In an effort towards stabilizing the booklist and also improving our Grammar levels, we are starting to construct our own spine history texts.  

To be perfectly clear, we still love rich, living book, multi-perspective education!  We have no intention of writing “one history book to rule them all” and turning Tapestry into a curriculum that can only be done as a textbook-based program.  

At the same time, the past twenty years have shown us a few things:

1) Lack of a stable overview history text can be terribly frustrating for teachers, students, and curriculum designers alike.

2) We hate recommending otherwise-inferior books simply because there is no other history overview text available. 

3) Especially at the Grammar levels, we cannot easily give you history discussion materials because the books we rely on keep going out of print.

4) It can be hard to find digital versions of children’s illustrated history books.

5) For some of our customers on a tight budget, with tight storage space, or working in a large group (school or co-op) context, spine books would simply be a godsend.

We were inspired from the beginning by looms, which are set up with a “warp” and “weft” of vertical and horizontal threads.  In many cases, the picture of the tapestry is woven into the fabric itself.  However, some famous tapestries (such as Bayeux Tapestry) are actually stitched onto a sturdy foundational cloth formed by the threads of the warp and weft.  We decided that although we don’t want to lose our colorful, vivid, living books, our rich perspective books, and our classical books, we do want to offer a sturdy foundational cloth that you can use to understand the basic information of history, church history, philosophy, literature, government, art, and music, before moving on to select from our buffet of living or classical books that add vividness and perspective, like rich colored threads in an embroidered tapestry.  

We call the Grammar level books “Weft,” and we are thinking right now that they will be available in both digital and print, and in audio.  You can already listen to our Weft Audio sample for History on our store, and we are working to produce more of these History overviews every day!  The Weft Audio is designed for both Lower Grammar and Upper Grammar students, but we intend to produce age-appropriate overview readers for Upper Grammar students as well.

At the Dialectic and Rhetoric levels, we refer to this project as the “Warp” (or “the Warp Drive” for our Star Trek fans, of which there are many in the Somerville family).  We are sure we want the Warp to be mostly digital or web-based so that we can continuously improve, update, and hyperlink to other resources, and so that students can use it as a sort of personalized Wikipedia for research as they write papers and prepare presentations.  As with the Weft, we want our Warp to be rich in the basic information and overview features that will orient upper-level students as they prepare to read all our rich books.  The Warp will also include summaries of multiple perspectives on various topics, and (where possible) links to primary-source documents (e.g. Ben Franklin’s Autobiography on Project Gutenberg), curated pictures and videos, etc.  We will also incorporate Book II and Appendix B of Poetics into the Warp.   

We hope that the Warp and Weft will eventually replace World Book as an information resource for both students and parents.   

Who will write all this?  Nathaniel Somerville, oldest son of Scott and Marcia Somerville, is our lead author for this project.  In addition to his homeschool training as a pioneer of Marcia Somerville's curriculum, Nathan has a degree in history from Hillsdale College, a six-year-old son, a tremendous talent for humorous narrative, and a gift of wisdom.  Now forty years old, he also has the experiences of life, God, and suffering, that we feel are indispensable to a history project like this.  It is hard to find a writer of Nate’s caliber who will commit to a big, complex, multi-year writing project, so we are exceedingly grateful to God for him!  

There can be no question that this is a massive undertaking, but fortunately, we have some guidelines.  We will use materials from the Pop Quiz, the Primer Guidebook, and Evaluations, as well as of course the Teacher’s Notes in Tapestry of Grace, to help direct our topics, scope, sequence, etc.  The goal is that when we are through, you will never again have to wonder where to find the basic places, ideas, events, dates, people, etc., upon which and through whom God has woven His tapestry of grace.  To that end, we covet both your feedback and your prayers.  

After months of design meetings, we have actually begun to write the first version of this project.  We set painfully high standards, desiring that the Warp and Weft should combine our best and most precise scholarship with primary sources and “fresh” historical details, provide every bit of information called for in discussion scripts, and be written with a marvelous sense of fun!  To that end, we have invented two characters--Ted the Thread and Nelly the Needle--to help guide our younger students through the Tapestry.

This is our extremely tentative production schedule for the Warp and Weft:

  • Summer of 2021: Begin to release Weft Audio (History) for all four years, with a finish date in September or October.
  • Early Spring of 2022: Begin to sell subscriptions to the Warp Drive for Literature.
  • Winter of 2023: Release Weft Readers (History) for all four years.
  • Winter of 2023: Begin to add History articles to the Warp Drive subscription.
  • Summer of 2025: Finish adding most History articles to the Warp Drive.