Category Archives: weavers

Weaving Words

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Until the Industrial Revolution weaving, and the words associated with the equipment and materials, was probably as familiar to most people as the words we now use to describe our cars.Now most of the terms sound like a foreign language unless, of course, you are a hand weaver who loves the craft and still weaves in the traditional European manner. I clarify with European because a different style of weaving, still practiced in Peru and other such countries, employs the backstrap loom. Instead of a beam, the warp goes around the weaver’s back. Using memorized patterns, their fingers pick up the threads and press the weft through. (It is truly amazing to see their fingers blur as they pluck the threads, similar to watching a good guitar picker.)

However, the ‘weaver’s cross’ is still obvious and as my weaving teacher once told me there is no weaving without the cross.

Anyway, I would venture to guess that most people know maybe three or four words that pertain to weaving : warp, weft, shuttle and loom. I would also bet that there is some confusion in most people’s minds between warp and weft. (Just so we’re clear, warp is the the skeleton of fibers that runs from beam to beam in a loom. The weft is the fiber sent crossways through the warp on the shuttle.)  The loom, on the other hand, is not a static piece of equipment but has many pieces that work together to take two strands of fiber and make them into finished cloth.

A loom can be warped back to front or front to back so, depending upon the method, the steps would be slightly different. But the basic process is the same.

The warp is wound upon a warping board, a board or free standing rack with pegs. Ties are put at each end of the cross and then at each end of the warp at about one yard intervals. These ties are called choke ties; these are released once the warp is put on the loom. Long thin sticks called lease sticks are inserted on either side of the cross to hold it while the warp is wound around the rear apron rod. The warp is spread and the fibers are brought forward and threaded through the heddles. These are slim metal pieces that hang down from on rod on the castle. Each heddle has an eye and each thread must be pulled through a heddle. Then the strands are pulled through another piece that slips into the loom, a piece that resembles a comb although closed on both sides, and is called a reed. This step is called sleying the reed, I am not sure why. The reeds have slits of varying thicknesses depending upon thickness of the threads: cotton, linen, wool or silk, that is drawn through them and how closely woven you want the cloth to be.  Each handful of finished strands are knotted loosely to keep them tidy. When all the warp is finished, it is tied to the front beam.

Confused yet? Every loom has a certain number of  shafts from 2 on up. The more sheds, the more complicated a pattern can be woven. What is a shed you ask? The framework that holds the heddles. The space between the upper and lower warp is call a shaft and it is through this space that a shuttle goes. The treadles, foot pedals on the floor, are attached to the bar that connects these shafts. Stepping on the treadles raises and lowers different shafts, different warp threads in other words, and it is this interaction that creates a pattern.

At its most basic, stepping on a treadle lifts a certain number of threads. The shuttle with the weft thread passes through to the other side. Then you push a piece of the framework called the beater that pushes the weft tight. Step on another treadle, lift another set of threads, and pass the shuttle back to the first side.

Problems can arise at any point. Your warp threads can break. The tension of your warp may not be even. You may have missed threading a strand through a heddle or the reed.

Sounds complicated doesn’t it? And it is. Another quote from my weaving teacher: weaving is a process of constant problem solving. Although looms are now mechanized, this basic design: the cross, the sheds, the shuttle has not changed. The big difference is that a hand weaver, such as Rees, would use his feet to raise and lower the sheds and it would take him a lot longer to finish several yards of cloth.

A traveling weaver, such as Rees, would have to reassemble his loom at every stop, make a warp and put it on the loom, thread the heddles and so on before he even began weaving. Then the loom would have to be disassembled at the end of his job. No wonder weavers were considered skilled craftsmen and completed an apprenticeship of several years.

As complex and labor intensive as this process seems, a weaver was still able to keep 9 to 11 spinners busy.

How sweet it is; honey and the Shakers

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In A Simple Murder, Lydia Farrell is a beekeeper or apiarist. The Shakers regularly used outside contractors for certain jobs and I thought it logical that a former Shaker, ejected from the community, might stay on, especially if she possessed a useable skill. Photographs of Shaker communities, obviously from later in their history, sometime show the recognizeable white hives.

Honey is the oldest known sweetener; cave paintings from 10,000 years ago show people collecting honey. Sugarcane was grown on the Indian subcontinent and became a trade item when someone discovered how to extract crystal sugar from the sugarcane juice. It traveled by the trade routes to the Middle East and from there the Crusaders took it home to Europe and the British Isles. Christopher Columbus is commonly named as the one who brought sugarcane to the New World. Sugarcane is another crop, like cotton, that had a tremendous impact on the United States. It was grown in the south and since it required tremendous amounts of labor for the cutting and processing it necessitated lots of slaves.

The Native Americans made and used maple syrup as a sweetener.

Sugar came in cones and each piece had to be chipped from the cone. Most people in the early United States used both maple syrup and honey for sweetening, especially on the frontier. Most of the Shaker communities kept bees both for their honey and the beewax for candles.

Since this was before the age of petroleum, paraffin was not known and tallow, a substance made from animal fat, was sometimes used for cheap candles instead of beeswax.

 

The wooly facts

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So, my last post concerned flax and linen. I forgot to mention that flax was also grown for its seed. The seeds produce an oil. I’ve never heard of that, you say. But you have, under the name linseed oil. Linseed oil has a long history of human use, right down to cleaning artists’s brushes.

The fibers for wool are shorter than for linen but still has to be aligned the same way. Usually that was done by carding. Some of the prints from this period show very little girls carding wool. The carded wool was then spun into yarn.

Linen was actually more commonly worn than wool; sheep were expensive and many households didn’t own the equipment with which to process the wool. Also, handling the flax and  the sheared wool took time and skill.

But what about cotton, you ask? Cotton, because of the seeds which need to be picked out of the cotton boll, is very labor intensive as well. Unlike linen and wool, it requires a hot climate. It is also a ‘heavy feeder’, and rapidly sucks the nutrients from the soil. So cotton was not commonly worn, especially by the middle and lower classes. Lawn, a very finely woven cotton, was a fashionable fabric during the Regency period and as expensive as silk. It was not until Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin that cotton became more economically feasible to produce. Because of the gin’s impact not only on cloth production but also on slavery (many many slaves were now required to grow cotton), I think a case could be made that the gin changed the world.

Cloth was consequently very valuable. Every piece of clothing was worn, by the average person anyway, until it was literally rags and then those scraps were used for other things like pieced quilts. The wealthy could purchase many changes of clothing and unlike today, when it is frequently difficult to tell who is wealthy and who is not by looking at them, in earlier times someone’s wealth and status was immediately apparent. Maybe that is why some people know crave the designer labels; it speaks to the trappings of wealth and status? What do you think?

Weaving Words

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I suspect most people never think about the origins of some of the most common metaphors in our language. Take, ‘Strike while the iron is hot’, a concept that predates Shakespeare and comes from blacksmithing (as least according to one theory). Well, weaving and spinning have given common words and phrases to the English language too, and I’ll bet most people never think of their origins or really understand what they mean.

Take ‘tow’ for example, as in tow-headed. After the flax is treated into linen fiber (more about that later) and the long fibers are removed for spinning, the short fibers that are left are known as tow. They are not blond as people think but a light grayish brown. They have to be further processed to make them useable and they were made into sacks and cords and clothing for slaves and the poor.

Flaxen, obviously from the flax plant, refers to light blond hair. Flax is a flowering plant that has been cultivated since the time of the Egyptians and processed into linen. Since that is a multi-step process that involves soaking the flax in water and beating it with specialized equipment before the linen fibers are extracted, I wonder how anyone figured it out.

We are no longer so familiar with the words for the equipment required to process the flax into linen cloth. Loom, of course, and warp (the fibers that form the skeleton of any cloth), weft (usually the crosswise threads) and shuttle we still know. But the break, heckler and scutching knife?

First the flax plants were soaked for several weeks, sometimes in a stream, sometimes in special trough dug for this purpose. When the stalks rotted, they were put into a brake or break and crushed to remove the outside stalks. Although there are some smaller breaks made for women, this process was usually done by men, and skilled men at that, as it was a heavy job. By the late eighteenth century some mills to help with this step had begun to spring up. Once the bark was removed the scutching knife, a long wooden blade, was used to beat the fibers against a board. Then the linen fibers were put through hecklers or hacklers, boards with metal prongs that helped straighten the threads. This step had to be done several times with hecklers of increasing fineness. All of this processing was done largely by men. After that the long linen fibers were ready to be spun by the household’s women

The men who were skilled at ‘dressing’ the fibers considered this a profession and during the winter went from household to household processing the fibers. Most households did not have the equipment, in fact many did not own a loom although all had spinning wheels. And that is plural, some wheels spun wool, some spun linen, some required the woman to walk back and forth with the yarn in her hands. The spinner controlled the tension.

Linen is a fiber with no give, unlike wool which has a little stretch to it. Linsey-woolsey was a cloth made with a wool warp and linen weft and offered some of the advantages of both fibers. And how, asks the practical minded woman, were these clothes laundered?

Well, usually only the underwear was laundered. There was a great controvery over which fiber to use, wool or linen. Linen won and it is a fiber that can stand hot water and ironing and grows softer with both wear and washing. So the practical housewife laundered primarily the underwear, termed ‘body linen’ in those days.

The Simple Life?

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As I struggle to negotiate the programs for blogging and all the other digital equipment we deal with, I thought how appealing the ‘good old days’ were.

But were they?

The Shakers strove for a simple life but the culture then was essentially agrarian. The women cooked, sewed, canned and performed all those thrify housewifely virtues. Since talking was frowned upon they were essentially alone even in the midst of a crowd. And although they were equal in influence to the Brethern, everyone had to give up sex. I think most of us would agree that that is a tough sacrifice.

Outside the Shaker communities, women were not important at all. Documents of the period show that they were referred to almost exclusively by their married name, if that. Some are listed simply as wife. Talk about loss of identity. Women, as helpmeet to husbands, was a concept taken very seriously. Although most boys were taught to read and ‘figure’, many girls were not. It wasn’t seen as necessary and besides, they were all very busy. No wonder so many of them died young.

The women who had jobs outside the home were usually women who helped husbands, fathers or sons in a business. Sometimes they continued after they were widowed but not always. Many of the wills from that time put women firmly under the control and care of the eldest son.

Weaving was one of the very few non-gender professions. The male weavers, like my character Will Rees, took their looms from house to house. Those who traveled the roads were called factors (I wonder if there is a connection to the word factory? I’ll have to research it). Weaving was an honored middle class profession. William Findlay, one of the first legislators from the Pittsburg, Pa area and a moderate voice during the Whiskey Rebellion, was a weaver.

Shakers and the Simple Life

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The Shakers formed in the middle of the 1700’s and moved to the United States in 1774. So, at the time of  “The Simple Murder” in 1795 they were already established and rapidly growing. During the mid- nineteenth century the Shakers numbered between 4,000 and 5,000 members living in 19 communities that stretched from Maine to Kentucky. Several of these remain as museums. The converted community in Hancock, Mass has  interpretive guides after the Williamsburg model:  www.hancockshakervillage.org. Today, there are still three living Shakers residing in the Sabbathday Lake community near Auburn, Maine.

The more formal name for the Shakers, which they gave themselves, was United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, or the Believers for short, but they were called The Shaking Quakers for the dancing, singing and twirling in their services. They also called their Church the Millennium Church since they expected their Church to last a thousand years.

            From the very beginning women played a significant role in the formation and shape of the sect. Ann Lee, who joined in 1758, claimed revelations regarding the fall of Adam and Eve, and preached celibacy. She became a highly influential and revered leader, called Mother Ann by her followers.  Many of her admonitions became part of the Shaker canon.

               “Good spirits will not live where there is dirt.”

            “Do your work as though you had a thousand years to live and as if you were to die tomorrow.”