Curiosity becomes a search

I threaded my new overshot pattern "Flowers of Cromaine" (BGH) yesterday and beamed the warp today, which means I was able to weave a couple repeats:




It's a pretty pattern, and I'm looking forward to making some progress on the warp.

But I started thinking about the origin of the name of the pattern. Ms. Hayes put some interesting names on her patterns, like "Gastric Ulcer" and "Bomber Flight" to name a couple, and I was pretty sure "Cromaine" meant something.

This is where I love the internet. What would have taken days at a city library took me a few minutes on the internet.

It turns out that Cromaine Crafts was a part of the Hartland Area Project in Hartland, Michigan. It was one of those social experiment communities popular in the first part of the 1900s. Handcrafts was a big part of their "project" and they built a loom named the Cromaine Crafts Loom.

Here's a link to what Janet Meany has to say about it:

http://www.oocities.org/rugtalk/CromaineCraftsLoom.html

which is quite interesting. I had no idea when I chose this pattern that it was connected to what is The Mannings today! Wow! History is so cool! No telling what the connection was between Bertha Gray Hayes and the Cromaine Craft Project, but I'm pretty sure there was a connection.

I'm very glad I have this warp on the loom and ready to go. Sanity is a warped loom.