You hear the loom before you see it. Most mornings by six, in the converted machine shed behind Ingrid Halvorsen's white farmhouse north of Decorah, Iowa, a rhythm is already going: the soft clack of the shuttle, the deeper thud of the beater packing weft against weft, the creak of a wooden treadle that has been creaking, in one country or another, since 1908. Halvorsen, 57, weaves in a flannel shirt and wool socks, coffee going cold on the windowsill, a barn cat named Lefse asleep in a basket of thrums.
The loom is Norwegian birch, built in a workshop outside Voss, and it came to Iowa in 1921 with her great-grandmother, Signe, who could not afford the freight on a loom. So the family took it apart — castle, beams, beater, breast beam — crated the pieces, and shipped them across the Atlantic labeled as farm equipment, which cost about half as much. Nobody at the dock asked questions. In Decorah, a town settled thick with Norwegians, nobody would have needed to.
"I love that lie," Halvorsen says, resting a hand on the loom's castle, worn the color of dark honey. "Although Signe would tell you it wasn't one. She'd say, it makes the things a farm needs — blankets, towels, clothes for the children. What else is farm equipment for? She kept the shipping tag her whole life. It's in a drawer at Vesterheim now, with her name misspelled on it. Halvorson with an O. We forgave them eventually."
Decorah, population eight thousand and change, sits folded into the bluffs of northeast Iowa's Driftless Area, the corner the glaciers skipped. Vesterheim, the national Norwegian-American museum, anchors Water Street. Every July, Nordic Fest fills the sidewalks with rosemaling, lefse griddles, and Hardanger fiddle tunes drifting out of the courthouse square. Here, an heirloom loom is not an eccentricity. It is practically a civic duty.
She learned the loom the way other Decorah kids learned to skate — early, and without ceremony. Her grandmother Astrid wove in this same shed, and Ingrid's job at six was to hand up wound bobbins and keep quiet, work for which she was paid in butterscotch discs from a tin on the warping bench. By ten she could thread heddles. She remembers the smell of it exactly: lanolin, machine oil, and the coffee her grandmother drank scalding at any hour.
Then she did what people do. Luther College, an accounting degree, a marriage, a move to Des Moines, and twenty-three years at an insurance company, most of them in claims analytics, under fluorescent light, in a building where the windows did not open. The loom stayed behind in her mother's hayloft under a canvas tarp. She thought about it, she says, roughly never.
"They laid off my whole floor on a Tuesday in March," she says. "I was forty-five. I cried in the parking garage, and then I drove home and tried to think of one thing about that job I would miss, and I couldn't. Not one thing in twenty-three years. That scared me worse than the layoff did. I call it the best worst day, because it's the day I found out I'd been renting my own life. Six weeks later I was up in my mother's hayloft, pulling the tarp off my grandmother's loom."
I call it the best worst day, because it's the day I found out I'd been renting my own life.
The loom needed a year. She rubbed the wood with beeswax and turpentine, ordered new string heddles from a supplier in Trondheim, and replaced a cracked treadle with white oak from a tree that had come down on the property in a windstorm — the loom's first new part in a century. Her first warp was kitchen towels. "Terrible ones," she says. They still hang by her sink, and she will not be talked out of them.
The colors come from within a short drive of the shed. Goldenrod, cut from the ditches along Highway 52 in late August and hauled home in five-gallon buckets. Black walnut hulls, gathered in October, which stain her hands brown until roughly Thanksgiving. Madder root from a raised bed in her garden — three years in the ground before it will give up its red. On dye days the shed smells of hay and honey and something faintly like iron, and the propane burner hisses under pots she is not allowed, by her own rule, to hurry.
"Goldenrod gives you a yellow no chemical dye can quite manage — it's the yellow of the ditch it came out of," she says. "Walnut gives you brown. Madder gives you red if you're patient and orange if you're not, so it keeps a record of your character. People ask why I don't just buy dye. Well. Then the blanket could have come from anywhere. This way it can only have come from here."
The wool comes from eleven miles away, at Driftless Ridge Farm, where Emma and Tyler Skoglund — both barely thirty — run about sixty Corriedale-Icelandic cross ewes on rented pasture. Halvorsen met them at the winter farmers market six years ago, bought two fleeces on the spot, and never really left. Now she is there most Sunday afternoons, helping skirt fleeces on a plywood table, weighing in on breeding decisions, and — being a former insurance analyst — quietly overhauling their spreadsheets.
"Emma texts me pictures of fleeces the way other people text pictures of their kids," she says. "They didn't inherit any of this. No hayloft with a loom in it, no grandmother with a butterscotch tin. They chose it, which I think might be braver. Somebody handed weaving down to me. Nobody handed anything to Emma and Tyler. Somebody has to be the grandmother. I decided it might as well be me."
Somebody has to be the grandmother. I decided it might as well be me.
Each blanket takes three weeks. The first four days are warping: winding more than four hundred ends, threading heddles in the same broken twill Astrid used, doing the math in pencil on graph paper because she does not trust herself to do it anywhere else. Then the weaving — thousands of throws of the shuttle, a few hours a morning, while the radio plays the Luther College station. A wall calendar by the door exists mostly to tell customers, gently, that no, it cannot be ready by Friday.
And in the lower corner of every blanket, worked into the twill where you would never notice unless the light rakes across it just so, there is a single letter. She asks each buyer for an initial — usually the person the blanket is meant for, though some people choose a letter they decline to explain, and she has learned not to ask. She keeps a ledger of every one.
"Signe wove an S into hers," she says. "My grandmother showed me one when I was little and made me find it with my fingers, with my eyes shut. A blanket outlives you — it ends up in a cedar chest or at an estate sale, and someday somebody holds it up to a window and finds a letter and wonders who. That wondering is the whole point. That's the thread going forward. You won't be there for it. You weave it in anyway."
On Thursday evenings, Emma Skoglund drives the eleven miles into town, hangs her coat on the nail by the door, and sits down at a loom that is now a hundred and eighteen years old. Halvorsen stands behind her, the way Astrid once stood behind a six-year-old with butterscotch on her breath, and corrects her selvedges without touching anything. The treadle creaks. The shuttle goes. Somewhere in that rhythm are four generations of one family and one young woman who is no kin at all — which, Ingrid would tell you, is exactly the point.
