Everlasting
Everlasting – a beautiful name for a lovely fabric! Everlasting is a two shaft binding with flotations and I was intending to weave this pattern on a Jacquard loom. The original is stored in Glomdalsmuseet in Elverum, Norway. It is a light pink jacket, maybe faded red. It must have been tight fitting, even on a slender person living during the 17-hundreds. The sparse text in digital museum tells the following: jacket, coarse linen fodder, handsewn, width 43 cm, height, 48 cm, length 48,5 cm. Nothing about the previous owners or where it was found.
But first I had to test if the loom actually worked. I put on a narrow test warp with the English yarn, in order to test the yarn and the Jacquardmachine. I punched a small pattern with eight cards, a twill variation, on the card machine. After fixing of some loose threads and some which crossed each other, the pattern emerged very nicely. I almost couldn’t believe it!
The next step was to transfer the pattern from the jacket to square paper. I enlarged the photos I had taken in the museum. Some places the threads were difficult to count, as they were worn out and thin or the photo had unsharp spots. I copied several flowers to be sure I had the right pattern. At the end, the zigzag lines did not meet and something was clearly wrong. After finding the mistake I started from scratch. The pattern repeats were 96 warp threads, but the Jacquard machine had 400 needles. I added therefore two threads symmetrically on both sides of the flowers. Then I transferred the pattern to 3 mm graph paper with a felt-tip pen, making the template for the punch cards.
Then I could start to punch cards. The first ten cards were punched with a lot of concentration, but no problems. Then things started to go wrong inside the machine, I barely managed to punch the 74 cards, and only with lots of patience and extra time:
Keys stopped moving
The pistons needed sharpening
The holes for the pistons needed to be enlarged
The advancing mechanism stopped working and had to be readjusted
The keys stopped moving again
And the advancing mechanism as well
The frame for sewing together the finished punch cards had become warped due to storage in the humid barn
74 punched cards were a lot more than eight and we had to build a frame for holding the cards. I started weaving and lo and behold, a flower pattern emerged. There were some weaving mistakes though. I found three faulty punched cards, which I corrected. But the mistakes continued, so:
I sewed together all 74 punch cards once again
I checked if the warp was threaded correctly in the places where the mistakes occurred
I checked all harness threads in the same places
This was when I realized that the problem was the Jacquard machine. Some of the springs which guide the needles were old and weak. We got some new ones from a neighbour, some were too big, some were too hard, some were too small. I had no clue how to order springs online and how to measure spring strength. Or should we change all 408 of them? We ended up stretching the weak springs, which helped for the next 15 cm, before the same problems started again.
I realized that I would never manage to weave any fabric within the time frame of the bursary if I continued like this. Therefore, I started to weave samples despite of the weaving mistakes. I tried seven different types of weft, if you are interested in the yarns, check out this blog post.
The warp from Spectrum yarns, 31,3/2
The warp yarn spooled together with sewing silk
Hillesvåg 28/7
Kampavillalanka 36/2 spooled together with sewing silk
Worsted 40/1 from Minnotex
Worsted 40/2 from Minnotex spooled together with sewing silk
Minnotex 40/2
The result: the samples with silk have more luster than the ones without, which is no surprise.The beater is very heavy and it was difficult to beat lightly on a narrow warp. The samples have the same warp density as the original, but I think they are too dense. Maybe I should have tried a less dense reed, but then the flower motive would be larger than in the original fabric. Or maybe the warp yarn is too thick? But what would be the alternatives? There are too many unresolved questions and now the bursary is finished.
Am I happy with the result of the project? Yes and no. Technical problems took far too much time. I had applied for a three year grant and I got one year, so it was not possible to fulfil the goals I had set. But the looms works almost. The next steps are try to find a way to fix the faulty springs, put on a full width warp and start to repairing the flying shuttle system. And maybe I will try to weave Everlasting in full width?
