In the movies, museums, and your house.(Design notes)

There are some who make a sport out of exposing historical bloopers in movies set in earlier times. Indeed, one film Web site incorporates an entire section entitled "Goofs" (www.imdb.com/sections/goofs). Clearly some producers and directors are more concerned with historical accuracy than others, so before sliding the DVD into your machine to enjoy Road to Perdition, Master and Commander, Amistad, The Polar Express, The Alamo, or Cinderella Man, among many other movies, make a mental note to pay particular attention to the fabrics used to make the costumes, bedding, carpeting, window treatments, trims, and other textiles. The fabrics seen in these films would never be cited in the Goofs section, for they are woven just as they would have been in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, by a company called Thistle Hill Weavers, located in the historic town of Cherry Valley, New York.

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The company is run by Rabbit Goody, who was formerly a textile curator at the Farmers' Museum and the New York State Historical Association in Cooperstown, New York. Goody founded Thistle Hill Weavers some twenty years ago. Her small mill can turn out as few as twenty or as many as two thousand yards of worsted, dimity, tow cloth, cotton, baize, figured worsteds, camblets, hareteens, lustrings, bug bars, furniture checks, and diapers. In addition, several years ago, Goody and her colleague Jenny Stewart studied the pertinent engravings in Denis Diderot's Encyclopedie (Paris, 1750-1765) and P. Falcot's Traite encyclopedique et methodique de la fabrication des tissus (Paris, 1852), and, working from these illustrations, re-created specialized ...