China is the birthplace of mulberry silk. In the long-term practice of planting mulberry, raising silkworms, making silk, and weaving silk, a unique and charming mulberry silk culture has been formed, which reflects the broad and profound farming wisdom of the Chinese nation. As a major silk country, China has made significant contributions to the invention and improvement of the loom. Looms in China have a long history and are of various types. According to its evolution history, it can be roughly divided into original waist looms, pedal looms, jacquard looms, etc.; according to the different types of weaving silk fabrics, it can be divided into silk looms, Luo looms, velvet looms, etc. The evolution of ancient looms and weaving technology in my country has become the basis for the continuous enrichment of silk fabrics and the growth and development of the silk industry. We also have a lot of weaving beam at SUNTECH.
original waist machine
The early looms in China are generally called primitive waist looms. When weaving, the weaver sits on the ground, uses the body as the frame, pushes on the warp beam with both feet, and ties the cloth winding shaft around the waist, carries the heald to form the shed, and then picks and beats the weft to weave the fabric. The earliest known parts of the original waist machine were unearthed from the Hemudu and Tianluoshan sites in Zhejiang Province more than 7,000 years ago. This kind of primitive waist loom is still used in the minority areas of southwest my country, Hainan, Taiwan and other places, and is also relatively common around the world. It is the earliest loom invented and used by human beings. Although the structure of the original waist machine is simple, consisting of only a few wooden sticks, it can still successfully weave simple fabrics. Its appearance not only greatly improved the original weaving technology, but also laid the foundation for the emergence of various looms in later generations.
pedal loom
A pedal loom is a general term for a loom with a pedal lifting and opening device. The original looms needed to open with hand-held healds during operation, while pedal looms used foot pedals to lift or press down the healds to control the openings. It adopts the lever principle in physics, and uses the foot pedal to control the lifting of the heald, so that the warp yarn is divided into upper and lower layers, forming a triangular opening, so that the weaver can free up his hand for picking and beating the weft, and use the machine The frame replaces the human body as the frame, which greatly improves the production efficiency and weaving quality. The pedal loom appeared in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, but its real image could not be seen in a large number of Han painting stones until the Eastern Han Dynasty. By the Qin and Han Dynasties, it had been widely used in the vast areas of the Yellow River Basin and the Yangtze River Basin. There are several types of pedal looms, such as double-pitched single-held loom, single-pitched single-held loom, and double-pitched double-held loom.
Twill Loom
The characteristic of the twill loom is to control one heald with two pedals, and it is called a twill loom because of its inclination. Its appearance can be traced back to the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, and a large number of them are found on the stone portraits of the Han Dynasty, so it can be seen that it was widely used in the Han Dynasty. Compared with the original loom, the twill loom has a great breakthrough in weaving technology to weave plain weave fabrics.
vertical loom
The vertical loom is a central axis pedal loom that is closer to the diagonal loom. Its warp plane is perpendicular to the ground, and the formed fabric is erected, so it is also called a vertical loom. The image of the vertical loom once appeared in the caves of the Five Dynasties period in Dunhuang, and the most detailed record is Xue Jingshi's "Relics of Ziren" in the Yuan Dynasty.
horizontal machine
Horizontal loom is an important type of pedal loom in ancient China. Its basic feature is that the fuselage is tilted, and the single harness is single-footed, and the tension is controlled by the waist. The horizontal loom evolved from the original waist loom through the ladder frame loom. It has been applied in the Han Dynasty and spread all over the country in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties. The horizontal machine was also introduced into East Asia during the Han and Wei Dynasties, and made great contributions to the development of the textile industry in neighboring countries.
Jacquard Loom
Among the ancient Chinese weaving techniques, the most complex is the jacquard technique. In order to enable the loom to weave complex patterns repeatedly and regularly, people have successively invented the jacquard device with the heald and the pattern as the jacquard device to store the pattern information, and formed the multi-heddle type jacquard machine and various pattern type jacquard machines. Jacquard technology is a milestone in the history of textiles. The basic concept of a jacquard machine is to store the jacquard pattern on the heddle of the loom or on the heald connected to the heddle eye, and use the storage of the jacquard pattern to control the jacquard program. Information is recycled. From today's point of view, the jacquard technology invented by the ancients is a graphic information storage technology, just like a computer program. After the program is programmed, all operations can be repeated without restarting each time.
Multi-heddle Jacquard Machine
The multi-heddle jacquard machine is a kind of jacquard loom, which realizes jacquard weaving with multiple heald frames. However, due to the limitation of the weaving process, the number of heald frames cannot be increased indefinitely, so the multi-heddle jacquard machine is mainly suitable for weaving jacquard fabrics with short longitudinal patterns and unlimited transverse patterns. Based on the existing historical materials and the structural analysis of the unearthed silk cultural relics, the appearance of the loom should not be later than the Warring States Period.
Dingqiao loom is a type of multi-heddle multi-trap jacquard loom, which is a kind of belt loom in the countryside near Shuangliu County, Sichuan Province. It is called "Dingqiao Loom" because the pedals are covered with bamboo nails, which are shaped like stone piers arranged in sequence in a river ditch. Generally, this loom has 2 to 8 ground healds and 40 to 60 flower healds, each of which is controlled by a pedal, so the total number of pedals is the same as the total number of healds. This loom has a long history and has been recorded in the historical documents of the Three Kingdoms period. The Dingqiao loom is still passed down from generation to generation as a main hand loom among the people, and it is used to weave brocade and lace with ethnic customs.
Harness Jacquard Machine
In the past, the weft pattern cycle could not be expanded when weaving fabrics by the previous looms, so the weaving of pattern patterns was limited. For large patterns with large cycles and complex organization, such as flower patterns, animal patterns, etc., it was quite difficult to manufacture. After long-term exploration and practice, people invented the bunched jacquard loom on the basis of the original loom around the Eastern Han Dynasty. The beam jacquard machine is a relatively complex loom. The most critical technology of this loom is cross-stitching and knotting. The flower book is used to store the jacquard program and memorize the changing rules of the pattern. The upper part of the loom is a loom component that controls the ups and downs of the warp threads of the jacquard machine. The biggest feature of the Hualou bunched jacquard machine is that the jacquard warp is not controlled by the heddle, but instead is controlled by the wire heald, that is to say, there are as many jacquard warps as there are as many healds, and the wire heald with the same lifting motion is the end of the wire. Hanging together on the flower building. When weaving, a weaver and a puller are required to cooperate. The puller sits on the flower building and pulls the horizontal thread of the flower, and lifts the corresponding warp to open the heald. The two should sing according to certain formulas, and coordinate with each other according to this rhythm.
Beam heald jacquard looms are divided into Xiaohualou looms and Dahualou looms, depending on the width of the pattern and the density of the warp threads. Small flower floor looms can be used for small-width fabrics with many flowers; Flower House Loom. The representative ones of Xiaohualou looms are the Sichuan Shu brocade loom in the Han Dynasty and the Suzhou Song brocade loom in the Song Dynasty. The Dahualou loom appeared in the late Tang and Five Dynasties, and developed rapidly in the Ming and Qing dynasties. It was the pinnacle of the development of the beam jacquard. Its characteristic is that the flower is large and circular, and the pattern cycle can be extremely large, and the robes like dragon robes are woven, and the cycle reaches more than ten meters. Nanjing Yunjin makeup flower fabrics are usually woven by Dahualou looms. The patterns and colors are as brilliant as the clouds in the sky.
The beam heald jacquard machine has the advantages of wide adaptability of the fabric structure and random variable size of the flower width, and weaving batches of excellent silk fabrics, and the continuous update of silk weaving varieties also promotes the improvement of the jacquard machine. In 1801, the French Jacquard invented a new generation of jacquard on the basis of the Chinese jacquard jacquard, and replaced the pattern with the perforated pattern, thus bringing the silk weaving jacquard technology into a new era, and also for the electric jacquard in the future. The handmade jacquard creates the conditions.