Of course braid and tape could not be bought, nor could we weave that sufficiently narrow to make a neat appearance on dress goods; but we soon found that long chains of crochet-thread would answer nicely for braiding. Balls of it were crocheted of various colors; black, white, red, blue, and dark brown were the colors most used. It was braided on in various ways; sometimes singly, at times we would sew three or four chains together of colors to blend, making the tape an inch or more wide. And thus it was placed upon our dresses.
The extent and variety of our cloth manufacture, our fertility in making designs, our different ways of weaving, were really remarkable. We made cloth in stripes broad and narrow, and in checks wide and small. We made plain cloth, twilled cloth, jeans, and salt-and-pepper cloth, the latter by alternating one thread of white and one thread of black the width and length of the warp, and the same in the woof. This was a slow process, as the shuttles, with the quills of black and white thread, were changed at every tap of the batten. Plaids were woven both of wool and cotton thread. They required three and four shuttles and as many varieties of color. We had “dice”-woven homespun, or “basket plait,” as some would call it, which required three or four treadles and as many different ways of tramping them to form the plait. When the warp was dyed a solid red or deep garnet and filled in with blue, or perhaps purple, slate, or black, as one wished, or when the warp was dyed blue and filled in with whatever other color pleased the eye, such cloth we called our “chambrey.”
Sometimes lint cotton was dyed a deep and a pale blue, and then carded and spun as dyed. If the warp was of deep blue the woof would be pale blue; or the woof would be deep blue thread and the warp pale blue. It was woven solid and tipped with bright bits of silk, cassimere, merino, or other fine woolen scraps, which, cut in small pieces, were woven in the meshes of thread.
Cloth was woven with two, three, four, and five treadles. An ingenious way the weaver had of tramping the treadles would throw up on the right or upper side of the cloth whatever design was placed in front of the weaver’s eye. Some beautiful carpets of wool, dyed a variety of bright colors, were woven on our common house-loom; and large woolen coverlets as well as woolen and cotton flannels were made in the same manner.
I often wonder how we were able so quickly to adapt ourselves to the great changes rendered necessary in our modes of life by the blockade. But be it remembered that the Southerners who were so reduced and so compelled to rely entirely upon their own resources belonged to the Anglo-Saxon race, a race which, despite all prating about “race equality,” has civilized America. The reflection to which memory gives rise when I recall war times in the South is this, that “blood will tell.”
As to our cotton flannel, while it was rather heavy for every-day wear, it was just the thing for capes and cloaks, and was often made into blankets. The filling was spun rather coarse and very softly twisted. If it was to be used for capes or cloaks the raw cotton was dyed whatever color was made choice of before carding and spinning; if the flannel was to be used for blankets the lint cotton was carded and spun white. When placed in the loom for weaving the treadles were tramped in a manner which threw up the coarse, soft spun woof very nearly all on the upper side of the cloth. Two or three heavy beats of the batten were given to pack the filling close and dense. When so much had been woven and was still smoothly and tightly drawn over the breast-beam, one of a pair of cotton-cards was used by the hand to raise the lint of the coarse, soft-twisted, tightly-packed filling, till it was perfectly smooth and downy. It would then be passed over the cloth-beam, and again so much would be woven; then it left the loom-bench, and with the card the lint was raised again in the same manner. And so the process of weaving and stopping to raise the lint with the cards would go on to the end of the warp. It was a slow and tedious way of making cotton flannel, but a large quantity was made. That which was dyed a very dark brown, and with which great pains had been taken in raising the lint, was, at some little distance, sometimes mistaken for sealskin. So much for the ingenuity of the women of southern Alabama.
Soon after we had finished our self-imposed task of carding and spinning the warp and woof for our four dresses, and it had been noised far and wide in our neighborhood that we had had patience to hold out until the task was completed, one of our acquaintances, a young lady, set to to excel us, in that she was not only going to card and spin the warp and woof for a new homespun, but was herself going to weave the thread she had spun into cloth for her dress. She finally arrived at the loom with her warp and woof and commenced with great joy the weaving. Her homespun warp proved to be quite defective. There were more or less broken threads to mend in the run of any warp, even that spun at the cotton mills, which was always stronger than hand-spun warp. At first, when the threads of warp would break on either the cloth-beam or thread-beam side, she would leave the loom-bench and mend the broken threads; but she became impatient and wearied at the oft-breaking threads (sometimes three or four would snap asunder at once), and by the time she had woven three or four yards she had tired altogether of mending and piecing, so she began to leave the threads hanging wherever they happened to snap apart, and soon a thick fringe of thread was hanging from the sides and middle of the cloth on both sides the harness and sley. She kept on weaving, however, saying she had enough for the plain skirt, and, as it narrowed, that would cut the waist, and if it narrowed yet more, why that would make the sleeves; but the more threads that broke the fewer were there to sustain the remaining ones, so that the cloth, from being a good yard wide at the beginning, narrowed to less than half a foot, and after the first two or three yards was useless for any purpose, and there ended that homespun that was to be the wonder of the settlement. We felt nowise inclined to exult over our friend’s failure, for we no doubt would have suffered defeat had we attempted to weave our spun warp. It required no little patience to work with warp the threads of which were every now and then breaking, for every thread had to be mended as soon as it broke, or if not, thin, flimsy places would occur all through the web, and the cloth would not wear long enough to pay for the trouble of carding, spinning, and weaving.