weaving

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The production of textile fabric by means of a loom. The basic process involves the interlacing at right angles of vertical threads (the warp) and horizontal threads (the weft). The weft is traditionally carried across from one side of the loom to the other by a type of bobbin called a shuttle, and weaves in and out of the warp, creating the fabric.

The technique of weaving has been used all over the world since ancient times. It has only fairly recently been mechanized and handlooms are still used in many societies, for example, in the manufacture of tweeds in the UK. Handlooms may be horizontal or vertical; industrial looms are generally vertical. In the handloom era the Jacquard machine, the last in a series of inventions for producing complicated designs, was perfected by French inventor Joseph Jacquard in the early 19th century. This used a series of punched cards to control the lifting of the warp threads.

The power loom, first patented in the 1780s, was the invention of English cleric Edmund Cartwright. The speed limitations caused by the slow passage of the shuttle have been partly overcome by the use of water- and air-jet insertion methods, and by the development in the 1970s of ‘multiphase’ looms in which the weft is inserted in continuous waves across the machine, rather than one weft at a time.

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