Calico Bush by Rachel Field

Author:Rachel Field [Field, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780027346107
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 1987-03-30T07:00:00+00:00

Now she was showing the girl how to go about the “beaming” or “drawing through.” This was a long and difficult piece of work, requiring more than one pair of hands to pass the thread through the teeth of the long wooden “rake” that ran across the middle beam. Each thread must be drawn separately through an opening which the old lady called “the harness eye,” and must be set according to the draft or pattern. Marguerite could make nothing of this. It seemed to be a series of strange dots and dashes in faded pen strokes on a sheet of worn, brown paper.

“It looks like magic,” she told her hostess seriously.

“Well, it ain’t,” smiled the other. “Every one of these here marks is as plain to me as the foreign gibberish you know how to talk.”

Marguerite turned to with a will. She had taken her place on a low bench in front of the loom where she could receive the thread ends as they came through the harness eyes. At first she was clumsy at the handling; her thumbs got in the way, and she dropped or confused the threads. But soon she grew more skillful. Her brown fingers moved surely and steadily. She hardly ever missed the strands as the other passed them through to her.

“This here’s goin’ to be ‘Whig Rose’ pattern,” Hepsa explained, “for a good warm winter spread. That reddish wool I dyed from sassafras bark will go good with the bay-leaf yellow.”

“But how do you make the pattern, Aunt Hepsa?” The twins left their winding to draw near.

“You’ll see when the time comes,” she told them. “I do it with my foot on this treadle. That raises or lowers the warp threads—so.”

“You ’n me, we make a good team,” she said during a pause as she bent to splice two ends of thread. “I expect we could weave an’ spin our fingers to the bone without ever tirin’.”

“I do expect so,” Marguerite acquiesced with a little sigh, “if it was not that I am a Bound-out Girl.”

“You won’t be one always,” Aunt Hepsa told her comfortingly. “You’ll be marryin’ with a home of your own before long.”

“I belong to the Sargents for six years yet,” she reminded the other. “Many things can happen in six years.”

“There’s no denyin’ that, but when you’re as old as I be, you get to take whatever comes along.” She fastened the threads before she went on in a different tone. “But one thing’s certain—you need a pair o’ shoes, an’ I mean to see you have ’em.”

That was a day to remember, with the sweet smells, the good food, the wonder of seeing the colored strands of wool turning into patterns of firm, warm cloth under Aunt Hepsa’s hands, the setting up of the smaller loom to make linsey-woolsey cloth for them all. This was a simpler matter, involving no special pattern, for the wool would be woven on linen warp in its natural state with only a darker thread at intervals to give it a grayish color.

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