2009 Weave of the week #10: Sample weaving, part one

Broadway & 39th St., NYC

Burlington Woolens New York sales and design office, at 1450 Broadway, was in the center of the Garment Center (photo above).  I was one of six employees of the company whose job it was to handweave  samples of fabrics, exactly as they would ultimately be commercially woven for the fashion industry.

The weave room was located way in the back. To get to it we had to walk through the open, spacious, salesmen’s area, then to the end of a long corridor of executive offices, where we punched a time clock. The weave room was cramped and had all the ambience of a factory, but I was so excited about becoming a weaver that I didn’t notice. I worked on an 8-harness Macomber loom (one of six Macombers of various sizes), with shelves of reeds above my head. A small warping/ironing room was partitioned off from the main room, as was Elke’s tiny office.

Elke designed the fabrics and ran the weave room. She was a softspoken German, and her staff was an interesting, polyglot mix of people from all over. Esther, who was Swedish, and Lee, who was French, were the experienced weavers who worked on the big looms and helped Elke train us. The newbies were Edy, a Scotswoman who had graduated from an English art college, and FIT graduates Sonja, who was Puerto Rican, and Andrew, from Staten Island, who was openly gay and handsome as Michelangelo’s David. And I was the least experienced of all. Our weave room’s interesting mix of nationalities and cultures was not unusual — and not always harmonious either.

It took a while before I got used to the warping reels and could remember how to dress my loom without notes, but even with the problems, I can still remember that my first sample was magic to me. I made mistakes for weeks before feeling confident about what I was doing, and only after I had started to weave accurately and rhythmically did Elke let on that she had come close to firing me because she didn’t think that I would ever “get it.”

But the magic wore off and it wasn’t long before I was bored by 2×2 twill wool plaids. When I finally got to work on bigger looms and more unusual designs, I saved pieces in a notebook with instructions and drafts and here are the pages .

2/1 twill and coating

herringbone plaid

4×4 twill

3×3 twill

3/1 overplaid

broken twill

herringbone with overplaid

two coatings

open weave

The pages are posted chronologically, and there is a progression from fall colors through red/white/blue “holiday” to spring pastels (click on the thumbnails to enlarge). If I remember correctly, the two designs that I like best of the nine were knockoffs of European fabrics (#3 was a gorgeous coat). I stopped keeping the notebook after making only these nine pages, probably because at that point I no longer needed it and was ready to go on to weave — and create — more complex designs.

Update: The catalog sheet  on my Gallery page  shows front and back views of my well-loved “Calum” tunic, which was designed by my friend Edy Lyngaas.