TRURO — Donna McLaughlin used to think of herself as a quilter. The colorful products of that particular penchant are draped over the couch and hang on the walls of her small summer place in Truro. McLaughlin’s mother was a tailor. “I knew how to sew,” she says. “But after a while, everybody had enough quilts.”
She decided to try something different after she retired six years ago from her career as a speech pathologist. The Windham Textile and History Museum (the Mill Museum) in Willimantic, Conn., where McLaughlin lives when she’s not in Truro, was offering a weaving class taught by master weaver Peggy Church. McLaughlin took it three times. The first time, she says, she thought weaving wasn’t for her. By the third time, she was a weaver.
“I had made things with fabric,” she says. “Now I was making the fabric.”
She’s intrigued by all the steps in the process: “Some weavers not only make the fabric, they raise the flax — the flower that linen comes from.” For now, McLaughlin buys commercially available color-fast cotton, mostly from France. And with that unmercerized cotton thread — a durable, absorbent material — she weaves the soft, colorful kitchen towels that got the attention of Provincetown shopkeeper Jay Gurewitsch, whose store, Arcadia, features handmade goods.
“I love color,” says McLaughlin. The towels are “little palettes,” she says. Sky blue is laced with white; rainbow colors in their palest versions interact like wildflowers in a field; wine red transitions into a sunset of purples, pinks, and oranges.
McLaughlin’s granddaughters, who are 8 and 10 years old, are learning to weave now, too, she says. For her birthday they gave her a book that consolidates the weaves she uses. It’s called “Granny the Great’s Glorious Gorgeous Goodies.” They’ve dubbed one of her towels, a piece split down the middle into halves of red and yellow, “Ketchup and Mustard.”
She weaves the pieces in Willimantic on her looms, of which she has four — they’re too big to bring with her to Truro. Before the yarn gets there, however, she puts the threads onto a warping reel, where she measures out the material.
When you buy sheets, they might be 200 threads per inch, she says; the threadcount of her towels ranges from 18 to 26 threads per inch. For a towel that is 20 threads per inch with a desired width of 20 inches, she needs to use 400 threads. After she’s measured out the material on her warping reel, she’ll move it to the loom.
“The next step is for me to thread 400 heddles — the little eyes that each thread has to go through, so it knows when it’s going to be lifted,” she says. For each different weave — the basic “plain weave,” the diagonal “twill,” the visually interesting “m’s and o’s” — the pattern of over and under is different.
“One of the things that was hard for me at first is that weaving is so labor-intensive,” says McLaughlin. “There are so many ways you can go wrong.” The setting up of the weave, she estimates, takes about a third of the time. Actually weaving — throwing the shuttle, pushing down the treadles with her feet to lift the shafts — takes another third, and finishing the piece by trimming, hemming, and sealing in the color takes the final third.
But now she says she finds “the whole process is very peaceful,” though “weaving is not lucrative.” But what she sells covers the cost of her threads and guarantees that she doesn’t end up with a pile of towels in some closet or on the floor. She makes about 20 towels a month.
“My sister thinks they’re too good to use,” she says of the finished pieces. “They are good, but it’s great to have things that are nice and to use them. What are you saving them for?”
She’s not an artist either, she says, “by any stretch of the imagination.” Instead, she’s proudly a craftsperson. “I like the craft of something that you can get really good at, very exacting, and have it turn out the way you want it to turn out,” she says.
Her favorite part of the whole weaving process, she says, is finishing a piece. “I had the idea to put this together,” she says to herself, “and it worked.”