On this cold February day in Newbury, VT, Justin was starting something special. He took a worn pair of shears off his work bench and slowly cut down the line of fabric taught across the loom. It was the last of the most recent run of coverlets titled “Campbell’s Rose and Stars”. A coverlet like this, big enough for a queen bed, would take around five days of dedicated effort sitting at the sometimes cantankerous and fickle loom, tending to the mechanical intricacies and issues that come up along the way. What came next was the culmination of a year of work. Justin placed the newest cards over the Jacquard head. The holes punched looked like an oversized paper ballot or the instructions for an antique player piano printed on a heavy cardstock, covered in wax to protect them from the mechanical process, and it was hard to see how these would translate to anything as intricate as what would come next. Justin had closely studied images of a pattern not made since 1840, one with few surviving examples, and reconstructed the pattern by hand, a meticulous process. Then he and Andrew worked to punch the cards before lacing them together with thread. Finally, after a year of work, Justin threw the shuttle across the loom for the first time, operating the loom and the head with worn, rough-hewn wood treadles suspended above the worn wood floors and attached by thick twine to the loom. The jarring bang of both the Jacquard head and the old, massive loom became an unhurried, methodical rhythm. Slowly, over the course of a half an hour, the design’s words became readable on the coverlet. It’s a motto that Justin has held dear to his heart and one that he’s excited to start seeing again and again as he weaves.

“Agriculture & Manufactures are the Foundation of our Independence”