.

By the time I’m done, I’m equal parts tired, fed up, sweaty, and extremely satisfied with myself. I admire my work, and decide to name my loom Frankie. Frankie the Frankenloom.

Now all I need is yarn. And a shuttle. I order them, and wait.

You Can Weave – archives

• April 2025 (2)
• January 2025 (3)

The post You Can Weave: Meet Frankie, the Frankenloom appeared first on Jill Murray.

Weaver House calls the co-authors “two of Canada’s foremost professional weavers in the 1950-70’s.” My grandmother, Bessie was the president of the Halifax Weaver’s Guild (precursor to Atlantic Spinners and Handweavers), and is best known for creating the official Nova Scotia Tartan, which she apparently debuted in a display about sheep rearing at the 1953 Truro Exposition. She ran a busy weaving shop, and there are still Nova Scotian weavers around today, who remember her, as well as “the little boy who opened the door at the shop.” That would be my father, who was just a toddler at the time– the youngest of her five children.

You can read more about the tartan at the hub for Canadian Tartans, which is helpful, because outside of Nova Scotia, I bet that not many people are even aware that Canada has regional tartans.

Back to the book. YOU CAN WEAVE was published on New Year’s day, 1974, by McLelland Stewart. I would love to know more about why such an auspicious and inconvenient publication date was chosen. Did they think “let’s get it out there on a day when nothing is open and pre-launch promo will also be nearly impossible!” Did they forget that January 1 is New Year’s? Did they explicitly want it out after Christmas, even though it’s for children? Was there a big weaving to-do on the 5th? Did pub dates just not matter in 1974? I will have to investigate.

Bessie died when I was about five years old, so I never got to know her very well. My memories of her are mainly anchored around toys she made me and my brother– a dollhouse, a doll, and two sets of incredibly detailed doll-and-finger-puppet sets modeled after the Beatrix Potter books, Mrs. Tittlemouse, and Jemima Puddleduck.

For someone who created such an enduring icon, there isn’t an overwhelming amount written about her, or catalogued in archives either– though Dalhousie University apparently has a box of her correspondence from 1976-79 on file, and it’s intriguing to think I could read her own writing from around the time I was born.

And I do have this book, so let’s start there.

It’s dedicated to Natalie and Sheri Black, and to my cousins, Louise, Stephanie, Margo, Holly and Heidi. I can only speculate as to why my other cousins are not mentioned, so for now I assume it comes down to gender and birthdate.

The book opens with an Instructions page, which explains the book is designed for children and easy to follow. This, frankly, shocks me, because we had a copy of this book in the house growing up, and even as an early reader with a passion for making things, I must have passed it over a hundred times, never guessing it was intended for me.

The rest of the book is hand-illustrated, and printed in Bessie’s trademark handwriting. Its easy-to-followness hinges on a UX choice to print pertinent portions of the illustrations and their related text in red. (Pretty cool use of a 2-colour-process layout, actually.)

The jury is out on whether it’s actually easy to follow. This was a long time before the age of YouTube tutorials. Notably, the book has no advice on choosing a loom. It just says, quite suddenly on page 24, “Carry the warp to the loom carefully.” Presumably, you already have a loom, otherwise, why would you buy YOU CAN WEAVE? It’s an instructional protocol from a past time.

My initial reaction to many of the images and subsequent walls of red-painted text– math-laden pages on which nearly every term is apparently worthy of red, is panic.

There are so many things to measure, count, double check, tie and untie carefully. Warps and wefts, and pegs and clamps, and shuttles… Long before page 24, I am already starting to think it’s a miracle any of us wear clothes, let alone have the kind of additional internal resources that would avail us of things like the placemats and napkins that make up the early projects of YOU CAN WEAVE.

Something about the way my grandmother instructs weaving reminds me of the time my father told us (aged six and nine) that he was going to teach us to write codes to each other in binary because it’s easy. I absolutely can not ever remember exactly how binary works. COULD I WEAVE though? Could I?

When I was a teenager, painting and sewing and learning music, determined to figure out how to make everything I wanted to, our dear family friend, Katie Hastings, used to lovingly make fun of me. She’d come over for coffee with my mom, and perhaps ask me for advice on how to add an elastic to a skirt, or attach a ruffle, and if I didn’t know the answer– which was most of the time– I’d think it over and tell her about a book I’d seen at the library that might show the process. And then she’d hug me but laugh her head off. “A book, of course a book. It’s always a book.” I’d ask her why that was funny, and she’d say something like “because you think other people, can just figure any old thing out from a book!”

Well, it looks like I’ve met my match. It is called YOU CAN WEAVE, and my own grandmother wrote it.

I’m going to get myself a table loom.

I’m going to WEAVE. Possibly.

Maybe in the process, I can come to understand something about myself and my family better. Why are we like this?

Please stay tuned for whatever tangled mess I am about to make.

P.S. There are two copies of YOU CAN WEAVE currently for sale online, from a bookseller in Dartmouth, N.S., so you could actually get a copy for yourself if your inner crafty 70s child is interested!

You Can Weave – archives

• April 2025 (2)
• January 2025 (3)

The post You Can Weave appeared first on Jill Murray.