The New Green Book

Marguerite Porter Davison’s A Handweaver’s Pattern Book

is an absolute classic with an army of obsessive fans. Many new weavers track down a copy based on its reputation as a ‘must have’ weaving book. It is packed full of concentrated nuggets of weaving genius.

We are excited to take on this ginormous project with the goal of completing it by the end of 2026. We have lots of weaving to do! Jamie has taken the enthusiastic and technical lead digitizing all 378 threadings (phew!) and we've found some amazing folks to help with weaving and book formatting.

A big thanks to the Edmonton Weavers' Guild Monday Morning Study Group for weaving all the samples from the "Diamonds" Chapter! And to Mel and Greg Wilson for creating us a custom app to make the technical side of things possible!

What is so special about The Green Book?

The Green Book–or A Handweaver’s Pattern Book if we want to use its proper name–is one of the most extensive, diverse and beloved collections of four-shaft weaving drafts ever compiled. The drafts in The Green Book cover twill, overshot, summer & winter, crackle, lace weaves, various novelty and textured weaves, rib weaves… anything you want to try, there’s a draft in The Green Book!

What’s a draft?

A draft is the minimum information that you need to weave a particular variation of a structure: the bare bones threading, treadling, and tie up. Drafts are less detailed than patterns, which tell you how to make a specific project at a specific size. Drafts aren’t there to tell you what to make. They’re there to give you a whole range of possibilities that you can then pick up, modify, expand, combine, and create with.

Drafts are weaving information in its most concentrated form. That’s how The Green Book manages to cram an incredible 378 different threadings into a single book. For each threading there are anywhere between one and forty different treadlings. You could happily make projects based on Green Book drafts for your entire weaving life and never run out of inspiration.

Who created these drafts?

This is one of the very cool things about The Green Book: it represents the work and wisdom of many individual weavers spanning several decades as well as various different weaving cultures. Marguerite Porter Davison created some of the drafts herself, but most of them she collected from other books, other weavers, and boxes crammed full of notes and scraps that she got hold of after other pattern collectors passed away. Davison was an obsessive collector. The Green Book is her personal archive in book form.

Some drafts have no single creator or owner. No one person created plain weave or twill. Some more detailed designs do have named designers, although we often don’t know whether they created the design themselves or were simply the person who wrote down designs that were circulating within their community. Many drafts are part of specific cultural traditions, like the “Gerstenkorn” or “Barleycorn” drafts that Davison discovered through her friends in the Pennsylvania Dutch and German communities.

Weaving drafts aren’t like novels or paintings that have a single specific creator. They are part of a shared craft heritage and many have been woven, written down, picked up, altered, and re-circulated dozens or hundreds of times. One of the drafts is based on a coat that Davison’s friend Ginny wore. Davison liked it, so she figured out how to weave it and published the result as “Ginny’s Coat”. This is how weaving works: we pick up the work of other weavers, make it our own, and pass it on.

Why do we need a new version?

Davison put together the first version of A Handweaver’s Pattern Book in 1944, then followed it up with an expanded version in 1950. She wove all of the samples herself, hand wrote all of the drafts, and self-published the book when publishers were unwilling to take a chance on it. All of this without the aid of computers while raising a family during World War II and its aftermath! The Green Book is an incredible accomplishment.

That said, it has some of the problems you might expect. The handwritten drafts are sometimes cramped, making it difficult to tell which pick or end comes first. The photos are black and white, and not particularly clear. It’s often really hard to tell from the photos what the finished cloth will look like. Davison was amazing, but she wasn’t superhuman. Given the circumstances she was working under, it will come as no surprise that there are many errors in the book. Some treadlings do not match the image provided whatsoever. Some chapters are flawless, but others have errors in nearly every draft. Because people hold Davison in such high regard, they have been hesitant to confidently identify these errors as errors, leaving the drafts uncorrected.

Our New Green Book will have crystal clear colour photos and much more readable threading and treadling layouts. It will be written for rising shaft looms, like the jack looms most of us weave on, instead of the sinking shaft tie-ups provided by Davison back when counterbalance looms were king. It will preserve the incredibly valuable information from the drafts while correcting errors and standardizing format. Bottom line: it will be easier and more enjoyable to use the new version.

Davison gave the weaving community an incredible gift by documenting weaving drafts from the weavers that came before her. A new version will make sure that collective wisdom remains accessible to future weavers and keep her legacy alive.

FAQ

What is the New Green Book project?

Gather Textiles will be publishing a new version of The Green Book, more properly known as Marguerite Porter Davison’s beloved A Handweaver’s Pattern Book. We’re recreating all of the weaving in the original so that we can have high quality colour photos, and reformatting the drafts for clarity and accuracy. We are beyond excited to be working on getting the expanded version of this weaving classic back into print.

What needs to be done for this to happen?

This is a complex project with several stages. First, Jamie has taken the lead on translating all 378 threadings from The Green Book into Fiberworks, checking for errors as we go. (Special thanks to Mel for her work on this!) Once drafts are ready to weave, Kim is choosing colour palettes and recruiting weavers, Mila is distributing yarn and .wifs, and Kim and Jamie are troubleshooting any new errors that get discovered in the weaving process. Meanwhile, Kim is hard at work on the back end, figuring out how to format drafts cleanly and accurately for publication. Once we have collected the samples, we’ll be wet finishing all of them ourselves to ensure consistency, then having a photographer take crystal clear photos of them. Eventually, we’ll have accurate, readable drafts to share with you accompanied by colour photos, available digitally as well as in a beautiful new hardcover book.

That’s so exciting. How can I help?

Really truly, spreading the word to your weaving nerd friends and sharing your excitement is the best way to help! We are working hard on this project and hearing other weavers get excited about it has been a massive boost. Your support really means the world. Follow us on instagram @gather_textiles or sign up for our newsletter to stay in the loop on project updates.Then be ready to celebrate with us when the book launches!

When will the book be available?

That’s going to depend on how quickly we can get all of these samples woven. We’re going to go hard on sample weaving in 2025 and adjust our schedule as we see how that goes. We’re optimistic about getting the book into the world on a reasonable timeline, but we’re also learning as we go and the project has a lot of moving parts.

Can I help with the weaving?

Short answer: a very tentative maybe. We’re starting slow with the actual sample weaving, and gradually expanding our network to include more and more weavers. Our ideal contributors are experienced Canadian weavers capable of completing more than one ~5 yard warp within a few months. If that sounds like you, by all means send us an e-mail. Please know that if we decline your help it’s likely more about our capacity to properly support sample weavers or a decision based in project logistics and not any judgment about your weaving ability.

What will the book look like? Will there be multiple formats?

We love weaving books and we LOVE love The Green Book. We’re going to make sure that this is a beautiful, well-made book that will be a joy to use. It will have high quality colour photographs of the new samples and easy-to-read digital drafts. We hope to capture the spirit of the original but to massively upgrade the image quality and overall usability.

We plan to have a hardcover book for people who love physical books as much as we do. We also plan to have a digital version at a lower price point to make sure we can get this treasure trove of weaving knowledge into as many hands as possible.

Are you allowed to publish Davison’s work? Do you have the rights?

Because Davison passed away more than 70 years ago, her work is now in the public domain. Public domain works can be re-published by anyone who puts the work into getting them back into print. Since Davison’s estate was no longer profiting from the book after it went out of print in 1980, nobody is harmed by the book becoming public domain. In fact, the public domain is a really really good thing, as it means that classic books like this can get new life and stay in circulation. Nobody owns the rights to a work once it’s in the public domain: it becomes part of our shared cultural heritage and belongs to everyone.

What about the other versions of A Handweaver’s Pattern Book? How is yours different?

There are two versions of A Handweaver’s Pattern Book: the original version, published in 1944, and the revised version from 1950. The revised version is substantially expanded, with about 30% more material than the original version. Most weavers are talking about the revised version when they talk about The Green Book.

The revised version, AKA The Green Book, has been out of print since 1980. It’s an excellent book, but the black and white photos in it are often not legible and copies are aging and disappearing. The price tag can be painful–we’ve seen used copies listed online for anywhere from $100 - $250 CAD.

The original version is available in an orange paperback reprint known to many weavers as The Orange Book. This version has about 30% less content. Again, the weaving information in it is still excellent, but the scan used in this direct reproduction is low quality. The already blurry black and white photos are sometimes simply black smudges here. The company that made the reprint does not have a website and we can’t tell if they’re still in business. Once existing copies are sold, we fear this version may also fall out of print.

Our New Green Book is not simply a scan or photocopy of the original. We are making all new samples and taking colour photos. We are going over all threadings and treadlings in detail, finding and correcting errors. Davison was an excellent weaver, but she was human. She was also working on this book on her own, without the benefit of weaving software or a technical editor, during World War II. It should come as no surprise that the original has frequent errors. Our version will be more readable and more accurate than any previously published, and will have the major benefit of being in colour! We’ve been blown away by how seeing the drafts woven in colour has changed our perception of them and made us eager to weave them ourselves.

Why are we so excited about this project?

New Life for Old Weaving Books: Craft and the Public Domain

We are at a very exciting time for weaving as a craft: many of the legendary books written during the handweaving revival of the 1920s-1950s are entering the public domain! This means that within the next few years books we love, like Mary Meigs Atwater’s Recipe Book and Marguerite Porter Davison’s A Handweaver’s Pattern Book, can be freely reproduced, reprinted, and circulated in any way that weavers want. Here’s how public domain works and why you should be psyched about it.

What even is the public domain?

The public domain is our collective cultural library made up of all of the writing, art and music that is no longer under copyright. When someone makes a creative work, they have copyright. That means they’re the only person who can make money off of their writing, art or music unless they give permission or sell their rights to other people.

Copyright is important because it makes sure that people are fairly compensated for their creativity… but it doesn’t last forever. People benefit from copyright while they’re alive, and their heirs benefit from it after their death. Many years after a creator’s death, though, the people who benefit from it have all had a good run. At that point, copyright expires and the work enters the public domain.

The public domain is incredibly, incredibly important. If a creative piece is still valuable and exciting to us decades after the creator’s death, it’s likely something worth preserving! When it enters the public domain, a work gets new life. People can now share it in any form they want to: anything from making a scan and posting it online to doing a full publishing run of a new edited version. Think of all the different ways that Jane Austen novels have been adapted, reprinted, and put into new hands. That’s the public domain at work. When a work enters the public domain it has now become part of our shared cultural heritage. It belongs to everyone who loves it.

When Does a Work Enter the Public Domain?

The answer is complicated and I am Not A Lawyer. But the short version is that most works enter the public domain in the US and Canada 70 years after the death of their creator. (In Canada, the wait is shorter–only 50 years–for creators who passed away before the 1970s.) It doesn’t matter when the work was published; it only matters when its author passed away. On the next January 1st after the 70th anniversary of their date of death, the book becomes public domain.

What does this mean for weavers?

Well, it means that many of the books published in the first half of the 20th century are either already in the public domain or about to enter it. Since this was a very active time for writing about weaving, there are some absolute treasures that are due to be revived in new forms.

Again with the caveat that I am Not a Lawyer, here’s how it looks like weavers will be benefiting from works entering the public domain over the next while. Some books, like Marguerite Porter Davison’s A Handweaver’s Pattern Book and Oscar Beriau’s Home Weaving, are already in the public domain. Remember, though, it’s about the year of the author’s death. Miniature overshot innovator Bertha Gray Hayes and crackle queen Maria Moden-Olsson were born two years apart (1878 and 1880). Gray Hayes passed away in 1953, placing her works already in the public domain. But Moden-Olsson lived until 1976, so her works remain copyright protected. The year of publication also doesn’t change anything. So even though Mary Black’s New Key To Weaving (1957) was only published a few years after Davison’s follow up A Handweaver’s Source Book (1953), Black’s book won’t enter the public domain until 2060 because she outlived Davison by 35 years.

The biggest name set to enter public domain soon is Mary Meigs Atwater, the “Dean of American Handweaving”, who lived from 1878 to 1956. Atwater published multiple influential books about handweaving, including her famous Recipe Book, which has a wealth of drafts and patterns, and The Shuttlecraft Book On American Handweaving, a comprehensive guide to weaving techniques and structures.

What should we do about it?

So many things! We all benefit from keeping information about weaving circulating and accessible. That can look like sharing snippets of your favourite public-domain content on a blog, or making high-quality scans and sharing or selling them online. It can look like sharing physical photocopies through guilds or friend groups. We can also pop old weaving drafts into Fiberworks (or your weaving software of choice) to make cleaner, more readable versions of old hand-drawn drafts. Some of us are taking on exciting book projects to get out-of-print gems back into active publication. Whatever you do, you’ll be part of keeping weaving wisdom circulating, which keeps the craft alive. Weaving is like a very, very large, very, very long-term group project. We all have a part to play in keeping it going. What’s yours?

The New Green Book

Marguerite Porter Davison’s A Handweaver’s Pattern Book