Dream Weaver With a loom and a vision, Rockland woman turns castoffs into functional art

This is a rags-to-riches story.

The riches aren’t tangible – they’re more of a spiritual, artistic nature. But the rags are real. Bags and stacks of old corduroy pants, jeans, worn flannel shirts, cotton baby blankets and new wool from Oxford take up the better part of Mary Ann Small’s front porch in Rockland.

By day, Small sorts through the piles, picking out colors and textures that appeal to her sense of design, and cuts the fabric into long, thin strips. By night, she sits at a large, antique Union Loom, weaving the strips into rugs and table runners, purses and place mats.

“I have an idea when I make them and I do a little sketch, but it’s always a surprise,” Small said during a recent interview in the tiny shop at the end of her driveway.

When they’re finished, she gives each rug a name for the feeling or place it evokes, such as the pastel Two Lights, the orange and earthy Sand at Hurricane Island, or Trescott Cranberries, which looks like an autumn day Down East.

“When you get cranberries in the fall, these are the colors,” Small said, running her hand over the soft wool rug.

What some people see as castoffs, Small sees as inspiration – in her hands, a pair of ripped jeans are woven into a pattern that mimics moonlight dancing on the ocean; threadbare towels get a new life as a rug in the colors of a springtime apple orchard.

“She sees a life, a story, in every person, every place, and in the most humble of threads,” said Kathy Moran of Camden, who gave her daughter’s old high school and college clothing to Small after a major closet purging. Small sold the resulting rug, Camden Days, to a woman who loved the story behind it. “She uniquely weaves the past and the present into her rugs, sometimes boldly, sometimes subtly. I think of it as the synthesis of time and place. Every piece has a name, but it is left to the viewer to finish the story.”

Small’s own story is deeply linked to family history. The fact that she is a weaver comes as no surprise – her grandmother, aunt and uncle were all weavers in the woolen mills of Dexter and Corinna. Her first ancestor to emigrate from Holland to the United States was a weaver, too.

“I feel them all lined up behind me when I weave,” Small said. “When I weave, I feel like I honor them.”

She grew up in Monmouth, where she learned to knit and spin wool, but her path to rug making was circuitous. She became a social worker and settled in Rockland after moving up and down the East Coast with her Navy husband, David.

Small loved her job. She loved the fact that she was helping people. But a debilitating illness made it impossible for her to work. She could barely get up in the morning. During a particularly low time, David asked Mary Ann what she wanted to do when she got better. She knew the answer right away.

“I said, ‘I want to weave.'”

So he scoured the countryside for an antique rug loom and set it up in their home. The more she thought about it, the better she felt. Once she was well enough to start weaving, she knew she had found her calling, and her dream of creating Maine Island Rag Rugs took shape.

“I really think it saved my life.”

David, who never had built anything in his life, got to work designing a shop on their property – a cozy wooden cottage with glass doors and a view of the garden. Mary Ann has packed it full of rugs and purses and a small loom. Fresh flowers, lace curtains, and a carved wooden otter by artisan Anita Ellis, whom she met while exhibiting at the National Folk Festival, decorate the space, and a small ceramic plaque behind her loom reads, “Follow your dreams.”

“This is my dream – David makes all my dreams come true,” Small said, beaming. “It worked out. It was supposed to be.”

The loom that David bought was manufactured in the 1930s, shortly after American women started weaving rugs and bedspreads out of rags during the Depression.

“Nothing was thrown away and that’s exactly what happens to me,” Small said.

Much of what she uses is recycled, and families often bring Small old clothing that they can’t bear to part with – grandpa’s old flannel shirt, outgrown children’s clothes, or, in the case of Moran, a daughter’s dresses. These are things people want to keep, memories they want to preserve, but they don’t exactly lend themselves to a quilt.

“Fortunately, I … had set apart my favorites of my daughter’s dresses from those years, which I will one day ask [Small] to weave into another ‘Camden Years’ rug, for me for my next home, or for my daughter’s (she is now 27) first home, whichever comes first,” Moran said. “You ask for my daughter’s reaction when she sees it? It will be a vocal, but silently appreciative, ‘Oh, Mom!’ because she knows how much I still don’t want to admit she is now a woman in her own right.”

Mass-produced rag rugs, table runners, place mats and seat covers are a dime a dozen at IKEA, Bed Bath & Beyond and Linens ‘n Things. Small’s rag rugs not only are made by hand, which is a time- and labor-intensive process, they are made by heart. Her custom-made “memory rugs” have the potential to become heirlooms.

“We talk about the person and I think about them the whole time I’m weaving it,” Small said.

It’s that thought that sets Small’s work apart. For her, weaving is a vocation, a way of life that is so deeply ingrained that it seems as natural as breathing. She knows she isn’t going to make millions on her rugs, but they have made her life richer.

“Everybody has a niche, a place, and to find it and be able to work toward someday making a living at it, it’s really wonderful,” Small said. “What could be better than color and fiber? It’s a perfect life.”

Maine Island Rag Rugs is located at 29 Rockland St. in Rockland. For more information, call 594-8038.