Fig. 13
FUR AFTER CUTTING. CUT AND FOLDED.
TRANSVERSE SECTION SHOWING FUR INSERTED
Immediately after being cut free, these strips of fur pass over a jet of steam and a steam-heated cylinder, whose surface is formed with a series of V-shaped grooves. This has the result of folding upwards the cut ends of the woollen yarn, and giving a permanent V-shape in section to the fur. The object of this is that when the fur comes to be woven, its pile shall all be turned in one direction. The damping of the fur just before the grooved cylinder is sometimes effected by rollers revolving in a trough filled with water.
The newly formed fur is then reeled off into individual skeins. It is marked both with its pattern number and series number, and sorted into its proper sets.
For a carpet 9 ft. wide beaten up 4 shots per inch, it will be seen that each inch in the length of the carpet will require no less than 12 yards of fur weft, so that a strip of fur 48 yards long will only weave 4 inches; and if the repeat of a design be a yard long, 9 series of fur strips will be needed. The fur strips are, therefore, sorted into their sets and numbered from 1 to 9 for a 1 yard repeat, or as the case may be; and are stored in bundles of skeins until required.
We now come to the second part of Chenille manufacture, the weaving up of the fur into the carpet. This is done on a setting loom, which may be regarded for the present purpose as normally of a width of 9 ft. or upwards. This is not saying that Chenille is not woven in narrower widths, for Chenille is woven in pieces 27 in. and 36 in. wide, and a very large business is done in rugs of various widths between about the same limits.
When a carpet is ordered, the fur in bundles of skeins is handed out to the cop-winder, whose duty it is to wind the skeins on to cops for use in the setting loom, and to serve them to the weavers in their proper order. Cops are always the same size, but the length of carpet that a cop will weave depends, of course, on the width of the carpet.
The setting loom is prepared for work by the threading of ends of warp from various beams through eyelets carried on gear frames, in much the same way as in a Brussels or Wilton loom. Indeed, this principle is common to all woven fabrics, varying only in its application, that is to say, in the number and arrangement of the warp beams, the yarn employed, and the pitch.
