Weaving

• 1. Introduction

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  Weaving is one of the oldest technologies humans ever devised, and its origins reach back at least 27,000 years to the Paleolithic. At a site called Dolní Věstonice, archaeologists found an indistinct textile impression left by people of the Upper Palaeolithic, people who were already producing a variety of cordage types, making plaited basketry, and crafting twined and plain woven cloth. What drove them to do it? What kept them doing it across every continent, through every empire, every economic upheaval?

  The answer isn't a single thread. Weaving shaped trade routes and triggered riots. It created a gendered division of labor so deep that Sigmund Freud speculated women may have invented the technique entirely. It fed the Black Death's aftermath. It powered the Industrial Revolution. And in the 1920s, it walked into a German art school and announced itself a fine art.

  At the heart of the craft is something almost absurdly simple: two sets of threads crossing each other at right angles. The threads running lengthwise are the warp. The threads crossing them are the weft, older known as the woof, an Old English word meaning simply "that which is woven." Everything else, from a Navajo blanket to a Jacquard-patterned silk to a soundproofing panel from the Bauhaus, grows from that single crossing.

• 2. How a Loom Works

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  Shedding, picking, and beating-up: these three actions are the entire heartbeat of a loom. Shedding means separating the warp threads by raising or lowering heald frames to open a clear passage called the shed. Picking propels the weft thread through that passage, either by hand, by an air-jet, by a rapier, or by a shuttle. Beating-up then pushes the new weft thread tight against the existing fabric using a component called the reed. Without that last step, the gaps between weft threads would be irregular and far too wide.

  The principal parts of a loom tell the story of the process in physical form. The warp-beam at the back holds the warp on a wooden or metal cylinder. The threads extend forward to the cloth-roll at the front, passing through openings called eyes in the heddles along the way. Small patterns can be controlled by cams that move the heddles mechanically. Larger patterns call for a dobby mechanism, where pegs inserted into a revolving drum dictate which threads rise and fall. The most complex designs require a Jacquard machine, where individual harness cords give each warp thread its own independent control, row by row, without repeating.

  On a conventional loom, the weft thread rides in a shuttle on a small spool called a pirn or bobbin. A hand weaver threw the shuttle across the shed with a picking stick. A power loom hit the shuttle from each side using an overpick or underpick mechanism at rates of 80-250 times a minute. When a pirn ran out, the loom ejected it and loaded the next one automatically from a battery attached to the frame. Later, rapier-type machines abandoned the shuttle entirely, instead using small grippers that carry cut lengths of weft halfway across and hand them to a second gripper, reaching speeds in excess of 2,000 metres per minute.

  The simplest crossing pattern is the plain weave, producing the widest range of fabrics from poplin to taffeta to grosgrain. Twill weaves, described by ratios like 2/1 or 3/3, offset the crossing pattern to create diagonal lines and produce softer fabrics. Satin weaves minimize visible crossings to give a smooth, reflective surface. Pile fabrics like velvet introduce a surface of cut threads standing upright from the base. The raising and lowering sequence of warp threads generates all of these structures, and the Jacquard-controlled loom made even more complex interlacings possible once it arrived.

• 3. Ancient Origins

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  Guitarrero Cave in Peru holds some of the oldest woven material found in the Americas: remnants of six finely woven textiles and cordage made from plant fibres, dated between 10,100 and 9080 BCE. That range puts them well into the era when much of the world was still relying on stone tools.

  In North America, the Windover Archaeological Site in Florida produced evidence of an equally sophisticated early tradition. The Windover hunter-gatherers, working between 4900 and 6500 BCE, made twined and plain weave textiles that researchers have called finely crafted. Eighty-seven pieces of fabric were recovered, associated with 37 burials, and researchers identified seven distinct weave types among them. One kind of fabric had 26 strands per inch. A round bag made from twine also survived, as did matting, probably woven from the palm leaves that were common to the region then, as they are now.

  Across the Atlantic, a fragment found at Fayum in Egypt dates to about 5000 BCE and is woven at roughly 12 threads by 9 threads per centimetre in a plain weave. Flax was the dominant fibre in Egypt by 3600 BCE and remained popular in the Nile Valley for centuries. By about 2000 BCE, wool had become the primary fibre in most other cultures. And in China, the weaving of silk from silkworm cocoons was established by roughly 3500 BCE; a piece of intricately woven and dyed silk from a Chinese tomb has been dated to 2700 BCE, showing a craft already well developed.

  At the Çatalhöyük site in what is now Turkey, a piece of cloth woven from hemp was found in 2013 at burial F. 7121, suggested to date from around 7000 BCE. The city of Olynthus in Macedonia offers a different kind of evidence: when Philip II destroyed it in 348 BCE, artifacts were locked inside the houses. Loomweights appeared in many of them, enough for household production, while some contained enough weights for commercial output. One house sat adjacent to the agora and contained three shops where many coins were found, suggesting a textile trade already organized for sale beyond the family.

• 4. Silk, Empire, and Social Identity

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  In China, silk weaving was never purely an economic activity. Men and women within the same family divided the labor: women generally wove simpler designs within the household while men operated more complicated looms, such as the wooden draw-loom, for intricate patterns. That draw-loom required two or three people to operate. Women typically entered the trade by marrying into a weaving family, living in a region with suitable climate, or being born into the craft.

  The reeling of silk, the unwinding of cocoons, began by placing them in boiling water to separate the filaments. The task of finding the end of each strand fell to girls aged eight to twelve, who reached into the hot water to locate the thread. Women then spun the filaments into threads of varying thickness. The silk was dyed before weaving began, and the quality of the final cloth depended largely on the breed of silkworm: the most workable varieties spun cocoons that could be unwound in one long continuous strand.

  Silk knowledge spread outward from China along well-established routes. Sericulture and weaving reached Korea by 200 BCE, Khotan by 50 CE, and Japan by about 300 CE. The pit-treadle loom, which may have originated in India though many authorities credit China, eventually spread through Persia, Sudan, Egypt, and possibly the Arabian Peninsula. By 700 CE, both horizontal and vertical looms could be found across Asia, Africa, and Europe.

  In the Inca Empire of the Andes, weaving carried a different but equally profound weight. Both men and women produced textiles, with women typically using backstrap looms for smaller pieces and vertical frame looms for larger ones. Men used upright looms. The Inca elite valued a fine tapestry-woven textile called cumbi, produced on upright looms, and offered it as gifts of reciprocity to other lords across the Empire. Women who made cumbi in regions under direct Inca control were called acllas or mamaconas; the men were called cumbicamayos. Andean textiles served simultaneously as currency, tribute, and indicators of social class. Some of the techniques and designs were still in active use in the 21st century.

  Andean weavers took a fundamentally different approach from their European counterparts. Whereas European cloth-making typically created ornamentation by adding embroidery, ribbons, brocade, or dye to a finished textile, pre-Columbian Andean weavers built elaborate designs directly into the structure of the cloth itself, manipulating the warp and weft during weaving. They used tapestry techniques, double and triple and quadruple-cloth techniques, gauze weaves, warp-patterned weaves, and discontinuous warp or scaffold weaves, among many other methods. Sixteenth-century Spanish colonists remarked on both the quality and quantity of what they found.

• 5. Guilds, Wool Towns, and the Putting-Out System

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  Wool dominated medieval European textile production, followed by linen and nettlecloth for the lower classes. Cotton arrived in Sicily and Spain in the 9th century; when the Normans captured Sicily, they carried the knowledge to northern Italy and from there across the continent.

  The weaver of the medieval period worked at home and sold cloth at fairs, operating on warp-weighted looms that were standard before horizontal looms arrived in the 10th and 11th centuries. As weaving shifted into an urban craft, the trade organized itself into guilds. Merchant guilds came first, then separate trade guilds developed for individual skills. A cloth merchant who belonged to a city's weavers guild could act as a middleman between the tradesmen who wove the cloth and the buyers who wanted it. The guilds controlled both quality and the training required before someone could call themselves a weaver.

  By the 13th century, a putting-out system had replaced guild-centered production. The cloth merchant bought the raw wool and distributed it to weavers, who then sold the finished cloth back to the merchant at rates the merchant controlled. The wool towns of eastern England reflect how much wealth this arrangement generated for those merchants: Norwich, Bury St Edmunds, and Lavenham are the named examples. Wool at this period was a political issue, not merely a commercial one.

  Then the 14th century arrived with catastrophe on multiple fronts. Europe had become overpopulated during the relative peace of the 13th century. A series of poor harvests caused starvation. The Hundred Years War took lives. And in 1346, the Black Death reduced the European population by as much as half. Arable land could no longer find enough workers, so land prices fell and fields were converted to sheep pasture. Traders from Florence and Bruges bought the wool, and landlords who owned those sheep began weaving outside the city guilds' jurisdiction. Production moved from individual homes into purpose-built buildings with regulated hours. The putting-out system gave way to a factory system.

  Around 1685, Huguenot weavers, Calvinists fleeing religious persecution on the continent, migrated to Britain. English weavers of cotton, woollen, and worsted cloth found themselves competing with people who brought superior techniques, and eventually learned from them.

• 6. The Industrial Revolution

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  John Kay's flying shuttle, invented in 1733, ended a costly problem. Broad looms had required an extra worker, often an expensive apprentice, to help pass the shuttle across the full width of the shed. Kay's invention made that assistant unnecessary and sharply accelerated the pace of weaving. The speed gain created a new problem: thread supply could not keep up with weaving capacity.

  The Bridgewater Canal, opened in June 1761, allowed cotton to flow into Manchester, a region with fast-moving streams suitable for powering machinery. Spinning was mechanized first, through the spinning jenny and the spinning mule, which eventually produced thread in quantities that could keep a weaver continuously at work. Edmund Cartwright proposed a weaving machine in 1784, drawing scorn from critics who argued the process was too nuanced to automate. He built a factory at Doncaster and obtained a series of patents between 1785 and 1792. In 1788, his brother Major John Cartwright built Revolution Mill at Retford, named for the centenary of the Glorious Revolution. In 1791, Edmund Cartwright licensed his loom to the Grimshaw brothers of Manchester, but their Knott Mill burned down the following year, possibly through arson. Parliament granted Cartwright a reward of £10,000 in 1809.

  Power weaving did not take hold immediately. Only in the two decades after about 1805 did it become widespread, at which point 250,000 hand weavers were still working across the United Kingdom. The loom became semi-automatic in 1842 with Kenworthy and Bullough's Lancashire Loom. Firms such as Howard and Bullough of Accrington, and Tweedales and Smalley and Platt Brothers, built a large metal-manufacturing industry to produce the machines. Most power weaving happened in weaving sheds in small towns circling Greater Manchester, separate from the cotton spinning districts. Wool and worsted weaving concentrated in West Yorkshire, especially Bradford, where large factories like Lister's and Drummond's handled all stages of production.

  The Jacquard loom, patented in France by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1804, arrived at a turning point. Punched cards determined which threads of colored yarn appeared on the upper side of the cloth, giving individual control of each warp thread, row by row, without repeating. Woven calligraphy and copies of engravings became possible. Richard Guest, writing in 1823, recorded a direct comparison of the two systems: a skilled hand weaver aged twenty-five to thirty could weave two pieces of shirting per week; a steam loom weaver aged fifteen could weave seven comparable pieces in the same period.

  The Industrial Revolution also shifted who did the weaving. Power loom workers were usually girls and young women. They minded four machines each, kept the looms oiled, and were assisted by children called little tenters who ran errands at a fixed wage and learned the trade by watching. Young workers would come full-time to the mill at roughly fourteen, starting by sharing looms with an experienced worker. The health costs were significant. Cotton dust caused lung problems. The noise produced total hearing loss. Because normal conversation was impossible, weavers developed a form of lip-reading they called mee-maw. A practice called kissing the shuttle, which meant sucking thread through the shuttle's eye with the mouth, left weavers exposed to oil that was later found to be carcinogenic.

• 7. The Bauhaus and Art Recognition

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  In the 1920s, the weaving workshop at the Bauhaus design school in Germany set out to transform how weaving was understood. Its stated aim was twofold: to elevate weaving from a craft to a fine art, and to investigate what industrial production demanded of modern fabrics. Under the direction of Gunta Stölzl, the workshop experimented with materials no traditional weaver would have considered, including cellophane, fibreglass, and metal. The results ranged from expressionist tapestries to functional soundproofing fabric to light-reflective material. Former Bauhaus student and teacher Anni Albers published the definitive 20th-century text On Weaving in 1965.

  The Bauhaus did not treat its weavers as equals within the institution. The weaving workshop was known as "the women's department," and many women were directed into it against their own preferences. A Bauhaus weaver named Helene Nonné-Schmidt held that women were assigned to weaving because they could produce work only in two dimensions, lacking, in her view, the spatial imagination men possessed for other art forms. Her position illustrated the contradictions of an institution that promoted progressive design while reproducing the same hierarchies it claimed to challenge.

  The art world's resistance to weaving had older roots. In 1939, art critic Clement Greenberg published "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," a text that many scholars read as institutionalizing the boundary between "high" art and what he implied was low art. Critics like Adolf Loos and Karl Scheffler had earlier correlated decoration and ornamentation with femininity, providing a theoretical framework that devalued work associated with women. The result was a long exclusion of weaving from mainstream exhibition spaces.

  That exclusion has been reversing in recent decades. Exhibitions of large scope have worked to place textiles within the art historical record, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which organized With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985. Weavers like Anni Albers, Lenore Tawney, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Olga de Amaral, and Sheila Hicks have become the subjects of exhibitions and major retrospectives worldwide. The Jacquard loom's use of punched cards to control warp threads, row by row, also had an unexpected descendant: Nvidia's Parallel Thread Execution instruction set architecture borrowed the term "warp" from historical weaving traditions to name a group of concurrent processing threads.