Stormy Weather. Polka Dot. Silver Glo. Popcorn Rug. Seventy years ago, names like these were attached to real scraps of cloth, tucked inside American weaving periodicals so that a reader could rub the fabric between finger and thumb before deciding to weave it. A guild in Texas has now put those swatches back to work.
Book cover for Inspiration from the 1950’s: Handwoven Swatch Periodicals. Three swatch booklets are also included with the book.
Becky Johnson, librarian for the Weavers and Spinners Society of Austin, was sorting fragile periodicals in a locked storage unit when she kept finding them: handwoven samples, some 70 years old, bound into newsletters and folios. With fellow member Mickey Stam, she began to plan a book: Inspiration from the 1950’s: Handwoven Swatch Periodicals. The collection spans three decades, but they settled on the 1950s, when handweavers were shaking off tradition.
Post-war prosperity put weavers into new suburban houses that needed curtains and upholstery, with table linens and cushions to follow. Synthetic yarns, developed to stand in for wool and silk during wartime restrictions, arrived in primary colours and neutrals, and texture began to overshadow structure. Overshot, the great coverlet pattern, was losing ground. In 1955, Elmer Wallace Hickman declared the traditional "done, re-done and over done".
Left: First magazine format for Shuttle Craft Portfolio Edition, January 1957. Top Right: Mary Meigs Atwater, Illustration. Shuttle Craft Guild Bulletin, September 1945.Bottom right: Mary Meigs Atwater (left). Courtesy of Mary Meigs Atwater Weaver’s Guild of Utah.
The book draws on four publications, among them the Shuttle Craft Handweaver's Bulletin Portfolio Edition, edited by Harriet Tidball, and Russell Groff's Warp and Weft and Drafts and Designs. Fourteen guild members each chose one or two swatches, researched them, presented their findings, then wove new versions. Copying was never the aim. The weavers asked whether a cloth would suit today's clothing or interiors better with a change of colour, a different yarn, a sturdier structure or a more sustainable fibre.
A selection of woven samples featured in Inspiration from the 1950’s: Handwoven Swatch Periodicals.
The chosen samples range widely: a baby blanket in shadow weave from 1953, a chiné or warp-painted cloth, a classical summer and winter, the Princess Margaret Rose tartan, a Danish brocade. Interpreting them took detective work. With little draft standardisation in the 1950s, instructions could be baffling, so the group redrew each design in a format familiar to weavers now. That alone opens the old cloths to anyone with a loom.
Original Instructions: Sample 7: Light-n-Airy, Warp and Weft, August 1950. As featured in the book.
The object itself is a rarity. The limited edition is hand bound in just 120 copies, each with twenty new swatches gathered in three booklets and slipped into a portfolio alongside the book. Members researched, wove, photographed and bound it all themselves. Paperbacks with digital images of the swatches will follow, but the woven edition is the one to hunt down. It has been available from the guild's website since 1 September 2026, and buyers outside the United States can write to guildbooks@wssaustin.org.
A swatch is a small cloth with a long memory. This project asks what an old weave might become next.
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Further Information:
The limited edition publication Inspiration from the 1950’s: Handwoven Swatch Periodicals is available now from the Weavers and Spinners Society, Austin.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Original Instructions, Sample 11. Four Block, Texture and Lace. Drafts and Designs, September 1958. As featured in Inspiration from the 1950’s: Handwoven Swatch Periodicals by Mickey Stam & Becky Johnson and the Weavers and Spinners Society of Austin Sample Study Group
All further images as credited in captions.