Scott Norris says he’s been a huge fan of books, of reading, of words themselves, for many years. He’s also fascinated by calligraphy and different kinds of text, as well as letterpress printers and early printing methods — oh, and 18th-century cabinet makers.

Norris, who lives in Florence, loves to make cloth, too; he’s been a professional weaver for over 30 years.

And over about the last five-odd years, he’s found a way to merge those interests in creating a whole new line of work: hand-dyed linen pieces to which he adds artfully woven text, like a page lifted from a very large, hand-designed book.

These pieces can be of considerable dimensions — about 6 by 4 feet — though he also makes smaller ones, about 30 by 30 inches, and both can include human and animal figures, such as chickens and lambs, that heighten the sense you’re looking at a page from an old-fashioned book.

The text itself is based on some vignettes Norris has written about an imaginary small-scale printer and farmer, Daniel Janes, who lives in a small town in eastern Massachusetts in the early 1800s. His first piece begins with the line “It was the last hour of daylight, on the last day of the year.”

They are stand-alone, wall-hanging pieces that, as Norris sees it, celebrate both the beauty of cloth and of letters and words — and as such they’ve given form to different ideas that have been rattling around his head for years.

“Cloth can tell a story,” he said during a recent morning in his studio, located in a converted garage behind his home. “The way it feels in your hand, its color, its texture and patterns, all of that tells you something about it.”

Weaving words into that cloth, he said, “is another way of telling a story.” The dark brown linen he uses for his text, he notes, “looks like ink that’s faded … I like how that kind of evokes a sense of the past.”

Norris, who’s 66, says this work was born in part from a desire to recreate the look of young adult novels (before the term was coined) from the first part of the 20th century that included illustrations. One example he cites is “Johnny Tremain,” the 1944 Newberry Medal winner about a Boston teen who gets caught up in the early days of the American Revolution.

“I love the look of those kinds of books, which I read when I was growing up in the 1960s, and I wondered why they disappeared,” he said.

But in deciding to weave text into his linen cloth, all of which he hand-dyes beforehand, Norris has set himself a real challenge. For starters, he creates his text backwards, working on the reverse side of the cloth to hide “the messiness,” as he puts it, of the added fabric, such as loose ends of thread and knots.

In addition, he has to work from the bottom of the “page,” so to speak, to the top, so he weaves in the last lines of the text first and works backward to the beginning of the passage.

To try and visualize what this process might look like, Norris drew on paper the words and text styles he wanted, then used an Excel program to convert the image to what it would look like reversed. Then he had Collective Copies enlarge these examples so he’d have a guide for doing the actual weaving.

He likens his weaving process, called inlay, to marquetry, which involves adding very thin wood inlays to furniture and other structures, with those veneers forming decorative patterns and designs.

“I’m adding contrasting threads of linen to create the words and images, simultaneously as I weave the background cloth on the loom,” he said.

It requires a lot of patience, he notes, and he’s also had to do numerous trial runs, on a much smaller scale, to see how everything might look.

“I’ve basically created my own typefaces, and there was a lot of trial and error,” he said, noting that curving letters like “s” and “e” proved especially challenging.

The two large designs he’s created — the exact dimensions are 74 by 47 inches — each took him six months to make. The smaller ones took three months each.

“This is not something you can rush into,” he said with a laugh.

A chance visit

But Norris has a deep love of weaving to spur him. How deep is that love? He explains that he was once getting a doctorate in musical composition when by chance he visited a house in New Hampshire, where the owner had what Norris calls “a big piece of equipment” in his kitchen.

“I thought, ‘That’s a loom — that’s what I want to do. I want to make cloth,’” Norris said. “That’s basically how I got started. I went from trying to be a composer to learning how to weave.”

That same year, he started taking classes at WEBS in Northampton — he taught beginning classes himself there some years later — and began setting up his business. Ironically, he later realized the “big piece of equipment” he’d seen in that New Hampshire home was actually a hand press.

“That guy was a printer, and maybe I would have become one, too, if I’d realized it at the time,” he said, laughing.

In some ways, transitioning from music to weaving wasn’t that surprising, as Norris says he came from a family of people who worked with their hands. His grandmother was a quilter, his father was a carpenter, and his grandfather was a carpenter, too — one who did embroidery and rug hooking on the side.

“I had those kinds of influences in my life, and I always admired people who worked with their hands,” he said.

Norris has also supplemented his work as a weaver for years by working as a grant writer for nonprofit health care providers.

During his career, he’s made plenty of more traditional woven products such as dish towels, bath towels, and tablecloths, some with more standard plaid patterns or with small design motifs, some of which resemble fleurs-de-lis.

But in the last few years, Norris has embossed many of his dish towels with the same illustrations he’s created for his text-based pieces. The illustrations evoke the general historical narrative thread of the larger works: pot-bellied stoves, a women wearing a long 19th-century-style skirt, a farmer holding a lamb.

He’s also created other standalone pieces depicting a bearded weaver — one in a blue shirt, the other in a black shirt — seated at a loom.

Norris says he’s written about 75 pages of material for the loose story built around his fictional character, Daniel Janes, but he’s not clear how much of this will make it to actual cloth, given how long it takes to create these text- and illustration-based pieces.

But, he notes, “My goal has not been to tell a literal story. It’s really a story about how cloth and words can go together and my own love for these subjects.”

As he prepares to bring some of these works to trade and craft shows or have a large gallery show to exhibit them, Norris says he’s happy to have discovered a new type of design this late in his career.

“In some ways it feels like I’ve been building toward this for years,” he said.

Scott Norris’ website is elamswidow.com.

Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.