Southern Appalachian Digital Collections

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Weave pattern: Blue Bell

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Item
  • These two watercolor drawdowns and two drafts, dating from the early 1900s, illustrate a weave pattern known as Blue Bell. To record a pattern, a weaver creates a draft and/or a drawdown. A draft looks much like a strip of musical notation; a drawdown is a visual grid that illustrates a single weaving block. These drawdowns were made by Frances Louisa Goodrich (1856-1944), who recorded weaving patterns she collected in and around Asheville, North Carolina. A note on one drawdown, "F. L. G. her fancy - or Dewdrop - or Blue Bell made from part of High Crick's Delight" shows that this was a revision of another pattern, High Crick's Delight. These four versions of Blue Bell well illustrate Goodrich's method of interpreting drafts that she collected. She pasted the original into a notebook and created her own numerical version in a second notebook. In the early years of her work in creating drawdowns, Goodrich painted the patterns on hand-drawn graph paper; versions on printed graph paper were drawn later in Goodrich's life.
Object
  • These two watercolor drawdowns and two drafts, dating from the early 1900s, illustrate a weave pattern known as Blue Bell. To record a pattern, a weaver creates a draft and/or a drawdown. A draft looks much like a strip of musical notation; a drawdown is a visual grid that illustrates a single weaving block. These drawdowns were made by Frances Louisa Goodrich (1856-1944), who recorded weaving patterns she collected in and around Asheville, North Carolina. A note on one drawdown, "F. L. G. her fancy - or Dewdrop - or Blue Bell made from part of High Crick's Delight" shows that this was a revision of another pattern, High Crick's Delight. These four versions of Blue Bell well illustrate Goodrich's method of interpreting drafts that she collected. She pasted the original into a notebook and created her own numerical version in a second notebook. In the early years of her work in creating drawdowns, Goodrich painted the patterns on hand-drawn graph paper; versions on printed graph paper were drawn later in Goodrich's life.