john landes

You might know of John Landes without realizing it, as images of his weaving pattern manuscript have become widely circulated around Pinterest and more recently used as text backgrounds on Instagram — and it’s not hard to see why.

I first discovered these drawings a decade ago while viewing an exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (where the manuscript is housed), which led me to google, then to ebay, then to purchasing a spiral-bound copy of A Book of Patterns for Hand-Weaving by John Landes, with threading drafts and notes from Mary Meigs Atwater.

There is no recorded history of Landes aside from his manuscript, but archivists agree that he was a Pennsylvania weaver in the 1800s and most likely a tradesman. It was common during this time for weavers to travel with their looms and supplies to rural areas, selling custom-made coverlets from their design books. As Mary Meigs Atwater states in the foreword of the book she published, the manuscript lacks any draft information or weaving notes, and therefore was most likely a work of art to show off Landes’ original patterns. Atwater translated his drawings into usable drafts, noting,

If woven in “double” weave or in the “summer and winter” weave, the patterns may be reproduced exactly. Some of them are not practicable in ordinary “overshot” weaving, and others have to be varied slightly to bring them within “overshot” limitations. Most of the patterns, however, lend themselves to four harness weaving without difficulty.

Landes’ drawings and subsequent drafts have become more accessible over the years, as the original book Atwater published was digitized and eventually reprinted. The On-Line Digital Archive of Documents on Weaving and Related Topics has the publication available for download in two parts — part 1 and part 2. Handweaving.net has also created WIFs of all the profile drafts that can be translated into block drafts to apply other structures (you will need to be a paid member to access the draft information).

With luck, I have found copies of the Southern California Handweavers’ Guild and the Western Textile Center reprinting of A Book of Patterns for Hand-Weaving by John Landes (pictured below) through secondhand book sellers (the original 1925 version is almost impossible to source). It was again reprinted as an 8x5 booklet in 2014, but unfortunately the print quality is lacking — the scans are blown out and resized to be smaller, making the pages hard to read. I personally think it’s worth skipping that version and opting to find a used copy or downloading the free digital version.