History Student Keeps Scottish Weaver's Patterns Alive

by Andrew Vowles for @Guelph
Once a month, Deborah Livingston-Lowe leaves her Toronto Beaches home, heads to the Ontario Science Centre (OSC) and steps back into the Victorian era. As with other occasional OSC volunteers, she spends a day recreating patterns of a prominent 19th-century Ontario weaver on a massive, one-of-a-kind loom now owned by the science centre. But Livingston-Lowe has a deeper connection to the loom and its maker. This fall she began a master’s degree in U of G’s history department studying Scottish immigrant weaver John Campbell, who spent almost four decades near London, Ont., turning out Jacquard coverlets and rugs, blankets and flannel items on that loom. Besides highlighting his early work, her research will likely help correct a few romantic misconceptions and stereotypes about 19th-century lives, says her adviser, Prof. Catharine Wilson, a specialist in Canadian rural history.
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