E. W.”
Mr. Blair made the desired appointment, and Mr. Whittlesey’s letter bears the following endorsement in the Postmaster General’s handwriting:
“Somewhat mixed, but his heart is in the right place. Recommendation approved.”
Star, Washington, D. C.
HAND-LOOM WEAVING REVIVED
Seated on a thick oak plank, worn smooth and shiny by centuries of use as the seat of a hand loom, and with Mrs. Talbot seated on a similar plank in front of a second loom in the basement of his residence, No. 193 Power Street, Arnold G. Talbot, secretary of the Tockwotton Company, and well known in social circles of the East Side, has become a hand loom weaver. Side by side, with a light between them and another in each of the front corners of the little room, Mr. and Mrs. Talbot sit every week day evening and weave plain and pattern goods in silk, linen and cotton, on the looms and in the fashions of two centuries ago.
They do it partly for amusement and partly to satisfy an increasing demand for such goods as our grandmothers wove, among people with so much money that it is really doing them a service to separate them from some of it. They have what is probably the only hand loom establishment in this State, a practical exposition of the spread and possibilities of the modern arts and crafts movement. It is right in line with the present movement for hand work in wearing materials or house fabrics by those able to pay the necessarily increased cost.
In fact there are but few such establishments in this country. In the mountains of Kentucky hand weaving is still practiced, and the products of the mountaineers, handled through a semi-public institution, have a ready sale. In Massachusetts such goods are also selling. Mr. and Mrs. Talbot first thought of the possibilities of remunerative trade when they found a demand for hand weaving among friends who saw the results of their work of three hours every evening—from seven to ten o’clock—on the one loom with which they began work. Then they procured another loom in Johnston, the town from which the first one came, and set that up beside the one Mr. Talbot had bought as a curiosity. Now they have hired a Swede woman to come to work at the loom during the day. In Sweden all the girls are still taught in the country districts to operate a hand loom, and this woman has not been in this country long enough to forget what she was taught as a girl.
Mr. Talbot believes in old things. It is said by friends that there is nothing modern in his house except the present members of the family. He has one of the most strikingly beautiful mantels imaginable, taken from one of the old houses on South Main Street, in which the quality of the old town of Providence once lived, and his son and heir even sleeps in one of the trundle beds of song and story. So when a friend told him of the auction of goods of a collector of antiques in Johnston he went to the sale. No one else seemed to want the old hand loom there offered, so Mr. Talbot bought it, just for the sake of getting an unusual antique.
There must be many such looms in the garrets of the South County and other sections of the State, where they were shoved to one side half or three-quarters of a century ago, but few of them are set up and in working order as this one was. Mr. Talbot had the loom brought to his home and then started to put it together again. What he did not know about looms was vast and comprehensive, and Mrs. Talbot’s knowledge was equally vain. But together and with the help of a friend or two whose working idea of mechanics was as great as the Talbot willingness to learn, they finally had it set up in the room Mr. Talbot had used for his den. Then they went to work to learn how to run the thing.