Page 52 - Constructing Craft

Weavers in 1928. The name was changed in 1933 to Taniko Loom-Craft Weavers
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‘in order to avoid the “terrible indignity” of being mistaken for machine knitters’ but
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the similarity of the name to the Māori weaving form called ‘tāniko’ was probably
not an accident. The business grew, producing a range of fashion goods, household
and religious items, and selling weaving supplies as well as giving demonstrations

of the craft. The success of the business during a particularly testing time for all
business set an example for how future weavers needed to organise to turn their

hobby into a professional career. In 1936, after the sisters married, the business

closed and they both left Auckland. In the 1960s, Josephine Glasgow (nee Mulvany)
helped Florence Akins establish a weaving course at the Canterbury University

College of Art – the first in the country. The course ceased when Akins retired in

1969. The Mulvany sisters experienced many of the influences and difficulties that
fabric craftspeople encountered well into the 1960s. Nevertheless, by 1970 a

federation of clubs had established the New Zealand Spinning, Weaving and
Woolcrafts Society (NZSWWS). In 1973, in a further sign of their growing strength,

spinners and weavers began to exhibit on their own. Dorothea Turner was able to
report that ‘the partnership [between Wellington potters and weavers] is dissolving

now only for the happy reason that everyone has too much work to submit [to the
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traditional joint exhibitions].’

Constructing Craft