[Northkeep] FYI

[Jennifer Carlson]

Jacquard is the name of a technique for weaving patterns, particularly 
non-regular patterns, into fabric.  Think of it as high-tech brocade.

Say you want to weave a fabric with a rose pattern brocade.  You can do this 
three ways:

1)  Pick-up weaving, where you manipulate the shuttle under and over each 
thread appropriately to make the pattern.  This is mind-numbingly tedious, 
but the only way to do it on simple looms such as backstrap or 
warp-weighted.

2) Use a weaver's devil.  The much more sophisticated and complicated 
horizontal looms speeded up the weaving process immensely, and made pattern 
weaving easier by means of multiple foot-controlled heddles, each of which 
lifted a certain set of warp threads to create the shed the shuttle passed 
through.  Now, you COULD create your pattern by carefully arranging an 
appropriate number of sheds, but this would be impractical for complicated 
designs.  So, instead of separate heddles each holding a number of reeds 
(the litte perpendicular rods the warp threads pass through), you set an 
apprentice (or "devil") sitting atop the crossbeam of the loom and have him 
lift the appropriate reeds.  This is mind-boggline for the poor devil, but 
was a chief method of producing elaborate patterns in period.

These methods work most efficiently with regular patterns.  So, if you're 
weaving roses, you'd do stylized roses.  Depicting natural roses would be 
this side of insane.

Now, imagine trying to do this with fine silks, where you might have 
thousands of warp threads across the breadth of the fabric.  Weaver's devils 
must have had a high rate of mental illness.

In the era after our period, more natural depictions of plants and animals, 
influenced by fabrics imported from China, became popular, and something had 
to change.

Now, my memory of dates fails me (I'm typing this at 12:30 am after a full 
shift of trying to prepare for the bleeding Harry Potter release this 
weekend, and my brain is kind of fried), but method number 3 comes from a 
French gent by the name of Jacquard, who had a brilliant idea of using a 
series of cardboard templates, chained in sequence, to tell the loom which 
reeds to raise and which to drop for each pass of the shuttle.  These cards 
were joined into a huge loop representing one repeat of the finished 
pattern.  Once the loom was configured for this technology, the only thing 
mindboggling was getting the set of cards punched up and in place.  Many 
technology historians call the Jacquard loom the first computer - a 
punch-card computer at that.

Until recently, Jacquard was pretty much an industry term to describe the 
manufacturing technique.  Over the last twenty years or so, it has been used 
by cloth manufacturers as a desgnation for fabrics that are for the most 
part patterned cloths of dress and shirt weights, intended for making 
clothing.  Nearly all brocades, however, are made by this process.  Of 
course, today the looms are generally run by more sophisticated computers 
than Jacquard's cards.

Hope this answers your question.


In servicio (but very sleepy),


Talana


>From: Chris Graue <myangelmorgan at juno.com>
>Reply-To: The Barony of Northkeep <northkeep at ansteorra.org>
>To: northkeep at ansteorra.org
>Subject: Re: [Northkeep] FYI
>Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 20:48:42 -0500
>
>Excuse my ignorance, but could someone please define jacquard? I am
>familiar with the word just not it's meaning. I'm sure I'll be slapping
>myself on the forehead when I read the answer...
>
>Danke,
>Gise
>
>On Wed, 13 Jul 2005 11:08:24 -0700 (PDT) Aline Swynbrook
><alineswynbrook at yahoo.com> writes:
> > The Hankcocks on 21st and Garnett is having a sale on
> > many things, including linen/rayon blends, linen look
> > fabrics, and decorator fabrics.  I got some nic green
> > cotton jacquard for sleeves for $4.99 a yard.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Aline
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