Made in New England | Swans Island Company

By Virginia M. Wright

The people who make Swans Island Company blankets work a quarter-mile upshore from Penobscot Bay in a 235-year-old farmhouse fringed by a border of Solomon’s seal and lady’s mantle. Their daily commute encompasses working harbors, placid lakes, forested mountains, and wild blueberry barrens. “We live in a place where you can open your window, and a cloud will drift in off the ocean,” says company president Bill Laurita. “Nature is close at hand; it’s part of our lives. This is not a fancy, complicated, plasticized place, and our designs aren’t like that either.”

Swans Island’s handwoven woolen blankets embody the spirit of coastal Maine—its traditions, its timelessness, even the mutable nature of its tides and weather—in subtle ways. The palettes are soothing, the designs classic and understated: a few stripes of varying widths, perhaps; some softly contrasting checks; or maybe one glorious colorway that on close inspection proves to be not a solid at all, but rather a marbled interplay of uncountable shades.

Some references are more direct. The white-flecked Firefly fabrics are inspired by the spectacle of lightning bugs flickering in a field on a hot summer night. A hue called Seasmoke draws its soft pearly gray from the fog that spirals and drifts over the bay on bitterly cold winter days. Autumn in New England, a limited-edition throw created in collaboration with Yankee for the magazine’s 90th anniversary this fall, deconstructs an October landscape from earth to sky in bands of crimson, orange, sage, gold, and pale gray.

“We aim to capture the complexity of nature and lay down the colors as simply as possible on the loom,” Laurita says. “But—and this may seem like a contradiction—simple is hard to do. You have to start with really good ingredients.”

Laurita’s office is on the Northport farmhouse’s second floor, in one of the low-ceilinged rooms he and his wife, Jody, called home for a few years after he and his partners bought the company and moved it from its eponymous island in 2004. The founders, John and Carolyn Grace, were lawyers from Boston, motivated by a dream of living year-round on the actual Swan’s Island, where they had a summer home. Taking stock of an island neighbor’s prize-winning sheep, the Graces settled on creating a living around that fleece by reviving the kind of heirloom-quality wool blankets they remembered from their childhoods. They researched traditional New England styles in the Maine State Museum’s textile archives, installed two floor looms in their home, and sold their first blankets in 1992. Within a few years, they had a national clientele and a coveted spot in the annual Smithsonian Craft Show in Washington, D.C.An MBA holder who has worked as a Waldorf teacher, carpenter, and blacksmith, Laurita was drawn to the challenge of scaling up the Graces’ cottage business while maintaining the quality and individuality that distinguished their blankets from mass-produced textiles. Today, Swans Island Company employs about 25 people, about half of whom are hands-on crafters: the weavers, dyers, and finishers who annually make about 1,000 woolen blankets, the signature product in a line of goods that includes linen bedding, yarn, apparel, and bags. Swans Island buys its Corriedale fleece from family farms in Pennsylvania and Ohio and sends it to Green Mountain Spinnery in Vermont, where it’s spun into soft, single-ply yarn.

Presiding over the dye studio is Riley Smith, who concocts dye baths according to the company’s 180 custom-color recipes, using mostly natural pigments, such as blues from the indigo plant and reds from cochineal beetle shells. Smith swishes skeins around in pots and tubs, then allows them a carefully monitored soak before scooping them onto drying hooks. He’s adept at resist techniques, like tying and twisting the skeins to block sections of yarn from receiving dye (that’s how Firefly gets its “light trails” and Watercolors, another blanket style, gets its washy teal and blue currents). Unlike industrial dyeing, which compresses fibers and produces monochromatic colors, small-batch dyeing maintains the yarns’ loftiness and yields multitonal shades akin to the gradients within flower blossoms.

In the farmhouse’s ell, weavers sit at piano-sized looms, pushing and pulling beater bars to lift and lower warp threads as weft shuttles zip back and forth, propelled by compressed air. A skilled weaver can create a queen-size blanket in about eight hours; setting up the warp, however, remains a two-day process requiring 3,456 hand-tied knots. When completed, the blanket is sent upstairs to the finishing room, where artisans use surgical tweezers to remove any remaining bits of chaff, inspect for and resolve flaws, and embroider custom touches like monograms.

Designs are a team effort. Spring Into Summer, a limited-edition throw, took root during a January thaw that found the staff anticipating the lightness and promise of an awakening landscape still some months away. Smith accepted the challenge of expressing that mood in natural white wool crisscrossed with a fresh green, blue, yellow, and pink windowpane plaid.

That in turn prompted conversations about creating a fall blanket. Creative director Michele Orne studied landscape photographs, experimented with groupings of colored skeins, and shared sketches with her collaborators at Swans Island and Yankee. In keeping with Swans Island’s aesthetic, Laurita says, Autumn in New England is not a literal interpretation, but rather an expression of the mellow season’s fleeting yet ever-renewing splendor, one that will provide warmth and nostalgia for generations.

This feature was originally published as “Dream Weaving” in the September/October 2025 issue of Yankee.

See More: Weekends with Yankee | Discover Swans Island Company in Camden, Maine

Enter to win an Autumn in New England limited-edition throw!

Swans Island Company and Yankee are partnering to give away one of these handwoven, hand-dyed wool blankets, designed to capture the essence of New England in the fall. For contest rules and to enter, go to: newengland.com/swansisland
Giveaway runs 9/1/25 – 9/30/25

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