Category Archives: murder mysteries

The Question of Titles

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I am not good at creating titles; I’ll admit that first thing. Some authors seem to choose the perfect title. snappy and appropriate. I struggle.

I think of this now since I am struggling to title the fourth book. Right now it is titled “Death in Salem”. Bland, right? I started with “Salem Slay Ride” which I think is snappier but one of my readers said it sounded like winter. Since the story takes place in June, not a good thing.

Maybe I should have a vote.

The original title for my first book was “Hands to Murder”. I took it from the Shaker saying “Hearts to God, Hands to work”. The publisher felt that too many people wouldn’t get the allusion so it became “A Simple Murder.”

I was lucky with the second book. Since the mystery concerns a dyer – as in one who dyes – the title seemed perfect. But the third book, now titled “Cradle to Grave”, I called  The Book until my daughter suggested the title.

So now I’m struggling with the title for the fourth Will Rees.  “Death at Sea”? “”Blow the Man down”? I’m still partial to “Salem Slay Ride” because I like puns. Like I said, still struggling.

More about Salem’s sailors

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In an earlier post, I blogged about the cosmopolitan nature of Salem in the 1790’s, primarily due to merchant men who traveled to the far corners of the globe.

I did not really discuss the multi-ethnicity of Salem itself. Some of that is due to the merchantmen. Salem is home to a large East Indian population, an immigrant colony that began hundreds of years ago.

But some is due to the whaling ships.

The crews of the whaling ships included men (and yes, a few women, disguised as men) from every background. Some came from seafaring families, the profession passed down from father to son. The best harpooners were drawn from the local Native American tribes and were commonly reputed to be the best. (And probably were. The colonists learned the trade from the Indians who had been practicing it for generations from the coast or from small boats). Black sailors were so common they had a special name: the Black Tars. And as immigrants arrived, not only from Europe but also from some of the ports of call, the French, Irish, Portuguese and other men joined the whaling crews.

We always talk about how small the world is now. I doubt we fully realize how much travel and cross-fertilization went on hundreds of years ago.

The Industrial Revolution and the Loom

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The Industrial Revolution mechanized the entire process of cloth making. According to Brouty, prior to the invention of the flying shuttle in the 1750’s, three to four spinners were needed to produce enough yarn for a weaver. The statistic I’ve read other places is nine. Anyway, many spinners are needed for each weaver. The flying shuttle, again according to Brouty, quadrupled the weaver’s output. If you think that then people would try to find a way to increase the yield of the spinners, you would be right. The spinning jenny was invented in the mid 1700s and the first spinning factory was set up in 1761 by a gentleman named Richard Arkwright. Samuel Compton invented the spinning mule ten years later (unfortunately for him, he was a talented inventor that had his life threatened several times and died in poverty) and now handweavers were hard pressed to keep up. Pressure mounted for a mechanical loom that could keep up with the spinning machines.

Hand spinning and weaving, a honored and important job (primarily done by women) became a ‘craft’. Most people don’t even think of the connection between the clothing on their backs and the process by which it got there.

The Jack Loom

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The jack loom is a horizontal loom; i.e. the warp runs horizontally and most of the size is front to back, not up and down. The weaver can sit on a bench. With the vertical looms, like those still used in Scandinavia and previously in Greece, the warp threads hang down and the weaver must stand on a stool or the floor itself must be lowered to provide enough room.

folded loom

A loom this size could easily be put into the back of a wagon and transported from place to place, as I have my main character/detective doing in my historical mysteries. This is a back view, by the way. The white canvas is for the back apron. I prefer to have my finished cloth roll up on the back beam so i tie on the warp threads to the back and then thread them through the heddles and the reed.

Heddles; what are they? I’ve mentioned them several times and then someone emailed me and said I don’t know what heddles are. Well, mine are long metal wires with an eye exactly like a needle. Mine are made of metal, but the looms I saw in Greece had thread heddles. I think I would find weaving with those confusing.

heddles one heddles two

In the first photo, it is possible to see three of the four sheds. Each one has its own set of heddles. Threaded and tied up to the treadles, these sheds make it possible to weave many patterns.

And finally, the reed. The dents, or spaces, determine the fineness of the fiber and is another mechanism for keeping each thread smooth and untangled. I hope you can see the spaces here. Weaving with silk, for example, requires a reed with many many slots,

reed

 

More about treadles

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My husband and I just returned from Greece. Partly research, partly vacation. Anyway, I spent some time looking at looms. The vertical loom seems to have disappeared. At least I didn’t see any. The looms I saw were similar to the jack loom I own, except less sophisticated. Instead of metal heddles ( the needle like things that the warp threads go through), these looms used string. Instead of a castle, or upper frame that holds the heddles, posts were erected on each side. And instead of five treadles, these looms only had two. Only simple weaving could be done with these. Like my loom, however, these treadles are tied up to the sheds so that the threads are raised and lowered in turn.

loom - greece

Dyeing with indigo

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sweater-indigo

I’ll return to looms next blog. But I wanted to post about the indigo dyed sweater. Indigo loses strength with repeated dyeing I like the marbled effect but if one dyes the fiber in successive batches, as I did, the later skeins of yarn are lighter. See the sleeve? Still a few bits of darker dye, but overall the color is a lot less intense. Just FYI for all the dyers out there.

Some semi-modern looms

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There are any types of looms other than those previously discussed.

The drawloom and the jacquard loom both allow a weaver to weave a complex pattern without manually lifting individual threads.

First, a description of harnesses. A loom that makes four sheds (remember: that’s the space that allows the shuttle to pass through )allows a weaver to construct more complicated patterns than one with two. An eight harness loom allows more variation than four.  The compound harness loom, also described as a staggered harness loom, allows a loom to function as though it has many many harnesses. The invention has been ascribed to many different countries but it certainly appeared in China, allowing weavers to create silk brocade. Drawlooms required an assistant to sit on top of the harness and pull the heddles that controlled the pattern in the proper order. The assistant was call the drawboy (or sometimes the drawgirl  Can you imagine this job? Can you imagine that job?).Pre-constructed  patterns were required to produce the desired result.

The very thought of putting a child on top of a loom makes me shudder!

Treadles and Gas Pedals

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My husband has nicknamed treadles the gas pedals. He is not far off. Treadles do have an important function in weaving. They enable a weaver to create patterns in the weaving. As I said for the backstrap loom, the weaver picks up the individual threads. Treadles remove this step (no pun intended). The weaver steps on the appropriate treadle, which picks up the threads that the weaver has tied on to the metal rings. As these threads are lifted, the pattern is created. This enables the weaver, in combination with the threading through the reed and heddles, to make patterns, and, even for a four shed loom, fairly complicated ones.

treadles

Usually, the pattern is repeated across the warp.Look at an antique coverlet and you will see what I mean.

Since I have a four shed loom, I mainly use four treadles.

Treadles are one of THE Main features of modern looms. According to Broudy,  the treadles appeared in Europe about 1000 AD. The loom frame was not far behind. And, by the time silk reached Europe, weaving was already a highly developed art. Looms and weaving patterns developed in response to the fiber used and whether tapestries or other elaborate weaving would be done. Flax, although hard to process into linen, has smooth non-sticky fibers that lie together. Wool is a more forgiving fiber and takes dyes well. Silk is different from both. But whatever the fiber, and however the threads are warped and threaded, the treadles make the weaving of a pattern much easier than picking each strand up by hand.

Early looms – warp weighted

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No discussion of early looms would be complete without mentioning warp weighted looms.

As I mentioned in a previous post, weights have been discovered in archeological digs. The earliest date from the seventh century B.C. in Anatolia. In Europe, this type of loom was used since Neolithic times ( and according to one of the books I read is still used in Norway!). It is thought that this is the type of loom used in Ancient Greece.

What makes this loom different? Well, most of the modern looms are oriented horizontally. The weaver sits on a stool or bench. The warp runs from a front beam through the reed and heddles to a beam at the back. The tension or the warp threads can be adjusted by tightening the beam. The warp weighted loom is oriented vertically. In a warp weighted loom, the weaver stands.Moreover, she must walk back and forth and she pushes her shuttle through the sheds. How did she obtain several yards of cloth? With the modern jack, the warp can be very long and rolled around the front beam, and unrolled gradually as the weft threads are woven through. From what I’ve read, the warp weighted looms were tall. From the descriptions, she would have had to stand on a stool for the first bit of weaving. And pieces of cloth would have had to be sewn together to achieve the necessary length.

Tension is very important. To achieve a closely woven cloth, the warp and weft threads must be tightly packed together. So, the warp in every loom is under tension. In the warp weighted loom, warp threads are tied around weights that hang to an inch or so above the ground. Sticks would have had to be put through the warp to form the sheds.

All in all, weaving with this type of loom would have been much more physical than with a more modern loom. And, as a weaver, I wonder how it would have been possible to create the different patterns possible to construct on even a four shed jack loom.

A word about Norway and the Norse. The warp weighted loom is the type that would have been brought to the Norse (and Viking) colonies. Think Iceland, Greenland, and even early North America. Remnants of these looms, as well as cloth and weights, have been excavated from digs in all these areas. Ostergard, in Woven Into the Earth, discusses the digs in Greenland and the artifacts removed from just such a dig. The colonies were originally established during the middle ages. I always thought that the name Greenland was a lie,  chosen to lure colonists to a harsh and forbidding land. But the climate during this time was much warmer than it became later. In England, the climate was so warm grapes were grown and England had its own wine industry. But after the eleventh century, the climate became much colder. (It is call the Little Ice Age). So much for English made wine. And the climate in Greenland (and in North America) became too harsh for these colonies and they had to be abandoned. Or else the colonists died out.

An interesting study of the burials in North America shows that the bones, coming forward, show evidence of starvation and nutritional deficiencies. The dead also had to be buried in much more shallow graves since the permafrost line rose and graves couldn’t be dug as deeply as formerly.

Weaving and an interest in looms has led me far afield.

 

weaving in myths and legends

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Spinning and weaving were so important in the past that these activities are a regular feature of the myths and stories that have come down to us. Think Sleeping Beauty, put to sleep by pricking her finger on a spindle.

Usually the myths put the creation of weaving at the beginning of  history. As we might expect, many of the early myths attribute the beginnings to the spider, or, in China, the silk worm. The myth of the spider-weaver was still present in the Greek myths during the Classical period. (Remember, Hera turned Ariadne into a spider for comparing her weaving to the Hera’s.)  So the archeologists say that weaving probably began somewhere in the dawn of prehistory. There was weaving before there were looms. And spinning before that. Barber, in Women’s work, the first 20,000 years, talks about cords and string that were used as netting. Sometimes the fibers were twisted together to make a stronger cord. And then plaiting strands together was invented. Who would guess that braiding would have to be discovered?

Anyway, references to spinning and weaving are all through the folktales we still know now. Besides Sleeping Beauty, there are the three fates, who determine a man’s lifespan. How many fairy tales are there where the simple but beautiful and virtuous maiden must spin straw into gold. Rumplestiltskin is probably the most well known of this theme but there are others.

Remember the Grimm story of the princess supposed to spin straw into gold. She is helped to do so but the price is to invite three deformed women to her wedding.(Rather do this than give up my first born.)  One has a swollen lip, from moistening the fiber, one a large foot from pressing the treadle on a spinning wheel and the large thumb comes from twisting the fiber into yarn. Or the 12 swans where the sister had to weave nettles into shirts by a certain time or her brothers will stay swans forever. She is unable to finish the last shirt and one brother has a swan wing the rest of his life.

These are stories we still know, although I venture to say most children in the past were up close to both spinning and weaving in the home.