• By CAROL ANNE BLITZER
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Jun 25, 2008 - Page: 1E - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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A.B. Clark, former director of the LSU School of Home Economics, now the School of Human Ecology, taught hundreds of students home management and family economics in her decadeslong career in education.

One day, as she was nearing retirement, fellow faculty member Katherine Watts told Clark, “A.B., you need something else to do.”

Watts encouraged Clark, whose full name is Alma Beth but since college has been known as A.B., to join her at a four-part weaving course taught by the late Jean Valentine deTarnowsky.

“I didn’t do much weaving when I was still working,” Clark said. “I didn’t have much time, but after I retired in 1982, I began to do more and more.”

She joined the Bayou Yarn Benders, an organization that had workshops presented by weaving experts.

“I met a lot of other weavers,” she said. “I discovered that weavers were so different from my other friends in home economics on the campus. There is such a push in academia to publish that people don’t share ideas, but in the 9 weaving world, people would say, ‘Let me show you something wonderful.’” The weavers were all willing to teach others what they had learned and to share ideas.

Many of the members of the Bayou Yarn Benders were spinning a native brown cotton. “I thought the color of the brown cotton was so lovely,” Clark said. “The early Acadians had done a lot of their blankets with native brown cotton.”

The problem was that native brown cotton is not commercially available. When Clark offered to buy some from her weaving friends, they gave her some cottonseed so she could grow her own.

“I called my cousin in Cheneyville. He was a cotton farmer,” Clark said. The cousin planted the brown seed in a small, isolated patch on his land so it would not cross pollinate with the modern varieties of cotton he was planting.

“He was the talk of Cheneyville,” she said. “All the people came out to see the brown cotton.”

Clark’s mother, who at the time was nearly 100, showed Clark and her sister how to pick cotton. A friend on the faculty made her a little cotton gin so she could remove the seeds.

“It was like a little wringer washing machine,” Clark said. “You would put the cotton through the wringer by hand and the seed would drop into a little jar.”

The next step was to card, or comb, the cotton and then spin it into thread on her spinning wheel. Finally she used her loom to weave the cotton into fabric. She combined the natural brown cotton with some green cotton she grew from seed in pots on her patio and a little blue and white commercial silk. She designed her own pattern for a two-piece dress, cut the pattern from the fabric and made the dress. It was a 6-year project.