My latest obsession is with 17th and 18th century German linen-weaving. This started nearly a year ago, when I stumbled across pdfs of old German weaving books on handweaving.net. (If you aren't already a subscriber, it's $25/year and well worth the money.) I've been interested in historical textiles and weaving drafts for many years, and already had a few American books including
- The Weavers Draft Book and Clothier's Assistant by John Hargrove (1792)
- The Domestic Manufacturer's Assistant and Family Directory in the Arts of Weaving and Dyeing by J. and R. Bronson (1810)
- The Weaver's Assistant, Explaining in a Familiar Manner, the First Principles of the Art of Weaving by Philo Blakeman (1818)
but then I started to look at these earlier books and manuscripts and was entranced. Here were fabric designs for looms that had far more than four or eight shafts. I kept digging around, and now have in my library
- A Book of Patterns for Hand-Weaving: Designs from the John Landes Drawings in the Pennsylvania Museum by Mary Meigs Atwater (n.d.)
- The Speck Book: An 18th Century Weaving Manuscript by Johann Ludwig Speck (1723)
- Nutzliches Weber-Bild Buch by Johann Michael Frickinger (1740)
- Neues Weberbild-und Musterbuch by Johann Michael Kirschbaum (1771)
- The Draught Book by Jeremiah Fielding (1775)
- A German Weaver's Pattern Book by Christian Morath (1784)
and I'm continuing to add to my collection as I run across them. The majority of these are either written or printed in German fraktur, so I can't read them, but I can read most weaving notation, or so I thought.
I started with the "simple" drafts: point twills known as *hin und weider* ("out and back") that were all tromp as writ. These drafts, often simply a tie-up diagram with a zig-zag line next to it to indicate a point twill, gave textile production shops a real advantage in "custom" cloth production: a loom could be dressed with dozens (or hundreds) of yards of warp in a single threading, then the required cloth woven off as it was needed, after the client/customer "ordered" from a book of pictures of the tie-ups (which look like the designs).
It wasn't until New Year's Eve that I had time to sit down and read a 1986 article by Patricia Hilts on the development of block patterns that all those weird little threading drafts started to make sense, and I realized just how incredibly sophisticated 18th century German weaving technology was. Included in the article were some of the block drafts I had been puzzling over, along with Hilts' modern redactions done on a TRS-80 computer. It was a "Rosetta Stone" moment: all those lines that look like chicken scratches are actually profile drafts. Very complex profile drafts. That require a lot more shafts than most American weavers have worked with. I thought back to something Rebecca Heil had written in the preface for The Speck Book: "At least one researcher had speculated that damask was the intended structure. Miss Nancy A. Reath, Assistant Curator of Textiles at the Pennsylvania Museum (now the Philadelphia Museum of Art) in the 1930s, was quoted as having 'come to the conclusion that the coverlet weaving was derived from linen damask weaving which, in its turn, was practiced in Germany.' " Damask is a type of satin, which takes 5 shafts. That means one of these drafts, with what appears as 5 shafts in modern notation, is actually a profile draft requiring 25 shafts. This was confirmed by a quote from Frickinger's Nutzliches Weber-Bild Buch that Hilts included in her article:
To work with 35 and 40 shafts will certainly render greater advantage even though this is the highest class of shaft-loom work. Under this classification you will find such that will require thought and will need great effort to weave, but you should not think that they have been set out only to look at or to vex people. They are meant to be woven and are serviceable.... Some people think hat I drive the shaft loom weaving [footwork] too high, but as in any art, I say, let him who will, drive it higher." (Italics mine.)In other words, "Go big or go home." I rather like that. My first attempt at GBGH is a gebrochene arbeit draft from A German Weaver's Pattern Book. It looks like a series of squiggles, but is actually a tricky little point twill that produces a beautiful design of circles within circles separated by tiny tables and fine lines of flags. At 250+ ends per repeat when drawn as a 15-shaft damask, the design is meant for very fine threads, but the resulting cloth is probably stunning.
