Fabric weaving is one of the primitive and ancient textile art and craft. In this process placing two sets of fiber threads or yarn of the loom and turning them into cloth. Depending upon the requirement the cloth can be plain or it can be woven in decorative or artistic designs.India is famous predominantly for silk and cotton weaving. Silk weaving is common in most parts of the country like in banaras, murshidabad, mysore, assam, gujarat and surat etc. popular products like sari is woven using silk and cotton. Himroo and mushroo fabrics of Hyderabad are splendid examples of indian woven fabric.
In the past, fabric weaving was done on dobby looms and the Jacquard harness adaptation and it was reserved for more complex patterns. With rapidly changing technology majority of commercial fabrics nowadays are woven on computer-controlled Jacquard looms.
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| Jacquard loom |
Before the Industrial Revolution, weaving remained a manual craft, usually undertaken part-time by family craftspeople. Looms might be broad or narrow; broad looms were those too wide for the weaver to pass the shuttle through the shed, so that the weaver needed an assistant. This ceased to be necessary after John Kay invented the flying shuttle in 1733, which also sped up the process of weaving.
The general process of fabric weaving involves interlacing of two sets of threads at right angles to each other, called the warp and the weft. The warp is held taut and in parallel order by means of a loom. The loom is dressed with the warp threads passing through heddles on two or more harnesses. The warp threads are moved up or down by the harnesses creating a space called the shed. Now weft thread is wound onto spools called bobbins.
