by Dr. Anne Mulhern
I recently received the bit of fabric I wove myself at the Boott Cotton Mills Museum and am very pleased.
I learned about the program a couple of months ago, but didn’t get a chance to try it until June.
If you’re interested in trying it out you’re not too late; the program is scheduled to run on the second Saturday of every month right through October. The next will be held on July 11. You don’t have to register and it’s free.
I didn’t know what to expect when I got there, and you might not know either. Here’s how it works:
You show up at the designated location, the third floor of the Boott Cotton Mills Museum at 115 John St. The whole thing starts at 1PM and goes until 4PM.
You can drop into the loom room at any time, although I’ld recommend showing up early; I heard it gets busier later.
I found out that between set up and the actual weaving, I spent about one hour there, and you should probably expect the same.
There are about 16 looms in the room, set up and ready for weaving, with various colors. The looms aren’t terribly big, and are quite manageable for children, but adults can use them too. You can choose your loom and receive instructions in how the loom works. Then you begin weaving!
When you’re ready to stop, you let one of the people in charge know, and a procedure is initiated that will result in you receiving your very own bit of fabric in the mail about a week later.
This is where the ingenuity of the whole setup becomes apparent.
Rather than being processed and given to you on the spot, your bit of fabric is identified by a simple system of paper markers and tags, and the fabric on the loom is advanced so that the next person can begin work on their own bit of fabric, without any significant adjustments to the loom having to be made. The process is quite efficient.
At the end, after everybody who wants to has tried their hand at it, the whole bolt of fabric must be removed from the loom. Each person’s bit is separated from every other bit and mailed to that person in a previously addressed envelope.
Most of the looms in the loom room are treadle looms; they use a set of four pedals to control the position of the warp threads, hence the pattern of the cloth.
You can try as many different patterns as you like, and switch colors, also. I tried a few of the patterns that were posted on the looms, and a few that I worked out in my head. You can even tell by looking at my bit of fabric that my weaving technique improved slightly during the course of one hour.
Of course, modern mechanical looms are very much more complex, automatically raising and lowering the warp threads without the intervention of any human operator.
The looms in the loom room are models of an older tech that has been superseded by all sorts of innovations. But the problems that the modern industrial machines have to solve remain the same as those that were solved by human directed and powered looms in colonial times, much like the looms in the loom room, before the automatic looms of the 19th century took over in Lowell and elsewhere.
Of course, if your interest is piqued by your loom room experience, you can always plan another trip to check out the weave room at the mill.
