DEERFIELD'S ORIGINAL CRAFTS SHOW NEXT WEEK.
Pottery Seen for First Time--Painters Have Fine Show.
Deerfield's versatility will be well shown next week. Either an exhibition
of local industries or an historical pageant would be quite enough for one week
in most town of its size. Both will be presented here, the exhibition beginning
Tuesday and lasting until Saturday afternoon; the the pageant the last three
days. The two have no connection except that they are contemporary.
The annual exhibit of crafts promises to fully sustain the reputation it has
gained in the last 10 years. The Village room, proving to be too small to hold
all the displays of recent work, several of the individual craft shops will
also be open to show their products.
Miss Ellen Miller and Miss Whiting are not here in person, but there will be
a large and important exhibit of the blue and white needlework at the Miller
house, at the "Sign of the Wheel."
Mrs. Thorn will show her own weaving of colored linens in both free hand and
conventional patterns at her home just south of Miss Miller's.
The Deerfield painters will be across the way at the Harrow studios. This year's
collection includes paintings by Willis Adams, Elbridge Kingsley, Will Hutchins,
and Huc Mazelet Luquiens.
The Village room north of the old Brick church will be filled with crafts.
Both the Deerfield and the Pocumtuck basket makers will have here a large display
of baskets and boxes of every sort, raffia, reed, palm leaf, willow, pine-needles,
rushes, sweet grass. Anything that grows can apparently be woven into some pleasing
and novel shape by the clever Deerfield women. The walls will be hung with woven
fabrics. The weaving grows in importance and beauty every year. The rag rugs
with which it began are still here in good force.
Miss Arms will have some of her wool rugs, woven somewhat like Navajo blankets,
of Kentucky homespun wool, dyed by the mountain women with "yarbs."
Mrs. Hawks has lighter weight bed blankets of wool with free hand decorations
in color, and both cotton and linen bedspreads, etc., with knotted designs,
all woven in. Mrs. Hammond's bags and belts and spreads are of linen, woven
with double harness, like the old coverlets and Swedish work.
The Allen photographs are farther up the street at the usual rooms. The year's
new prints are chiefly Deerfield fields and folk with a few pictures of Quebec.
The pottery, the latest addition to the crafts, is a little farther on, in
the old Stebbins house. Mr. Thomas has worked out a combination of local clays
which gives a distinctive product to be known as the Deerfield pottery signed
"D. P. T." It has a matt glaze in soft, low toned colors, green, blue,
dull yellows and browns, in all the subtle variations and combinations to which
fire and clay lend themselves.
Mrs. Ashley and her daughters will have their own basketry in their basket
shop near the north end. Mrs. Ashley has a new example of her large landscape
baskets, and a varied assortment of smaller ones in rye straw and grass as well
as raffia, in pretty soft colors and graceful designs.
Mrs. Henry's well-known netting and tufted work will be in her house at the
north end. Some genuinely old bed spreads which she has recently secured will
also be on exhibition.
The plan of having the exhibits somewhat scattered has the advantage of distributing
the visitors also. The distances are not long, and each place will have a conspicuous
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