Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

CARPET MANUFACTURE. 325 printing. No dyeing takes place in this factory. Having been sorted and scoured, and spun into hanks, the wool is wound on to spools for the yarn printer. Set together on a board below the huge circular printing drum, the yarn bobbins slowly and carefully give cut their yarn to the drum, covering it over with white threads. Round the printing cylinder is a copper rim, all toothed and numbered, while the frame holding it has a corresponding rim. Below the drum lies the colour box, and within it a broad-sided disc revolves, at each revolution dipping itself through the colour. Colour box and disc are easily changeable. Suppose the colour is yellow and on the pattern yellow is numbered 50, the printer nicks the point 50 into the side catch and sends round the drum. The little colour disc below is busy running backward and forward across the drum, and when the machine stops yellow bars of colour mark the yarn wound on the drum. These acts are repeated till the drum has been changed from white to a rainbow- like cylinder. Immersed in bran to fix the colour, washed with clear cold water, dried in steam-heated stoves, and wound on to spools, the yarn is made ready for the warp setters. This is the critical act of the tapestry process. At one end of the long setting board is the bobbin frame, while at the other is the weaver’s beam, and the yarn has to be trans- ferred from bobbins to beam. Carefully unwinding the yarn from the bobbin, the setter lays them together, forming the warp into the pattern. When she has got all the threads properly placed the setter clamps that part firmly, draws it gently on to the weaving beam, and then resumes the setting process, thus making, the warp of a large carpet. When the warp is ready it is taken to the weaving shed, and there joins the previously prepared linen warp and weft. Like the Brussels carpet, the tapestry carpet surface is formed of little loops. Here also we see at the front of the loom the long steel wires thrust between the linen and worsted warps with the forward stroke of the shuttle, the shuttle in its backward flight withdraw- ing a wire from the loops already fixed. William S. Murphy. LARGE HANI) LOOM FOR AXMINSTER CARPETS (MESSRS. TEMPLETON AND CO., GLASGOW).