The Lair
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in the old days you used to get a master weaver working the shuttle back and forth through the warp threads while he called out to a boy sitting on top of the loom which heddles to lift in order to create the correct pattern, so that either the warp or the weft threads showed where needed. dad was talking about factorials tonight. can you believe that if you have just 30 heddles, there are 4060 combinations?? and that's only if you want to lift three heddles at once- imagine what the combinations are for FOUR heddles!!
Blanket making: it's a fascinating process. there was an old woman and a young man working together. they had a table in the center of the room, and in the corner they have a machine that fluffs the cotton. they buy bags of ginned cotton and stick cotton in the machine, which produces a sheet of fluffed cotton about two inches thick, a meter wide and a meter and a half to two meters long (rough estimates). they then roll this sheet down on the table, get another sheet and put that down next to the first. the old woman used a loosely woven, flat basket to level the two sheets, which had been laid right close to one another, and then she got a third piece of fluffed cotton and put that down across the two, and leveled it all some more. then she and the youth got a large wooden disc each and went about vigorously pressing the bed of cotton down, compacting it and leveling it thoroughly. by then you couldn't tell that it had ever been three separate pieces. then she used a bow-like tool threaded with a red thread, and with it she would take hold of one end of the thread then yank the thread with the bow from the spool across the room to the youth, who would take his end of the thread, and so forth. they used this thread to give the blankets structural durability, placing it in a grid-like pattern with an X from corner to corner as well. after this was done, on one side only, they pulled down a large sheet of white gauze from a huge roll that was affixed to the wall above the table, and laid it across the bed of cotton. they used the wooden discs to rub and smooth and press this gauze into the bed of cotton, and she used a thin white thread to tie off the corners, placing the tail ends of the thread inside the gauze. after a while of this they flipped the blanket over, with the gauze still connected to the roll on the wall, and unrolled enough gauze to cover the other side as well before cutting the gauze from the roll. More pressing with the wooden discs, before they tie off the whole blanket and really press the corners in well. then they fold the whole thing up, tie it with a sheet of protective newspaper on one side, and slip it up on the stacking shelves.
wax medicine capsules: basically you had a wooden ball with a small rod sticking out of it that you could hold it by, you'd dip this ball in wax, several times to get a nice thick coating, and then dip it in cold water to harden it, and slice the wax all the way around the wooden ball, peeling the wax off after that. that would give you two wax semicircles that you could reseal without the wooden ball inside and fill with whatever potion you had mixed and ready to go.
In particular they had a weaving room with a huge loom, the model of which is a precursor to the jacquard loom which was invented in france two hundred years ago, as the centerpiece. two girls, with a master weaver looking on, were hard at work on the loom. it's a loom used to make brocade and tapestry fabrics, and the model has been used in china for over seven hundred years previous to the jacquard. it's fascinating to watch them work. you have one girl seated at the loom working the beater and the main treddles and heddles, and another girl seated high up top, pulling the brocade weft heddles in a pre-arranged order to open the shed when the weaving girl is doing the brocade work. it's quite an intricate machine.
they also had a simple plainweave loom set up for visitors to try their hand at, and all three of us gave it a shot. you really get into a hypnotic rhythm after you get the hang of it, and so we made our tidy contribution to the cloth there. they had only two heddles, which means that there were two connecting treddles. You push the right treddle, which twists the heddles one way (lifting one and lowering the other) to open up the shed, into which you slide the shuttle through to the other side of the warp threads. then you release the treddle and pull the beater to smooth the newly strung thread back firmly and uniformly against the woven fabric, being careful not to put any tension on the weft thread in order to avoid puckering the fabric. then you step on the left treddle, which twists the heddles in the opposite direction (lowering the one that had been raised before and vice versa) and slide the shuttle back through to the other side, and pull the beater back again. it's actually more fun than i would have thought it would be.
