Weaving on the loom

I have been around weaving all my life, in a outsider way. When young we would visit the rug tieing shops of the remoter parts of Iran and Afghanistan, see the rows of young boys, girls of all ages, and women, each sitting in front of the loon, mostly several to one, and tieing the knots at speed one could not fallow, the wool yarn in one hand, the knife in the other, and the knot tied and cut in a flash of concentration, changing the ball of wool as the pattern required the colour next knot - by them would be a paper pattern glued onto a board, ancient patterns. The rooms always lit by small windows and very dark and cramped, and so they sat and tied endlessly, as long as light and endurance would allow - some seeming 4 and 5 years old - an old man would have sheep sheers to trim the long knot wool to very low, upright, fibres. Carpets are tight so one walks on the tips of the fibres, they standing vertically in a press of knots, which will make them last and not wear for almost ever. One wondered how they could bare it, what it took to keep these rows of children tieing from morning to evening...

Much later I took up industrial lighting retro-fits and travelled the USA Deep South updating the lighting systems in vast textile mills, they all have a Dickensian quality - the mill dominating the community, wages low but kept generations working. The lint is kept airborne in a high overhead chamber and tiny ports allow the air, lint filled, to escape down, spinning with a venturi force, and then the stream of twisting lint is spun and spun by delicate machines into thread and spooled by the mega miles.

Each line of loons, 14 foot wide, (in a fabric mill) had people with special hooks to tie breaks, tie new spools, to monitor the madly fast mills, about 10 looms to a person...intense work, endless....and then the huge spools of fabric are run over light tables at huge speed through amazingly complex looping to absorb the shock of breaking and accelerating thousand pound rolls - flaws detected and cut out - so fast, so intent to see every imperfection....

An old mill had 3 kinds of looms, one with shuttles and paddles at the ends like pinball paddles, which shot the shuttle back and forth through the warp and weft - slow, not cost worthy, but old and still working, then a faster generation, metal tapes shoot down the warps and wefts and one passes the thread to the other faster than the eye can fallow - still obsolete but running, and then the modern ones - a burst of air shoots the bare thread the 14 foot through the warp and weft fast as a bullet! Pfft Pfft Pfft Pfft....the big loon slamming the warp and weft so fast, the room roaring....

All closed now. The Chinese took the work. The Labour costs not the problem, the wages were just above minimum mostly - but the cost of living is cheap in a Mill Town. It was these mills had a mix of equipment, maintained, working well, trained staff needing their jobs, but second and third generation machinery, ones not able to compete on the pennies per yard differences...But the Chinese mills were purpose, New, built. All the air Pfft machines, all new and modern, and they took the mill industry right away as no means existed to subsidize similar massive mill building here - so they took the industry, same as in UK. Trump has a point of industry going - it did not have to, it needed the same as the Chinese did - brand new mills, and they could have been making jobs and still be the cornerstone of these dieing towns...