Search

The article offers step-by-step instructions for making flower patterns using the Hana-Ami Flower Loom.

The article offers step-by-step instructions for using flower loom, winding yarn to the loom, and weaving.

The article offers step-by-step instructions for several techniques including loom knit cast on methods, purl cast-on method and basic stitches technique with the help of yarns.

Two decades of difficulty for the British and American cotton industries were followed by the outbreak of the Second World War, which did nothing to balk the trend of Lancashire's collapse or the shift of the United States cotton industry from North to South. The Lancashire cotton industry became far more automated in the 1960s, with the scrapping of redundant machinery, yet this did little to halt the inexorable decline of the industry. Accordingly, in the next 20 years Lancashire's demise was virtually complete, as Table 8.1 shows, with almost the last vestiges of a dying industry vanishing in the 1981 recession. In the United States, between 1950 and 1970, 300,000 textile jobs were lost in New England alone, whilst an increasingly capital-intensive industry, which was based upon multi-fibres, continued to develop in the South. In the 1970s and early 1980s, however, unemployment in the Southern states began to rise at an alarming rate and numerous businesses closed or were taken over (Gaventa and Smith 1991: 182). Nevertheless the cotton and related industries survived, albeit on a diminished scale and, by 1983, the United States had the distinction of being home to the world's most ‘productive’ textile industry. The shifting role of business communities has been inseparable from the evolution of cotton manufacturing from the eighteenth century. Similarly, in the second half of the twentieth century the decay of communities based upon cotton and the demise of industrial districts, deprived of their dynamism, is a reflection of the collapse of the industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The preceding four chapters have explored the forces which shaped the evolution of business attitudes and the emergence of networks in the British and American cotton industries before 1860. Their findings are summarised in Table 6.1 which demonstrates that, whilst sharing the common concerns of production, profitability and market penetration, businessmen on either side of the Atlantic often displayed differences in priorities, perceptions and behaviour. These were born of the varying social, political and economic forces to which they were subject, and in turn were translated into the culture of business. For example, the production-driven strategies, detected in much of the United States cotton industry, clearly only partly resulted from resource allocation. Rather they derived from a combination of collective approaches to community development traceable even to the colonial period, from a faith in the power of technology which was rarely contradicted by the workforce and the habitual transience of the workforce plus a confidence in a protected domestic market. Yet in Britain eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century infant industry protection against cheap colonial imports allowed the successful development of cotton manufacturing. However, the constraints of a small, but strongly differentiated domestic market, combined with overseas opportunities, brought with it greater market complexity than was then the case in America and significantly enhanced the relative power of mercantile groups, as opposed to manufacturers. This factor, combined with a need for cheap imported raw materials, a reliance on overseas markets for business expansion and the social and political forces which brought free trade, led to a shift in government policy in favour of liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the dramatic expansion of United States cotton manufacturing in the late nineteenth century, Lancashire remained the home of the world's largest cotton industry before the First World War. Yet, during the war and afterwards the increased capacity and continued labour productivity growth in the United States meant that by 1924, the United States had overtaken Britain as the largest producer of cotton cloth (see Table 7.1). During the 1920s and more especially the 1930s, on the other hand, both industries encountered the increasing competitive threat of Japan at home and abroad. The Japanese share of world cotton textile exports outstripped Britain by 1933, a lead which she sustained throughout the 1930s, as Figures 7.1 and 7.2 demonstrate. By the outbreak of the First World War, despite common technological origins, the British and American cotton industries had developed along quite different trajectories. Distinctiveness in the experience of industrialisation, in government–industry relations, in commercial policy and in the characteristics of product and factor markets meant that the historical forces shaping business strategy were strikingly dissimilar. The sharpest contrast came in the product and market orientation of the two nations, with Britain having the world's most export-oriented cotton industry. On the other hand, efforts to penetrate the Far Eastern market had only marginally reduced the legendary reliance of the United States cotton industry on its domestic market. The divergent evolution of the two industries and the resultant contrasts in organisation and capabilities make the shared experience of difficulties and decay in the interwar period all the more remarkable – their explanation is one of the principal themes of this chapter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically family firms have been vital during industrialisation throughout the world and were synonymous with the early development of cotton textiles in both Britain and the United States. Whether as the result of institutional failure stemming from underdevelopment, or as a reflection of pre-industrial wealth patterns, or a combination of the two, family businesses lay at the heart of the First Industrial Revolution on either side of the Atlantic. In eighteenth-century Britain family firms proliferated in most branches of manufacturing, commerce and finance. With the spectre of bankruptcy ever present in the hazardous world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a combination of the common law partnership and unlimited liability meant that many businessmen preferred to be associated with their family connections than with outsiders. This was less a reflection of conservatism than a strategy to ameliorate the worst effects of uncertainty. In the United States too, the regional take-off of New England and Pennsylvania was based upon personal capitalism which proved crucial in the cotton industry. Similarly in the Southern states the, admittedly limited, development was founded on family-based, community-oriented firms. The popularity of family business in the early British and American cotton industries in both manufacturing and commercial arrangements was, therefore, a predictable response to instability. However, national differences in the sources of uncertainty, in economic circumstances, in the institutional environment and in that complex array of historical forces which shape both business and national culture mean that, whilst ownership and control were united in both countries, the form which this took and the strategies pursued were at times strikingly different (Gerschenkron 1953: 1–19; Kindleberger 1964: 113–14). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Business behaviour is conditioned by a combination of external institutional forces and by the social and cultural environment of which they are part, which are, in turn, conditioned by historical factors. These influences, by affecting the expectations and attitudes of businessmen, themselves fashion the culture of individual firms leading to significant international variations in business behaviour. The firm embedding of family-owned cotton businesses in the social networks of local communities helped to give these businesses their distinctive characteristics and is reflected in the striking national and intranational differences in the ante-bellum period and also in the political behaviour and relative political power of interest groups. Business decisions are not, therefore, the result just of the price mechanism but are also affected by both laws and that complex array of rules, formal and informal, which determine human behaviour. Moreover, if the expectations and responses of businessmen are shaped by the institutional environment in which they operate, their changing responses and sometimes their efforts to evade laws may also impact upon the development of the legal system and rules associated with the conduct of economic activity (North 1990: 3–8). This is because laws, whether they relate to property rights, inheritance, the status and regulation of firms or commercial policy, are not formed in an historical vacuum. Instead, they are the product of responses to changing conditions and to the interaction between governments on the one hand and business groups and other interested parties on the other. They may also be a response to particular pressures and events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Textiles and industrialisation are synonymous and almost everywhere the first factories have been in the cotton industry. The position of clothing as a basic necessity, early success in mechanising textile production, and the comparative simplicity of technology, have meant that textiles in general, and the cotton industry in particular, are often the earliest industries to be modernised. Labour-rather than capital-intensive and requiring limited skill of operatives, the cotton and related textile industries suited both the resource profiles and the domestic markets of many early industrialisers and continue to do so. Similarly, textile production was developed extensively prior to modernisation in many countries. As a result basic skills became available to industrialists, even though prejudice against changing working habits might lead to significant labour market imperfections when factories and mechanisation were introduced. Moreover modest financial and technological requirements meant that relatively few barriers to entry existed until after 1960 when the industry became increasingly capital-intensive (Chandler and Tedlow 1985: 140; GATT 1984: 4; Kriedte, Medick and Schlumbohm 1982: 8; Pollard 1991: 33). These factors have meant that, whilst the cotton industry could form the basis of early spontaneous development in many countries, it has also been a prime candidate for government support as part of import substituting strategies aimed at speeding up the industrialisation process (Hoffman 1958:2–4). The cotton industry emerged as a dominant sector in the ‘take-off’ of both Britain and the United States although the macroeconomic consequences may be unclear. The two industries shared common technological origins as new ideas on manufacturing diffused comparatively rapidly from the first industrial nation to her one-time colony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Differences in the relative supply of labour, land, power and raw cotton differentiated the American from the British cotton industry and contributed to contrasting patterns of costs, technological development, productivity performance and business organisation. Before 1840 American cotton masters, in general, were faced with less plentiful and less elastic supplies of labour than their counterparts in Britain. Yet there were, nevertheless, sharp contrasts in the labour markets faced by the water-powered Lowell corporations in the 1820s and 1830s and those in urban centres such as Philadelphia, quite apart from the peculiarities of labour markets in the Southern states. Equally in Britain, although the factory system evolved against a background of relative labour surplus, there were imperfections in regional labour markets, especially where water power was used. Inevitably, therefore, in early industrialisation there emerged an array of labour and related technological strategies tailored to meet local, as opposed to purely national, conditions. Disparities in the evolution of business institutions, of technology and of product strategies cannot be understood exclusively in terms of differing price relativities. Similarly, national and regional dissimilarities in the development of labour management also need to be set in a wider context. The cultures and capabilities of family firms in the cotton industries of Britain and the United States were inseparable from their community cultures during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and this symbiosis extended to the management of labour. Thus networks that underpinned financial and commercial arrangements, on either side of the Atlantic, were also a feature of labour relations, the arrangement of work and of training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the nineteenth century, what had been a sexual division of labor between spinning (performed by women) and weaving (performed by men) became a geographical division of labor. Spinning moved from the center of the Caux to its borders, where it concentrated along the tributaries of the Seine. By 1823, there were 121 spinning mills in the Seine-Inférieure. Only ten were on small streams in the interior of the Caux, and most of these would not survive for long. Ninety-five were in the valleys near Rouen, nine were near Le Havre (the entry point of raw cotton), and seven were near Dieppe. The yarn produced in these mills continued to be put out into the villages of the Caux for weaving, however, and much of the cloth produced for the Rouen merchants continued to come from looms set up in the homes of the cauchois peasants. Now, however, both men and women worked at these looms. The rise of cottage weaving It is impossible to tell exactly how quickly spinning disappeared as a cottage occupation in Auffay because the recording of female occupations in the civil registers is almost nonexistent for the quarter century between 1803 and 1828. After that period, however, female marriage occupations are recorded more systematically, and it is clear that by the 1830s cottage spinning was dead in Auffay and the other cauchois villages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-agricultural production The Delhi sultanate lacks any description of its economic resources of the kind that Abū'l FaẒl supplies for the Mughal empire in his Ā'in-i Akbarī. Only a very incomplete sketch can, therefore, be offered of its mineral and craft production. Of salt, the cheapest mineral, the Sāmbhar lake formed a major source in northern India, so much so that the word namak (salt) was joined to its name. Quite surprisingly, in spite of the Salt range (‘Koh-i Jūd’) being frequently mentioned in our authorities, there is no description of the mines until Abū'l Fazl offers one c. 1595. Since, however, the mines are mentioned by Yuan Chwang, it is quite likely that they continued to be worked during the time of the sultans. Among the metals, iron ore of an exceptionally high grade was mined in India and was used to produce damascened steel which had a worldwide reputation. The mining areas lay scattered in the hilly region beginning with Gwalior and extending to the tip of southern India. The Cutch iron was probably responsible for the fame of the swords of Korij; and the Geniza records of the eleventh and twelfth centuries show that the Deccan exported iron and steel to the Middle East. But other mining localities can only be identified on the basis of the A'īn-i Akbari and our seventeenth-century sources. One may suppose that they were largely the same. Similarly, the Rajasthan mines probably yielded copper in the period of the sultanate, just as they did under the Mughals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1822 a Lyonnais who was worried about how his own silk industry would cope with the threat of the British industrial revolution composed an imaginary debate on its future. In this work the case for the inevitability of concentration in factories is put forward by an American visitor, while the essential soundness of the Lyons homeworking tradition is argued by a merchant from the city. The two protagonists visit a famous factory, La Sauvagère, the first real large-scale silk-weaving establishment to be established in Lyons: does some inexorable law of progress mean that this is a foretaste of the fate in store for the whole silk manufacture? The American: I have been visiting England, Germany, Prussia, Holland, Russia, and Italy with the intention of making a special study of silk manufacturing in all those countries: I was particularly keen to find out more about the situation in Lyons […] I had heard of the La Sauvagère factory: it has the same highly impressive method of administration and distribution of work that you find in big factories in Germany and England. […] But I was astonished to find that this factory is the only one of its kind in Lyons, and that the work of the Lyons manufacture is spread over a whole quantity of small workshops. The Lyons merchant: It is a very old tradition in our town for manufacturing work to be carried out by workmen who are independent of the heads of the manufacturing businesses, who negotiate the prices of the pieces with them. […] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of the industrial revolution and capitalism have emphasized the importance of mass production, a concept almost invariably associated with a series of related notions such as “low prices,” “modest or inferior quality” and “extensive market.” These notions come together towards the end of the eighteenth century with cotton, which has been recognized as playing a fundamental role in the early phase of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Competition over prices and the meeting of supply and demand in a free competitive market are the most widely-held conceptual parameters of an interpretative model tied to the categories of classical economics. To a large extent ignored, or at least underestimated and underused by historians, are the concepts of competition over product quality and differentiation, monopolistic competition, barriers to entry, flexible production, market segmentation and transactions costs. This is due perhaps to the view that these concepts have validity only for contemporary capitalist societies and that they are irrelevant with respect to the economies of the past. In this chapter I want to show that these concepts can be used to throw light on a variety of phenomena which have hitherto remained obscure and whose importance in terms of the formation of the capitalist market and of entrepreneurial strategies has still to be fully appreciated. It is within this framework that I will examine silk fabrics and fashion in eighteenth-century Europe. The silk industry is distinctive in the contrasts it offers to the cotton industry. Prices are high rather than low, markets are small rather than extensive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The regional history of the British industrial revolution is one of marked contrasts of fortune; rapid growth and advance in one area, slow or sudden decline in another. Few industries, however, can match the remarkable contrast between the fortunes of the woollen cloth industry in the West of England counties of Gloucestershire, Somerset and Wiltshire and that of the West Riding of Yorkshire. As Wilson in a perceptive essay has shown, the West Riding woollen industry embarked on its road to supremacy early in the eighteenth century, but its progress was rapidly accelerated by the advent of early textile machinery. The West of England, on the other hand, though dominant at the start of that century, was by its close already in rapid relative decline. Not long after the Napoleonic Wars this became an absolute decline. The West of England's failure to adapt to changed circumstances, its slower take up of new technologies, reduced it from the forefront of the cloth trade to little more than a backwater by 1850. The work of Wilson and of Mann have done much to explain this eclipse, both stressing the importance of differences of product and especially in marketing practices as major reasons. While accepting that these were indeed important factors, this chapter is addressed to another aspect of this pattern, namely worker resistance to machinery. Such resistance was encountered in both regions but, with one major exception, resistance did not prove an obstacle to advance in the West Riding. This was not so in the West of England where major opposition greeted all new innovations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last few years the literature on proto-industrialisation has almost achieved its own take-off into self-sustaining growth. The theories and agenda advanced by the pioneers of the concept have been applied to regions and economies far removed from its original settings in north-western and central Europe. Russia and Japan now feature in the proto-industrial canon, and the concept has also migrated from country to town, with studies of urban proto-industrialisation in settings as economically and geographically diverse as Lisburn (Northern Ireland) and Bologna. But, surprisingly, nothing has yet been said about the applicability of the theories to the Lancashire textile industries. This is extraordinary because south-east Lancashire, especially, has a strong claim to having become the first full-fledged industrial society during roughly the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth. At any rate, it combined factory industry, using steam power, continuous operation and a high level of mechanisation, with the rapid rise of distinctively industrial towns on an ever-growing scale, and the emergence of the first concentrated, purely industrial proletariat. Whatever qualifications one might want to make about the persistence of older ways of working alongside the factory, this was a remarkable set of developments. If a transition from pre-industrial through proto-industrial to industrial economy and society took place anywhere in its pure form, uncontaminated by the influence of prior innovations elsewhere, it should have been in the Manchester area of Lancashire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The statesmen who gathered at Vienna to bring back peace to a war torn continent set themselves to restore the conditions which had prevailed before the wars began. This proved impossible; too many of the changes of the previous decades were irreversible. This was especially the case in Germany, where the number of separate and autonomous political units was reduced from more than three hundred to thirty-nine. The German empire was snuffed out in 1806, without as much as a whimper. In 1815 it was restored, no longer under the auspices of the Austrian Habsburgs, but as the German Confederation, or Bund, dominated by Brandenburg-Prussia (Fig. 10.1). In western Europe, political boundaries were smoothed out, and much of its feudal debris of enclaves and exclaves was tidied up. France lost marginally and, in retrospect, significantly. Much of the Saar coalfield and of the ironworking Sambre Valley were lost respectively to Prussia and the United Netherlands. Savoy and Nice were restored to the Sardinian kingdom, only to be regained in 1860. Fear of renewed French aggression led to the incorporation of the southern Low Countries, previously Austrian, in the United Netherlands, the purpose being to create a powerful buffer to French expansion. This settlement proved to be unacceptable in the southern Low Countries, which in 1831 broke away to form the kingdom of Belgium, its independence and inviolability guaranteed by the powers. Changes were more fundamental in eastern Europe. Napoleon's Grand Duchy of Warsaw, a kind of revived Polish state created from the Prussian and Austrian shares of the Partitions, was given to the Russian tsars in their personal capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the early fourteenth century the period of medieval economic growth was over; the population of Europe reached its peak at about this time, and the spatial pattern of cities was to develop no farther before the nineteenth century. POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY The political map of Europe had assumed a form which, with minor changes, it was to retain into modern times. Only in the Balkan peninsula, where the Byzantine empire was clinging desperately to its last foothold, were major changes still to come. In most of Europe political control was becoming more centralized, and kingship more absolute. Feudalism, as a mode of government, was weakening, though its outward symbols were as conspicuous as ever. Only in eastern Europe and Russia were feudal relationships tending to strengthen. In the Spanish peninsula the southward advance of the Christian states had reduced the Moorish kingdom of Granada to the Sierra Nevada and neighboring coastlands. To the north, Castile, having absorbed Léon and other petty states, reached from the Biscay coast in the north to the Strait of Gibraltar (Fig. 6.1). It dominated the Meseta, while around its periphery lay Navarre and Gascony, Aragon and Portugal. Only Castile still had a boundary with the Moors and still continued its centuries-old crusade against them. Portugal and Aragon were casting their eyes beyond the seas and were beginning that commercial expansion which was to take them to Asia and the New World. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The centuries from the early ninth to the early fourteenth saw the rise and splendor of medieval civilization. They saw also the emergence of a political organization of the land which underwent little fundamental change before the end of the eighteenth century: an increase in population which stretched to its limits the agricultural resources of Europe, and the development of a pattern of cities, that remained almost unaltered until the Industrial Revolution. Not until the nineteenth century do we encounter again a period of comparable development and change. THE INVASIONS The period began with another wave of invaders from beyond the core areas of western and central Europe. These came from Scandinavia, westward from the fjords of Norway and the plains of Denmark to the British Isles and France, eastward from Sweden to the shores of Russia and overland to the Black Sea (Fig. 5.1). The first of these sea raiders reached the shores of western Europe before the death of Charlemagne; the last landed on those of northern Britain two and a half centuries later. Their raids were but an episode in European history, but they had, locally at least, far-reaching consequences. The sudden explosion of Nordic peoples in the ninth century is as enigmatic as that of the Tartar peoples during previous centuries. It has been attributed to political struggles within Scandinavia, to overpopulation, and to environmental change in this climatically marginal land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the mid-fifth century B.C. the long ordeal of the Persian Wars was over, and Athens, triumphant leader of a league of Greek city-states, was building a civilization which has been the envy of posterity. The great Athenian dramatists were writing, and work had begun on Athens's crown and glory, the buildings erected on the steep Acropolis overlooking the city. At the same time colonies established by Greek cities in southern Italy and Sicily were in their different ways following where those of the Aegean had led. At this time Rome was a small town spread over a group of low hills beside the Tiber in central Italy. Only a short distance to the north the Etruscan league of cities had created a civilization similar in some ways to that of the Greeks in the Aegean. Rome had once been part of this loose Etruscan federation, and its independence was at this time far from secure. Beyond the Alps the La Tène civilization had been spread by the Celts, armed with iron weapons and war chariots, through much of central Europe. They were pressing into western Europe, the Spanish peninsula, and the British Isles. Beyond them to the north and northeast, a Bronze Age culture still survived, and in the Baltic and Scandinavian regions and on the outermost fringes of the British Isles, Stone Age peoples were beginning to learn the rudiments of agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction In this chapter I shall deal with the tailors' guild in Turin at the end of the seventeenth and in the first half of the eighteenth century. The analysis proposed is based on a desire to understand the nature of trade associations and the factors which led individuals and different social groups to come together in such associations, and which contributed to their success or to their decline. The association, rather than the trade itself, is the focal point of this paper. Studies about guilds, even recent ones, have tended to identify the activities of a trade with the organizations representing it. By failing to separate their analysis into two parts, such studies have implicitly postulated complete identity between guild and trade. In fact they have tended not to separate the two aspects – guilds and trades – and thus have in effect implicitly postulated a complete identity between the two. This is also the case for studies of conflicts between guilds and their base, since these conflicts have been analysed purely in an economic, or in any case a trade context. Once broad chronological periods dictated by political history are identified, the trajectories of individual guilds are analysed principally in terms of the economic context of the trade or productive roles and mercantile politics. (In the case of Piedmont the periodization substantially follows the lines of that widely proposed for France – and hence has centred on progressive phases of subjection of the guilds to royal authority.) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A table of contents for the periodical is presented.

The article features loom artist Jana Trent and describes her eco-friendly artistic approaches. Information on how she started her Weave-It loom projects is given. Her opinion and sentiments on the Weave-It loom are highlighted. The article also cites the advantages of using little looms in Trent's craft.

The article focuses on tips used for large and small gauge looms for making any knitted item. Topics discussed include things that can affect gauge such as stitch pattern and color of yarn, thicker yarn will yield fewer stitches per inch and a thinner yarn will yield more stitches, pay attention to the stitch count in pattern repeat and what loom to use is the number of pegs on the loom versus the number of stitches you will be working.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including techniques of stitch patterns, loom-knitting skills and hat making.

A table of contents for the issue is presented which include Fido's Hat, Modern Color Beanie and Loom Techniques.

The article presents information about basic equipment in weaving. Some of these tools are ruler, tape measure, tapes and pencils. In order to make looms, a card is needed. When it comes to designing woven textiles, it is important to use pencils or marker pens. For circular designs, it is advised to use a pair of compasses.