The perfect loom for this artist is 100 years old and carries a special history

When Joelle Blandford scrolled through an online buy and sell website, she couldn't believe her eyes: a post for a century-old weaving loom that was available for purchase.

It was exactly the kind of thing she was looking for.

"I was in store for a loom, and this was perfect for me," Blandford said.

"This is an antique loom, it's over a hundred years old, and I got it on the buy and sell."

When she bought the loom, Blandford had just graduated from the textiles program at the Anna Templeton Centre in St. John's.

Back in Twillingate, where she runs Nature's Threads, she wanted to make locally-sourced textile artwork with natural materials, and an antique loom was exactly the right medium for her, Blandford said.

And while the loom has given her a way to make traditional textile products, she said it's so much more than that.

"The original owner of this loom used to weave Newfoundland tartan place mats and his wife told me that it was his original design," Blandford said.

Samuel B. Wilansky is the man who designed the Newfoundland tartan. Blandford said unfortunately, she can't remember the name of the woman who sold her the loom.

But after its owner died, his wife wanted to find someone who would use and value the loom as much as he had.

"All the varnish of the loom is worn off … where his arms would have laid as he was weaving the Newfoundland tartan place mats," Blandford said.

"I feel there's a happy spirit with this loom. He enjoyed what he was doing and this was his life. He wove place mats to support his family ..… You can feel his spirit in the loom. He was a happy weaver, I just know it. I can feel it."

Blandford said she doesn't know much else about the weaver from whom she inherited the loom.

"I don't know a whole lot about him. I believe before he owned the loom there was another man who owned the loom and he was a weaver, so I think I might be the third owner of this loom," she said, adding that she feels privileged to use a machine that holds such cultural significance.

"He designed the Newfoundland tartan place mats and sold it to stores in St. John's. That's how he raised his family, provided for them. It's a piece of history."

There are plenty of more modern machines that Blandford could use to make her designs come to life, and those would make the process much faster, but Blandford said there's something special about using older equipment.

"Of course, if you had a newer machine that was electronic, I could put my design into a computer system and then the computer could weave it for me, but I'm doing it all by hand," she said.

"I'm a textilist, an artist. I'm connected to what I weave. It's important to carry on this weaving tradition of hand-made goods. It's our past, but it's still relevant."

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