Quantock Weavers in the Somerset Heritage Textile Collection

At our first visit to the Somerset Heritage Textile Collection, Estelle, the Textile Curator, mentioned that they had a collection from the Quantock Weavers.  Intrigued, I arranged to come back and see it, and was completely bowled over by the beautiful work.

Firstly there were boxes of woven textiles, tablemats, table-runners, scarves and shawls, all unique.  On asking about the weavers Bethan brought in a box of stones and Estelle produced a booklet ‘Woven from a Stone’ by Hubert Fox that gives a short, life-history of the weavers.

The Quantock Weavers were Gladys Dickinson and Norah Biddulph, they set up business together in 1932, both aged 47, at the Old Forge in Over Stowey close to the Quantock Hills in Somerset. They spun, wove and bottled fruit (including whortleberries, which they sold in London to Fortnum and Mason, and Harrods); gradually devoting more time to the spinning and weaving.

 

“Local wool was bought from the farmers for spinning into yarn.  Natural dyes were used.  They were obtained from heather, gorse, bracken, and broom in the hills, from leaves, flowers, and brambles in the lanes, and from lichen on apple trees and boulders.  The humble galvanised bucket was used as a dye vat.”

Fox, H.  ‘Woven from a Stone’

 

 

In 1956 an artist friend gave Gladys and Norah an olive green, red and silver serpentine stone from Cornwall.  The ladies matched the colours with natural dyes and wove a curtain with the shades and pattern of the stone.  This was to be the first of many stones that would arrive from all over the world in little wedding cake boxes to be turned into patterns on the loom.

Both Gladys and Nora had come from comfortable backgrounds in London and Ireland, respectively, and had then been plunged into poverty after World War I and the deaths of their fathers.  They were both very resourceful women: Gladys had run her father’s farm during the war, including hand-shearing her and her neighbours’ sheep, and then worked for the ‘Women’s Guild of Empire’; Norah staying with her sister in Egypt got a job at Bourg-el-Arab in the Libyan Desert where Bedouin women were being taught to spin and weave, and on returning home after the British left Egypt in 1924, went to Sweden to learn more, taking courses in spinning and weaving.  They met in Somerset where Norah had started a job spinning, weaving and bottling fruit with an acquaintance in Washford.

It was fun matching the stones to the woven pieces; above is a piece of granite with lichen matched to a small placemat.  The Quantock Weavers use a very simple, but time-consuming, inlay technique to weave their patterns, similar to tapestry.  They were very skilled at choosing neutral warps, in this case a mid-green that blends well into the grey and the bright lime, lichen colour.  To show the inlay all the pieces are designed to be weft-facing.

A larger placemat matched to a larger piece of slate.  Here they have used inlay again but predominately they have simplified the weaving by using just two colours, one at either side of each weft row or pick.

It was quite hard to work out what each piece was designed for; the archive pieces were mostly all similar weights but there was one much finer piece.  The above piece was larger, approximately one metre long, I am guessing a large tablemat/tablecloth …

Brilliant colours from natural dyes: definitely a scarf or stole above on the left, on the right lovely; delicate hand-stitching on the back of a tablemat.

The one piece that was not plain weave – a point draft 2:2 twill, again a large tablemat/table cloth?

Again the same for the above pink piece that I have linked to a piece of gypsum (Note: the types of stones may not be accurate, there were quite a few question marks on the different labels).

The last two pieces are small tablemats linked to stones that both may be onyx, however the stones seem to have very different textures.  I love the use of a dull pinky-purple, putty colour with the vibrant lime greens and oranges.

 

New tools to make old tools: laser cutting rigid heddles

Rigid heddles have their roots in ancient civilisations. You can use them to make a back-strap loom, which will allow you to weave anywhere.  One end of the warp is tied to a handy tree or table leg, and the other end is tied to a stick, that in turn is tied to a strap around your back.  You use your body weight to tension the loom.

Because of their portability rigid heddles are an ideal way to introduce people to weaving – and as part of the Z-Twist education programme I will be using the laser cutter at Somerset College to make about 30 rigid heddles to teach community groups and schools how to weave.

Rigid heddles in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. On the left a rigid heddle band loom from Zuni, New Mexico, USA, made from wooden laths tied to sticks, with a wool warp and a wooden sword for beating in (you can see the tip of the sword poking out under the heddle). On the right decorated rigid heddles from Europe, top from Auvergne, France, and below from Abruzzi, Italy.

A rigid heddle is made up of alternating slots and holes, through which the warp is threaded. The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford has an interesting collection of rigid heddles from around the world made from a variety of materials.  Using a laser cutter to make rigid heddles is not new, Travis Meinolf, the Action Weaver, first made some as part of his Masters in 2008 and is now selling laser cut plywood rigid heddle kits.

Designing my rigid heddles I automatically fell back on my weaving training and started thinking about the density of the cloth we will be making, the yarn, how close or far away each warp thread should be to the next, and what it is possible to cut without weakening the final rigid heddle too much.

The first test on some spare scrap (above).  The laser both cuts and engraves (left) but my design was not robust enough at the edge.  On the reverse you can see the laser is too hot and has melted the cut edges.

My second test on an A4 piece of 3mm green, fluorescent-tinted acrylic.

The acrylic comes with a protective film on both sides – the film has burnt but underneath the acrylic is fine.

The laser cutter uses Adobe Illustrator (a vector-based drawing package) files to tell it where to cut. I am trying to make maximum use of the material (left), making sticks for tying the warp on to and securing around your waist, and stick shuttles for weaving in the weft. I tested an 8 dpi (dents or holes per inch) and a 10 dpi rigid heddle.  The 10 dpi with more slots/holes is looking fragile; there is not enough acrylic between the holes and the slots. I also thought about two designs of stick – the slot design (far right stick in the left image) is a no-go, the acrylic is not flexible enough to slot into another parallel stick – plus the slot is only 2mm wide and the acrylic is 3mm thick…

Trying out the 8 dpi rigid heddle using 2/11.3 nm “supersoft” lambswool I made a short 1m warp with the legs of two upturned chairs.

Threading the rigid heddle is easiest using masking tape and the edge of a table.

Weaving with the rigid heddle, the far end of the warp is attached to a table leg out-of-shot and the other end is tied to the stick which is also tied around my waist with a piece of cloth from the scrap bins. It weaves well, making a good gap or ‘shed’ between the slots and holes, for the shuttle to pass through.  Perhaps a little more space at the top would be useful for holding on to.

I am using two colours for my warp, arranged in a particular order, and then using the same colours again in the weft, woven in a chosen order to get a ‘colour-and-weave’ patterned effect.

As you weave the rigid heddle gets further and further away from you, so every so often you need to wind the woven cloth around one stick and secure it with a second stick to be able to weave comfortably.  The holes in the sticks could be a little larger.

A successful test – I will make a couple of tweaks to the design but essentially I am ready to cut more.  The main problem is timing; it took 40 minutes to cut an A4 piece of acrylic with 2 rigid heddles – I want to move on to A3 pieces with more rigid heddles, but the laser cutting slots at Somerset College are only 1 hour long.  I need to look at minimising cuts …

Moving on with MAKING…..

I applied for this residency as I saw it as a means to have the time, facilities and head space to generate new ideas to take forward in my creative practice and take a step back from the fast paced design world that I usually work in. I want to SAMPLE and play with new ways of working and explore techniques unknown to me. If I am to sample new approaches and new ways of working, why not document them through SAMPLERS. I don’t necessarily mean I will create samplers in the traditional sense, of course I will be putting a contemporary twist of these old ways of working. I am known for pushing the boundary of string art in my creative practice; a thread weaving craft with its roots in mathematics, and I intend to push boundaries with the work I produce during this residency by using techniques in an unorthodox yet contemporary way.

Following on from last weeks post I have been investigating the methods of mending further through making and experimenting with mark-making using repair techniques. I’ve been playing with a staple gun, distressing fabric and exploring shading techniques for use in drawings in an unusual way

Mark-making with staples and horsehair fabric

I have been further exploring darning processes and continuing on with removing the weft from the horsehair fabric. I am currently exploring the use of typography with this technique, examples below

typography and horsehair fabric

As some of the samplers have a high contrast warp and weft, the typography is easily read. However I like the hidden nature of the low contrast sampler, I have held these up to the window here to display the light shining through the lettering.

typography and horsehair fabric

I have also been experimenting with darning and drawn thread embroidery with little success, see below. I am not a huge fan of extremely slow processes. My next step is to look into getting a similar effect yet at a quicker pace. I like this juxtaposition of fast versus slow…..

drawn thread embroidery and darning

As well as doing lots of making, I also paid a visit to Blaise Castle House Museum in Bristol this week.  After trying to book a viewing of Bristol Museums important group of over 200 samplers and finding out they were closed until Easter, I was pointed in the direction of Blaise Castle House Museum. Having not heard of this museum nor did I know of their collection, I booked  an appointment with Helen McConnell  to view examples for their textile collection…..and what a collection it is. Some tasters below,

Young girls needle-work notebook

The first gem I would like to show you is this young girls needle work notebook, containing not only darning and cross stitch samples but beautiful hand-drawn sketches of the methods too, so exquisite

Needlework drawing and tiny cross stitch name tags

Here’s an example of one of the beutiful ink drawings in the notebook ans also some teeny weeny cross stitched name tags, so precise and wonderful

Darning Sampler

More beautiful darning

And finally this amazing patchwork quilt. Usually this type of patchwork uses patches that are similar in size to a 50p piece however the patches in this quilt were a lot smaller, each was the size of a finger nail. You can see the scale in the middle image where a hand is holding up the quilt. What an unusual piece, I’ve never seen anything like it

Patchwork Quilt

I would thoroughly recommend a visit to see Blaise House Museum, Helen was so helpful and even showed us their wonderful costume collection. They also have a lot of patchwork quilts but due to space are difficult to view. More details about their collection can be found here

Also you can visit Blaise House Museum facebook page here

First visit to Fox Brothers & Co Ltd

An eagerly anticipated visit with Lucy, Patricia and Rob, that did not disappoint.  Fox Brothers & Co Ltd weave very fine woollen and worsted cloth in Wellington, Somerset and they have been doing so for a very long time; since 1772.  They mostly make men’s suiting and coating; flannels, chalk stripes, tweeds, lots of dark colours, with the occasional surprise of bright orange, or a crisp wool and linen shirting.  The handle of some of their lambswool cloth could be mistaken for their cashmere but with the advantage of a more structured fabric.

The designer, Rosemarie, was incredibly helpful, giving us a comprehensive and informative tour of the mill and their new venture The Merchant Fox, selling luxury British hand-crafted products.  They also have the most fantastic archives; shelves and shelves of weaving sample books with weaving swatches that still look contemporary.

Fox Brothers weave a range of blankets, in checks, stripes and herringbone using different wools from shetland wool to the lambswool, herringbone, tasselled blankets in the image below.  My favourite is of course, the most  expensive and luxuriously soft; the lambswool herringbone.  I have decided to work with the same lambswool yarns to develop a blanket design inspired by the Somerset landscape.

The Merchant Fox is brilliantly styled, you walk into a cross between a British gentleman’s dressing room and his den. It even smells delicious – the scent of flannel from specially commissioned candles.

Cloth swatches in an archive book – they could be contemporary, and recently woven flannel. The piece of fabric below the sample book is unfinished, it is in its ‘loom-state’, feeling rough and stiff, a big contrast to the highly strokeable, soft, finished cloth in the sample book above.

Pages from the oldest, 1773, ‘pattern book’ at Fox Brothers (bound in calves leather). Flannels in some lovely, subtle shades of greens on the left, and the only page of silks on the right, but I could not resist the beautiful soft tones .  Everything would have been coloured using natural dyes.

I love all the detailed drawing and fonts in the woven and printed labels, it shows the heritage, subtlely, in comparison to a lot of labels today that are very simple. Also the use of the specific ‘Made in the West of England’ rather than the usual ‘Made in Britain’.

The warp is made in sections, the cones on the frame to the left supply the yarn which is fed onto the barrel to the right at the right density, or spacing, and with all the yarn at the same tension (very important). The yarn that is threaded onto the loom is called the warp.  Cloth is made when yarn (the weft) is woven into the warp threads.

The warp from the barrel is wound onto a warp beam, these are large, warps can be 1000’s of metres long. On the right is a warp on a beam, each thread has been threaded onto an individual heddle which is controlled by one of 12 shafts (the set of metal objects above the beam). The order of threading the heddles will determine the weave structures or patterns in the final cloth. With so many threads, it is heavy and so is supported by what looks like a mini fork-lift.

Fox Brothers have two new computerised looms (one on the left) as well as their existing looms that weave from punch cards (on the right). I love the magic of turning thread into cloth. On the loom on the right a broken thread is being repaired, the shafts are in front of us and behind are the ‘droppers’, these drop and stop the loom weaving if a thread in the warp breaks.