Short answers, pulled from the story.
Weaving is a method of textile production in which two sets of yarns are interlaced at right angles: the longitudinal warp threads and the lateral weft threads. The process involves three primary actions repeated on a loom: shedding (opening a gap between warp threads), picking (passing the weft through that gap), and beating-up (pushing the new weft tight against the existing fabric using a reed).
Weaving is at least 27,000 years old, based on a textile impression found at the Dolní Věstonice site from the Paleolithic era. Plant-fibre weavings from Guitarrero Cave in Peru date between 10,100 and 9080 BCE, and textiles from the Windover Archaeological Site in Florida date from 4900 to 6500 BCE.
Edmund Cartwright first proposed building a mechanical weaving machine in 1784 and obtained patents between 1785 and 1792, building a factory at Doncaster. Parliament awarded him £10,000 in 1809 for his efforts. However, widespread power weaving did not take hold until the two decades after about 1805, and the loom became semi-automatic only in 1842 with Kenworthy and Bullough's Lancashire Loom.
The Jacquard loom was patented in France by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1804. It used punched cards to control each individual warp thread independently, row by row without repeating, making complex woven patterns such as calligraphy and copies of engravings possible for the first time. Jacquard mechanisms could be attached to both handlooms and powerlooms.
Women have been central to weaving across cultures and eras. In China, women typically wove simpler designs within the household and often entered the trade by marrying into weaving families. In the Inca Empire, women called acllas or mamaconas produced the elite textile cumbi. During the Industrial Revolution, power loom workers were usually girls and young women. At the Bauhaus in the 1920s, women made up most of the weaving workshop, though many were directed there against their wishes.
Cumbi was a fine tapestry-woven textile produced on upright looms in the Inca Empire. The Inca elite valued it highly and offered it as gifts of reciprocity to other lords across the Empire. In regions under direct Inca control, specialized artisans produced cumbi; the women who made it were called acllas or mamaconas and the men were called cumbicamayos.