Weaving House

Weaving House. . , Since childhood, Cammie Henry was enamored by the artistic skills of past generations. She took up weaving as a hobby and became a master of many techniques. A collector of looms and spinning wheels, in 1934, Ms. Cammie needed to enlarge her weaving space to house them., She found a small one-room log hand-hewn timbers cabin on the Navajo Plantation north of Natchitoches. She purchased it for $25.00. Upon her directions, Henry Hertzog and five other men spent a whole day in the pouring rain disassembling the entire cabin and bringing the logs back to Melrose. Tragically, the Navajo Plantation's big house burned to the ground two weeks later., Once reassembled, Ms. Cammie would spend hours spinning and weaving coverlets and bedspreads in the cabin. In time she began to weave wool rugs and sold them to fund restoration projects for her home, buildings, and gardens. Her selling price for a homespun wool rug was $35.00. Her talents and skills became proficient, and as word spread, she attracted prestigious well-known weavers to Melrose, even a member of the Weavers and Spinners guild in England., Weaving Cotton Fabric:. , Once the cotton is picked and ginned, the cotton cleaning process begins. Processing cotton requires the removal of any stalks, leaves, and other matter still in the cotton. Once cleaned, a carding device (a roller with teeth) straightens and divides the cotton lint. , A spinning wheel turns and twists the clean fibers, transforming the cotton into long strands of yarn, then placed onto a bobbin spool, or stick, to be woven into cloth on a loom. , Weaving involves winding one set of yarn around another set. The long vertical thread, known as the warp, is stretched from the front of the loom to the back. The weft threads run horizontally and are passed between and through the warp threads. A beater pushes the warp threads tight against the previous row. , Over the years, Cammie collected a range of weaving patterns. Some of her weavings are found at Melrose and in the archives at Northwestern State University.