Showing posts with label loom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label loom. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 12, 2023

The Beauty is in the Cards

 

QUESTION: One of my passions is to visit historic houses. In many of them from the 19th century, I often see beautiful coverlets on the beds and sofas. House docents have said that women produced these coverlets on a special type of loom. I know they were done on a special kind of loom, but I forget what it was called. Can you tell me more about this special loom?

ANSWER: The unique designs of those coverlets were possible by the invention of the “Jacquard” loom. But coverlets weren’t the only types of weaving produced on this loom. By the 1850s, factories began using larger versions of the Jacquard to produce not only coverlets but two-sided carpets. Before the Jacquard loom, complex, figural designs were more difficult to produce alone on the same loom. 

Joseph-Marie Jacquard, a French weaver and merchant, patented his invention in 1804, he revolutionized how patterned cloth could be woven. His machine made it possible for complex and detailed patterns to be manufactured by unskilled workers in a fraction of the time it took a master weaver and his assistant working manually. 

A Jacquard loom wasn’t a particular type of loom but a control mechanism that’s added to a variety of looms. 

The spread of Jacquard's invention caused the cost of fashionable, highly sought-after patterned cloth to plummet. It could now be mass produced, becoming affordable to a wide market of consumers, not only the wealthiest in society.

To weave fabric on a loom, a weaver passed a thread, called the weft, over and under a set of threads, called the warp. The weaving of threads at right angles to each other  formed the cloth. The particular order in which the weft passes over and under the warp threads determined the pattern. 

Before the Jacquard system, a weaver's assistant, known as a draw boy, had to sit on top of a loom and manually raise and lower its warp threads to create patterned cloth. But this was a slow and laborious process.

The key to the success of Jacquard's invention was its use of interchangeable cards into which small holes had been punched, which held instructions for weaving a specific pattern and took over the time-consuming job of the draw boy. 

When fed into the Jacquard mechanism, fitted to the top of the loom, the cards controlled which warp threads should be raised to allow the weft thread to pass under them. With these punch cards, Jacquard looms could quickly reproduce any pattern a designer could create, and reproduce over and over.

The designer first painted a pattern onto squared paper. Then a card maker translates the pattern row by row onto the punch cards. For each square on the paper that wasn’t painted in, the card maker punches a hole in the card. For each painted square, he didn’t.

The cards, each with their own combination of punched holes corresponding to the part of the pattern they represent, were then laced together, ready to be fed one by one through the Jacquard mechanism fitted to the top of the loom. 

When the mechanism pushed a card towards a matrix of pins in the Jacquard mechanism, the pins passed  through the punched holes, activating hooks to raise their warp threads. Where there were no holes the pins press against the card, stopping the corresponding hooks from raising their threads. 

A shuttle then travels across the loom, carrying the weft thread under the warp threads that have been raised and over those that have not. This repeating process causes the loom to produce the patterned cloth that the punch cards have instructed it to create.

The Jacquard mechanism is a device fitted to a loom that simplifies the process of manufacturing textiles with such complex patterns as brocade, damask, and matelassé. The resulting ensemble of the loom and Jacquard machine is then called a Jacquard loom.

Unlike regular looms which are faster and less expensive to operate, looms with a Jacquard mechanism are slower and costlier to operate.

Threading a Jacquard mechanism was so labor-intensive that weavers threaded many looms only once. They then tied subsequent warps into the existing warp with the help of a knotting robot which tied each new thread  individually. Even for a small loom with only a few thousand warp ends, the process of re-threading could take days.

Factories had to choose the looms and Jacquard mechanisms to suit the requirements for their product. They used larger capacity machines or multiple machines which allowed greater control over bigger designs woven over the width of the loom.

The Jacquard attachment first appeared in America in the early 1820s, probably by one of the many German, English and French hand weavers who had immigrated from their native countries in Europe. These immigrant weavers tended to settle in areas with populations of their own ethnic group and near sources of good quality wool. Many brought some type of Jacquard attachment or at least the experience to use one. Some even developed their own devices based on Jacquard's idea and patented them in the U.S.

Jacquard weavers derived the patterns and motifs they used from well-known folk traditions of Western Europe. The designs of most Illinois coverlets can be traced back to Ohio and Pennsylvania coverlets. The center field patterns were either a large, repeated symmetrical motif on two-piece ones or a centered medallion on single-width coverlets. Floral motifs appeared most frequently, in the Four Lilies and Sun-burst, Four Roses, Octagonal Four Roses, Four Leaves and Four Acorns, and Four Bellflowers patterns. Star and Sunburst designs were also common.

Families in the 19th century often used Jacquard coverlets when taking long journeys in a horse-drawn carriage or stage coaches. In America, the practice of making coverlets using Jacquard looms began to fade during the fourth quarter of the 19th century. The import of cheaper materials into the U.S. became a difficult hurdle for weavers to overcome.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about "Advertising of the Past" in the 2023 Spring Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Fulfilling the Need for Warmth and Comfort



QUESTION: On a recent road trip through the Southwest, I stopped at a flea market in Arizona where I found an old Indian blanket in black and white on a red background which I purchased for my bed back home. It looked to be in good shape and the price was right. Can you tell me which tribe may have made it and perhaps how old it is?

ANSWER: While your blanket may look like it had been made by one of the Native American tribes in the area, it actually wasn’t. Contrary to what most people think, blankets like this—known as American Indian trade blankets—were commercially machine-woven for the Native American market. Prior to the production of these blankets, Native Americans provided  warmth for themselves using natural materials and traditional weaving techniques.

Native Americans had long engaged in intertribal trading for useful items, but it was the colorful European goods that caught their attention. Over time, traders upgraded their goods from beads, looking glasses, and fish hooks to more practical items such as metal axes and cookware, flintlock rifles, and blankets. To trade a beaver skin or two for a durable woolen European blanket seemed fair to 18th and 19th-century Native Americans. Making a robe from an elk, deer, or buffalo hide was a time consuming, labor intensive process.

It was the French traders who began trading blankets as a result of their insatiable need for beaver pelts in the early l7º-century in the St. Lawrence River area. By 1780, the British Hudson's Bay Company soon followed suit.

Blanket trading soon spread across America. The Hudson's Bay Company shipped hundreds of blankets to St. Louis, the last supply outpost for those venturing westward in the 1820s and 1830s. While those heading to the Rocky Mountains trapped their own beavers, those going north into the Upper Missouri region traded for beaver pelts with the Native Americans

The early Hudson's Bay Company trade blankets were a solid color with a wide darker band near each end. They sold their thick, striped blankets to trappers who, in turn, traded them to the Blackfeet and Northern Plains Indians.

Like any successful product, Hudson's Bay Company trade blankets attracted imitators. While some copied the Bay's blanket style, especially the bright multicolor pattern introduced around 1820, other companies duplicated geometric Indian designs.

By 1845 there were dozens of woolen manufacturers in America, but only 11 who made blankets, and just one, the Buffalo Manufacturing Company, which made Indian-style blankets.

The introduction of the Jacquard loom in the 1880s created a boon to the blanket business. It enabled blankets to have two sides and launched what historians and collectors call the 'Golden Age" of the American Indian trade blanket that lasted from 1880 to 1930.

Eventually, five major woolen mills began making Indian trade blankets in the United States during the latter part of the 19th century—J. Capps and Sons, Oregon City Woolen Mills, Buell Manufacturing Company, Racine Woolen Mills, and Pendleton Woolen Mills. Another, the Beacon Manufacturing Company of North Carolina, made Indian-style blankets for the American consumer.

Of the above makers, Pendleton is the most familiar label. It’s also the only one still in existence. The company credits its early success to marketing its blankets directly to Native American reservations through trading posts and producing colors and designs acceptable to specific tribes.

By the late 19th century, most Native Americans had settled on reservations. Trading posts became the distribution points for food, jewelry, clothes and, of course, blankets. Through the trading posts, the English and American woolen mills found a built-in market for their blankets, the quality and designs of which Native Americans appreciated. Eager to please their Native American customers, many mills sent designers to live among the Indians in order to learn what designs and colors would appeal to the different tribes and pueblos across the United States and Canada. From the beginning, Pendleton produced high-quality blankets that eventually became the favorite among Native Americans.

Unlike Europeans, many native people became bonded with their blankets day and night. The fact that they were made by someone else made no difference.

They gave blankets as gifts to celebrate births, marriages, and christenings. They also used blankets to pay off debts, to show gratitude, or to indicate status. And some used them to provide temporary shelter, as curtains or awnings, or for warmth and adornment. Native Americans cradled their babies in blankets, danced in blankets, and were often buried in blankets.

The name Pendleton became a universal and generic name for any of these distinctively patterned blankets, even those made by other mills. Today, collectors seek out pre-World War II blankets for their light weight and warmth.


To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about  the Industrial Age n the 2020 Winter Edition, "The Wonders of the Industrial Age," online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.