Monday, June 20, 2011

Seamless Weaving

This week, creative spirit Lyne Bruning asked for collaboration in researching the weaving of a seamless garment given to a king for his wedding...
My immediate thought, given my background, was of Jesus' robe "having no seam, being woven from the top down" (John 6:23) and folks who may have wanted to emulate that over the centuries.  Not finding much else at my first Google attempt, I checked in this morning, and she'd found this lovely seamless shirt, woven in Glasgow by a David Anderson in 1821, and presented to King George IV —
http://www.huntsearch.gla.ac.uk/cgi-bin/foxweb/huntsearch/DetailedResults.fwx?collection=all&searchTerm=C.63&mdaCode=GLAHM —
Labeled "A Shirt completely finished in the Loom without one stitch of Needle-work in the whole, by David Anderson, Weaver in Glasgow. It is believed that this is the most ingenious piece of Work that ever came from the Loom."

I found also an interesting discussion over at Weavolution that includes core contemporary book resources for shaping garments on the loom:
http://weavolution.com/forum/weaving/how-common-weaving-wearing-loom-shaped-clothing-good-book-learn-how-17991

Here's a blog post from the ingenious Katie Meek, with a historical (1680) record of a loom built for weaving shirts with sleeves with no seams - it's a warp-weighted loom, which is an early technology that lasted quite a while in some parts of the world. http://katimeek.blogspot.com/2010/04/must-be-there-is-something-about.html 



Historically, various Pacific Northwest folks used tripod looms for weaving in the round:  http://www.webportalnet.com/society/culture/makah/faq/Q002.htm for seamless garments

1 comment:

  1. We must give credit to the super smart and talented weaver Cally Booker for finding the original post that set my mind awhirl.

    Thanks Cally for saving the day....again.
    http://callybooker.co.uk/

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