The Flannel Experiment: Instagram Photo Diary

by ourgirlhistory

As I’ve been working on the Flannel Experiment for the past month, I’ve been reflected on each stage of the project over on Instagram, where I find it easy to share findings and ideas as they occur to me. In order to make it easier to keep track of that “photo diary,” I’ve chosen to share all of those posts here in chronological order. My hope is that this will make it easy to follow along with my thought process and learning throughout this project.

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#Repost @theburroughsgarret’s post on the very beginnings of my wild woolen finishing adventure! ・・・ First up this year is a 38 yard warp for my friend @whipstitch802. Eliza is studying early American fulling mills at @materialculturewinterthur, and thanks to generous grant funding I’ll be weaving a piece of flannel that Eliza will full in order to shed light on what the cloth described in 19th-century sources was really like. This beautiful woolen singles yarn is from @knollyarns, still redolent of spinning oil, a hallmark of the trade. . . #weave #weaving #handweaving #handwoven #handcrafted #handmade #loom #barnloom #handloom #flyshuttle #textiles #textileterroir #rootedinplace #ruralindustry #craft #interiordesign #fashiondesign #custommade #bespoke #madesmall #madeinvermont #madeinamerica #vermont #newengland #theburroughsgarret

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One of the things I appreciate about having Justin weave the cloth for this fulling project is his own professional curiosity about how to make the antique looms he works on more efficient. It’s like getting to watch the industrial revolution play out in real time. For instance, the fly shuttle mechanism on this loom was an add-on he built himself last year to speed up the weaving process, but it was originally invented in the mid-18th century. #Repost @theburroughsgarret with @get_repost ・・・ Slowing it down. While I took this for the novelty, it’s instructive to see the timing of the components that make each pick. Opening the shed, throwing the shuttle, and beating up are all critically linked in time in a way that’s sometimes hard to appreciate, unless it goes wrong. . . #weave #weaving #handweaving #handwoven #handcrafted #handmade #loom #barnloom #handloom #flyshuttle #textiles #textileterroir #rootedinplace #ruralindustry #craft #interiordesign #fashiondesign #custommade #bespoke #madesmall #madeinvermont #madeinamerica #vermont #newengland #theburroughsgarret

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It’s fulling test day!

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Today I was at Eaton Hill Textiles in Marshfield to do some preparatory fulling experiments on a few one-yard pieces of the beautiful cloth which @theburroughsgarret is weaving for me. First the cloth was scoured and you can see just how much grease we washed out by how brown the water was! We experimented with pounding the cloth with mallets (an unconventional way of reproducing the impact of a fulling mill, but ultimately not all that successful), and with stomping the cloth in warm soapy water. The most successful technique was the least exciting – dawn dish soap and a very long agitate cycle in a hot water wash in a top-loading washing machine. Thanks to Kate Smith and Norman Kennedy for their help and advice, and to the @centerforcraft for their generous grant funding for this project!

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When I started this fulling project, I really only had one piece of hard historical data – the fulling mill account book’s listing of how long the cloth was when it entered the mill, versus when it left the mill. From that, I extrapolated a percentage of shrinkage in length. I knew the cloth was going to shrink in width too, but since I didn’t have any data on how much it was going to shrink, I didn’t think too much about it. But now that I have a fulled sample in front of me, it’s pretty hard to ignore! This sample shrank by 25% in length, but the surface area shrank by 47%! Having lost only a quarter of its length, this cloth is almost TWICE as thick as it was prior to fulling. (It’s very possible that the original cloth shrank less in width than this one. Despite that, it’s an interesting point to consider.) The weaver would have known going into making that original piece of cloth that every square inch he wove was going to halve in size, but he would also have been able to visualize the beautiful thick cloth he was going to receive back from the fulling mill at the end of the whole process!

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A gal and her cloth.

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Scouring: and so it begins!

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This project has been generously supported by funds from the Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design’s Craft Research Fund; the University of Delaware’s Center for Material Culture Studies; funds provided by the Society of Winterthur Fellows, and by thesis research funds provided by the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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