Definitions
Acetic
Acid—Vinegar,
used to neutralize alkaline dye baths and can heighten some colors.
Alum—Potassium
sulfate (also known as potassium alum or potash alum), ammonium sulfate, and
sodium sulfate. Potassium alum is
found in the minerals kalinite, alunite, and leucite, which can be treated with
sulfuric acid to obtain crystals of the alum.
Used as a mordant in dyeing, it fixes dye to cotton and other fabrics,
rendering the dye insoluble. Modern
mordant alum is potassium aluminum sulfate.
Argol—Crude
tartar.
Bismuth—A
heavy brittle highly diamagnetic chiefly trivalent metallic element resembling
arsenic and antimony chemically.
Bluestone—Hydrated
copper sulfate
Bunch—Five
pounds of factory thread, ready to be spooled for weaving.
One bunch of thread can produce fifteen yards of cloth.
Cards—A
pair of paddles, usually rectangular in shape, with handles attached.
Each card is covered on one side by little bent wire teeth, pitched at an
angle. These teeth are embedded in
a backing which was leather in the 19th century.
Wool cards have 12 to 13 teeth per inch.
Cotton cards have longer, finer and closer-set teeth than those used for
wool carding. There were only three
hand card factories in the U.S. in 1860—all in Worcester County, MA, but they
were also produced in Europe.
Cards,
Breaking—Cards
that separate woolen fibers.
Cards,
Roll—Cards
that comb wool into rolls.
Chalybeate
Water—Water
impregnated with salts of iron.
Clock
Reel—See
reel.
Cochineal—A
red or scarlet dyestuff consisting of the dried bodies of female insects which
resemble mealybugs and feed on cactus. The
dye is very powerful and very expensive per pound.
It is produced in Mexico and Central America.
Color
Fast—Dye
which retains its intensity when repeatedly washed or exposed to light; also
washfast, lightfast.
Copperas
(Green vitriol)—Ferrous sulfate heptahydrate, is obtained as a by-product of
industrial processes using iron ores that have been treated with sulfuric acid. Used as a mordant (fixative) in textile dyeing and printing.
Modern copperas often goes by the name of "iron mordant."
Small amounts will darken or sadden colors, but copperas itself can also
be used as a dye. During the War,
Southern women made copperas by soaking rusting iron in vinegar.
Cream
of Tartar—Potassium
hydrogen tartrate, prepared from argols and also synthetically from tartaric
acid.
Dent—The
space between two wires or reeds on a sley.
Domestic
Cloth—Inexpensive
white and unbleached cotton cloth from American mills.
Dressing
the Loom—The
process of making the loom ready for weaving.
End—A
warp thread.
Factory
Thread—Usually
cotton, sometimes wool, weaving thread, usually produced in five pound bunches.
Foot-Powered
Loom—A
treadle operated loom as distinct from a table loom.
Ginning—Separating
the cotton seed from the fibers.
Handloom—Any
of various looms or weaving devices operated wholly or partly by hand or foot
power. Modern "handloomed
cloth" may be produced on a machine but the shuttles are changed by hand.
Machine loomed cloth is set up and the operator can just let it go.
Hank—840
yards of cotton thread, weighing one pound.
Harness
(Shaft)—A
device for raising and lowering the warp threads on a loom.
Heddle—The
string or wire loop in the harness that does the lifting or lowering of the warp
threads to form the shed.
Homespun—As
a mid-nineteenth century term may mean:
a. All handspun and hand
woven
b. Factory spun warp,
handspun filler, hand woven
c. All factory spun, but
hand woven
d. All factory spun and
factory woven in the South, where home=South; supposed to resemble true hand
woven
e. Fake homespun—factory
spun and woven in the North, considered a cheap imitation.
To determine if a piece of fabric is handwoven, check to see if there is
variation of thread count at various places on the cloth; if it is a plaid or
strip, fold the fabric to see if the spacing is exactly consistent; cloth is
usually not perfectly rectangular; usually has no selvedge or less than ¼"
and it is the same as the rest of the cloth; usually single ply, not two-ply up
through mid 19th century except for blankets or coverlets.
Synthetic dyes "run"—natural dyes never run (except perhaps
if a mouse urinates on indigo cloth) but may fade, eat out, or change colors
(information from Rabbit Goody's "Identifying Historic Textiles"
course—highly recommended!]
Indigo—A
blue vat dye obtained from plants in the genus Indigofera, by the mid-19th
century grown mostly in India and Central America although it was still
cultivated in home patches in the southern U.S.
Jeans—A
twilled cotton or wool and cotton cloth, often used for pants or suits,
including uniforms.
Lazy
Kate—A type
of spool rack, either upright or side-by-side.
Ley
or Lye—A
strong alkaline liquor that contains chiefly potassium carbonate obtained by
leaching wood ashes with water. In
cloth production used for scouring.
Lime—A
caustic highly infusible solid that consists essentially of calcium oxide often
together with magnesia, that is obtained usually in the form of white to grayish
lumps or pebbles of calcining limestone, seashells, coral, or other forms of
calcium carbonate.
Linsey-Woolsey—A
finely woven material with warp of handspun linen, and filler of handspun woolen
yarn. Both linen and wool were of single ply each.
By the 19th century, the South had largely substituted cotton
yarn, often factory spun, for linen.
Logwood—A
black or dark blue dye produced from the heartwood of a tree which grows in
Mexico, Central America, the West Indies, and northern South America.
Loom—A
frame or machine for interlacing at right angles two or more sets of threads or
yarns to form a cloth; Width usually 45"-54", but width of cloth
determined by use, not loom.
Madder—Dye
produced from the roots of Rubia tinctorum,
a Eurasian herb, mostly grown in West Indies, England, Holland, although it was
also grown in the United States in home patches.
It produces moderate to strong red colors.
Mordant—A
chemical agent which combines with both the dye molecule and the fiber molecule,
producing a permanently fixed insoluble color on cloth.
The most common home mordants in the mid-19th century were
copperas and alum.
Mordant
Assistant or Chemical Assistant—A
chemical that increases the effectiveness of a mordant, such as cream or tartar
and washing soda.
Muriatic
Acid—Hydrochloric
acid.
Niddy-Noddy—An
angled stretcher, made of wood, predating the clock-reel as a primitive device
for measuring skeins.
Osnaburg—Coarse,
unbleached cotton cloth.
Plain
or Tabby Weave—Weave
is completely balanced and has no right or wrong side—over one thread, under
one thread.
Ply—A
technique of twisting two or more strands of yarns together in the direction
opposite to the single twist. Knitting
yarns and sewing threads are plied.
Queen's
Delight—Stillingia
sylvatica, a woody shrub which grows in dry soil from Florida to Texas and
northward to Virginia and Missouri. It
produced a black dye.
Quercitron—A
yellow dye produced from the inner bark of the black oak, which grows throughout
the eastern US, with Georgia, Pennsylvania, and the Carolinas supplying the
greatest quantity in the mid 19th century.
Quill—The
paper tube or corn husk on which a bobbin is wound.
Reed
or Sley—A
device on a loom resembling a comb and used to space warp yarns evenly.
Reel—A
piece of equipment with two crossed wooden arms with yarn holders on each of the
four ends. The reel was placed on a
stand, allowing it to pivot to wind off the spindle yarn.
The reel had a circumference of about 6½ feet. Clock reels had gauges that ticked with each rotation on a
simple wooden dial. Forty turns of
the winder made a "knot" of 80 yards, and seven knots made one skein,
or 560 yards of yarn.
Repeat—A
unit of pattern, the distance before the pattern starts repeating itself.
Roll
or Rolag—Batt
coming off of the cards, with an even density throughout, loose and fluffy.
Roving
or Sliver form of Cotton—A
slightly twisted roll or strand of textile fibers
Saddening
Agent—Addition
to the dyebath of iron mordant, which ultimately dulls the color.
Dyeing in an iron vessel has the same effect, particularly on bright
colors.
Selvedge—The
firm edge of the cloth, usually the last four or six warp threads.
Handwoven selvedges are the same as the body of the cloth, unless at the
very edge where there may be double threads
Shed—The
opening between two layers of warp ends.
Shuttle—Any
device for carrying the weft across the loom through the shed.
Sizing
or Dressing—A
finish applied to fabric to add body, usually added to the warp to make it
smoother and therefore easier to weave; usually a form of starch.
Sley
or Reed—A
number of vertical splits of reed or wires set at precisely defined intervals
between two horizontal rods, used for spacing the warp and beating up the weft.
Sleys were changed according to the type of fabric being woven, and were
named according to the number of spaces per inch—such as a forty-dent reed.
Sley,
Double—Two
threads in each dent of the reed.
Sley,
Single—One
thread in each dent of the reed.
Soda—Sodium
carbonate or sodium bicarbonate.
Spinning
Jenny—An
early multiple-spindle machine for spinning wool or cotton.
Spinning
Wheel—A
small domestic hand-driven of foot-driven machine for spinning yarn or thread in
which a wheel drives a single spindle
Sugar
of Lead—Lead
acetate.
Swift—Adjustable
wheel mounted on a frame to hold yarn for unwinding.
Tabby
weave—Plain
weave.
Tannic
Acid—Any of
various soluble astringent complex phenolic substances of plant origin used in
tanning, dyeing, and the making of ink and in medicine.
It can be found in oak gallnuts, tea, sumac, oak bark, and mangrove bark
(cutch).
Threads—A
group of textile filaments twisted or spun together to make a continuous strand.
Threads
per Inch (Cloth Density)—The
number of parallel threads in a piece of cloth within one inch.
It may vary between warp and filler.
Homewoven cloth usually has 28-50 threads per inch; professional
"fancy" weaver 50-60 threads per inch; machine woven 80-100 threads
per inch except for some silks from France and some cottons from India.
Tin
Mordant—Stannous
chloride; dyers mixed muriatic acid with water and added powdered block tin
obtained from a coppersmith or apothecary.
Treadles—Pedals
used to raise or lower the harness on a loom.
Twill—A
weave which gives diagonal lines in the cloth—the weft passes under one warp
end and then over two, three, or four warp ends.
Twill will not rip in a straight line and holes are more easily patched. Home produced twills are the same on both sides.
Jean is a form of twill cloth.
Walking
Wheel—Also
called "great wheel" or "wool wheel"; the spinner paced back
and forth while turning the wheel with her right hand and with the left guiding
the fiber on the spindle. All of
the spinning wheels in Foxfire 2 were
walking wheels.
Warp
Threads or Ends—The
strong threads running through the loom and lengthwise through the cloth.
Warping
Frame—A
square wooden frame with pegs a measured distance apart on which warp yarn was
wound before proceeding to the warp beam on the loom.
Antique frames have pegs for as much as 20-30 yards, substantiating that
warping was put on the loom for several projects at one time.
Web—The
cloth on the loom.
Weft
Threads or Picks or Filling—The
transverse threads in the cloth.
Woven
Cloth—Cloth
in which threads interlace at 90 degree angles, can be cut and sewn, and is fast
to produce.
Yarn—Thread
of any kind, produced by spinning, now most commonly used to mean plied knitting
yarn.
1
good carder can card 1 lb. of cotton per day
5
lbs. of cotton makes 1 bunch of spun thread
1
bunch of spun thread makes 15 yards of cloth.
The
Southern Watchman [Athens, GA]
October 22,
1862, p. 2, c. 2
It
took almost two weeks of steady and earnest
labor
to spin enough thread for a dress, then
another
week to weave the fabric. Depending
on
the
style and complication of construction, it
could
take an additional week to cut and stitch the
garment
by hand.
Mills,
Betty J. Calico Chronicle:
Texas
Women
and Their Fashions, 1830-1910.
Lubbock:
Texas Tech Press, 1985, p. 19.