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Mary
Bellis
The major steps in
the manufacture of clothes are four: first to harvest and clean the fiber or
wool; second, to card it and spin it into threads; third, to weave the threads
into cloth; and, finally to fashion and sew the cloth into clothes.
Like food
and shelter, clothing is a basic human requirement. When settled neolithic
cultures discovered the advantages of woven fibers over animal hides, the
making of cloth, drawing on basketry techniques, emerged as one of
humankind's fundamental technologies. From the earliest hand-held spindle
and distaff and basic hand loom to the highly automated spinning machines
and power looms of today, the principles of turning vegetable fiber into
cloth have remained constant: Plants are cultivated and the fiber harvested.
The fibers are cleaned and aligned, then spun into yarn or thread. Finally
the yarns are interwoven to produce cloth. Today we also spin complex
synthetic fibers, but they are still woven together the way cotton and flax
were millennia ago.
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Picking
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By
Hand
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By
Machine |
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Picking
removed
foreign matter (dirt, insects, leaves, seeds) from the fiber. Early pickers
beat the fibers to loosen them and removed debris by hand. Machines used
rotating teeth to do the job, producing a thin "lap" ready for
carding.
Carding
combed the fibers to align and join them
into a loose rope called a "sliver." Hand carders pulled the
fibers between wire teeth set in boards. Machines did the same thing with
rotating cylinders. Slivers (rhymes with divers) were then combined,
twisted, and drawn out into "roving."
| Spinning |
By
Hand |
By
Machine |
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Spinning
twisted and drew out the roving and wound
the resulting yarn on a bobbin. A spinning wheel operator drew out the
cotton by hand. A series of rollers accomplished this on machines called
"throstles" and "spinning mules."
| Warping |
By
Hand |
By
Machine |
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Warping
gathered yarns from a number of bobbins
and wound them close together on a reel or spool. From there they were
transferred to a warp beam, which was then mounted on a loom. Warp threads
were those that ran lengthwise on the loom.
| Weaving |
By
Hand |
By
Machine |
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Weaving
was the final stage in making cloth.
Crosswise woof threads were interwoven with warp threads on a loom. A 19th
century power loom worked essentially like a hand loom, except that its
actions were mechanized.
Source: Lowell National
Historical Park Handbook 140
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