Textile Museum - Jacquard Looms

The Audax Textile Museum in Tilburg has a large display on Jacquard Looms.

These add-ons to "power looms" were invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard in the early 1800's and revolutionized weaving. It was suddenly possible to weave very intricate patterns much more quickly. Patterns were fed into the loom using a set of cards with holes - effectively punch cards. For this reason, the jacquard loom is considered a forerunner of modern computing! The systems were expensive to purchase and operate, requiring highly-skilled weavers and a lot of maintenance. But they could produce high-end damask cloth for table linens in large quantities.

Thanks to the "real" loom weaving lessons I've been taking recently, I was able to understand most of the working parts of these big devices. The patterning comes from having some threads drawn over the others for longer stretches - "overshot" - while the threads underneath continue the standard twill patterning. So the loom has two parts: the basic 4 to 8 shafts for the background twill weave, and the complex, punch-card-driven, individually-controlled string heddles behind this.

The looms were very large - with a second-storey superstructure to accomodate the punch card system:

[jacquard loom in full glory]

The operators basically stood at the loom with their bums resting on a slanted plank, so their feet could operate the levers for the shafts. In the picture above, you can see a leather apron draping down over the finished weaving (to protect it) on the lower right of the loom; the slanted wooden bum rest right in front of this. The white rope is attached to the jacquard pedal, which activates the card reader when the weaver steps on it. The holes in the cards determine which threads get lifted to make the weaving pattern, and each individual card represents one row of weaving. You can see other pedals below the loom under the weaving; these control the "background" weave.

[close up of the heddles]

In the photo above, the hundreds (thousands!) of string "heddles" hanging down with weights are the pattern heddles. Each can lift one warp thread, which runs through a small eye or loop tied in it. To the right you can see wooden frames holding more heddles; these control the background (twill) weave. There are 6 frames and each frame raises every 6th thread across the whole width of the weaving, in turn. These frames are controlled by the pedals, so that by pressing combinations of pedals, you can raise a predictable and repeating pattern of warp threads.

As you can imagine, setting up such a loom with thousands of threads is painstaking work that takes days. And if you make a mistake in threading the heddles, you'll see it in the pattern! So most looms were threaded only once, and then when the weaving was done it would be cut off carefully, leaving the heddles threaded with the remaining threads. You'd tie new threads to the remaining ones (which would still be threaded!), wind up, and start the new weaving. 

You can see how fine the linen warp threads are in the following pictures. The wooden bar across the top photo is a so-called "temple"; an adjustable cross-brace with little grippy teeth at either end, used to stretch the weaving out to a specific width.

[very fine linen warp and the temple in action]

[damask in progress]

These table linens were made using a linen warp (the threads that run through the loom and the heddles) and a cotton weft (the threads doing the actual back-and-forth weaving). The complex pattern is best visible when seen at an angle; it's subtle. That's the beauty - very understated luxury!

The factory had the ability to make new punch cards, so that new designs could be made.

[punch card machine]

Once you have seen these looms, it's much easier to understand the modern ones that were in action at the museum's Textile Lab. This is where textile artists were at work, using computer-controlled looms to create strange new textiles and patterns. That's for next time!

A Visit to the Textile Museum in Tilburg

I'm on vacation in Holland to see my relatives, and I just had the opportunity to visit the Audax Textile Museum in Tilburg.

This is definitely a place worth visiting, if you are a spinner or a weaver. It's located in an old wool-blanket factory, so there are some rooms dedicated to the old machinery (still all in working order!) that was used to make blankets.

There are other rooms dedicated to the history of jacquard weaving (I'll be blogging about that in a later post), but the major attraction is the Textile Lab, where modern, computer-driven weaving and knitting machines are used by artists to push the boundaries of current tech. Again, for a future post!

So, let's get started.
Quickie tour of the blanket factory:

The factory was in operation between 1900 and 1940, and produced 100% woolen blankets from bales of local wool. The blankets were woven and fulled on site and the entire production chain can be viewed.

The process starts with the "picker" (well, OK, it's called something else in Dutch). The wool shown in the pictures is pretty fantastically clean, and I'm not sure if this was actually the case when this puppy was in current use...but we'll not get picky about this.

[first stop: the picker]

Then, a couple of "carding" steps followed, to produce thin webs of fleece and finally narrow ropes of fleece. Unlike other mills I've visited, this factory didn't use a pindrafter.

[carding, step 1]

[thin fleece mat moving onto second carding step]

[second carding step, producing thin ropes of roving]

The thin rovings that come off the second carder look a lot like those wheels you get from Briggs and Little, called "country roving" - the ones you use to make Cowichan sweaters. See photo below:

[what comes off of the second carder]

These wheels were then used on the "spinner", which was a sort of automated drop-spindle. It thinned and twisted the roving into single-ply yarn.

[the spinner]

Then, weaving ensued. This step wasn't explained fully in the setup (all that was shown was how they set up a warp chain with a machine to do sectional warping - and they didn't demo it with the yarn shown above), but I understood that they produced double-woven pieces of woolen cloth (twill weave) that were then fulled and finally run through the teasel machine. The blankets were of a solid colour, with one side a lighter shade than the other.

The "fuller" took the blankets, soaked in a hot solution of ammonia and soda, and forced them through a pair of rollers, first in one direction and then 90 degrees opposed, to felt the wool fibers. Several passes were required.

[fulling machine]

After fulling, the edges were hemmed and the blanket was run through the "teaseler" a few times: basically a bunch of rollers with nasty burrs on them to raise a nice fluffy pile on the blanket.

[teasel machine]

[closeup of the nasty rollers]

Lots of factors contributed to the downward spiral and eventual death of the factories: the rising popularity of the down-filled or synthetic duvet, the fact that we have central heating in all our houses now, and the rising cost of land which makes selling the factory itself more lucrative than running it as a business. 

Wool blankets are a rarity these days. Most folks have one only as a sort of decorative throw, to cuddle under when watching TV on a winter night, or by a summer campfire. Blanket factories were once relatively common in northern Europe, England, and even in on the east coast of the US.

All About Sheep!

I signed up to talk at a local PechaKucha event recently. It was fun!

You get 20 slides and 20 seconds per slide to talk about anything you love.

Guess what I talked about?

Sheep Stories, volume 8

I visited a small local spining mill a while ago, and have since started to wonder how the different types of commecially-prepared rovings are made.

In that small mill, cleaned fleece was carded to make ropes that could immediately be sold for handspinning, or could be spun by the mill's spinning machine. Or, they could be fed into the pin-drafter. Pin-drafting machines use carded input. They use a couple of rows of really nasty teeth to straighten out the roving, which is then coiled up into a nice-looking rope. The pin-drafted rovings could be sold or spun as well.

I suspect that a lot of small mills in North America have pindrafting like this; they can produce carded preps and pindrafted roving, which some will call “combed” or “worsted”, although it’s not really if you are a purist. Mills like Jagger in Maine, Morro in CA, and the small mills around me here in western Canada have pindrafting equipment of this type, some of it "vintage"! You can handspin a “semi-worsted” yarn from this type of prep but not a “true worsted”, again if you are a stickler for technical details. That's because of the initial carding step. True "worsted" prep goes straight from fleece to combing, no carding at all involved.

The combed prep you get from big distributors like Louet is different. True “worsted” or “topmaking” factories use a combination of “gilling boxes” and combing machines to produce even more aligned fibers. There’s no carding done, not even as a prepatory step, like in pindrafting. I've never seen this type of equipment, and Googling it hasn't made me any wiser in terms of how it functions or what it looks like.

It used to be that only long-fibered wools were combed - in the UK, special "longwool" sheep were bred to support this industry - but nowadays even shorter, crimpier fibers can be combed. Merino is not a longwool, but it is put through this process to give smooth tops.

There are some smaller worsted mills still operating in the UK. I’m hunting for “topmaking” mills in America, but there are not that many. There’s the Maine Top Mill and Chargeurs in Jamestown SC, and that’s all I can find on Google. It seems this was once a thriving industry in the US, but it died out early in the 1900’s.

Finally, here is a cute Popular Science magazine article from 1891, which was written when the wool processing industry in the US was booming. It gives a nice overview of the then-recent developments of the machinery, and how processing was done.