ry pure and simple was in place in
the wide reaches of the picture. So we went on painting a woods interior
in materials of all sorts, from tenuous crepes to solid velvets and
plushes. It was one of Mrs. Holmes' silk pictures on a large scale, and
was perhaps more than reasonably successful. I remember the great
delight in marking the difference between oak and birch trees and
fitting each with its appropriate effect of color and texture of leaf;
and the building of a tall gray-green yucca, with its thick satin leaves
and tall white pyramidal groups of velvet blossoms, standing in the very
foreground, was as exciting as if it were standing posed for its
portrait, and being painted in oils.

The variety of our work was a good influence for progress. We were
constantly reaching out to fill the various demands, and, beyond them,
to materialize our ideals. As far as art was concerned in our work, what
we tried to do was not to repeat the triumphs of past needlework, but to
see how far the best which had been done was applicable to the present.

If tapestries had been the highest mark of the past, to see whether and
how their use could be fitted to the circumstances of today, and, if we
found a fit place for them in modern decoration, to see that their
production took account of the methods and materials which belonged to
present periods, and adapted the production to modern demands.

[Illustration: SEVENTEENTH CENTURY DESIGN TAPESTRY PANEL

_Courtesy of the Edgewater Tapestry Looms_]

We soon came to the ideal of tapestries which loomed above and beyond us
and had been reached by every nation in turn which had applied art to
textiles, but in all except very early work the accomplishment had been
more of the loom than of hand work. My dream was of American Tapestries,
made by embroidery alone, carrying personal thought into method. We
decided that there was no reason for the limitation of the beautiful art
of needlework to personal use, or even to its numerous domestic
purposes. This most intimate of the arts of decoration has been in the
form of wall hangings for the bare wall spaces of architecture from the
time when dwellings passed their first limited use of protection and
defense. After this first use of houses came the instinct and longing
for beauty, and the feeling which prompts us in these wider days of
achievement to cover our wall spaces with pictures, moved our far-off
forefathers and mothers to offer their s