Chapter 172: Between the Abbots (Part 1) [Please vote and subscribe]
"Okay, I'll teach you how to use it, but you have to help me. It's too hard to do it alone." Luo Chong nodded and said.
"Okay, how can I help you?" Xiaodie said eagerly.
"Well - you first find someone to wrap the thread around this small stick. This will be used as the weft thread later. It doesn't need to be too thick. It must be able to fit into this shuttle." Luo Chong said, and handed a few shuttle shafts to Xiaodie.
"Oh, what about me? What should I do?" Xiaodie took the small sticks and handed them to the other two pregnant women who were spinning, and then continued to ask.
"What do you think? Aren't you going to weave cloth? Bring the wool." Luo Chong rolled his eyes speechlessly.
"Oh, hey hey"
Xiaodie stuck out her tongue awkwardly, and just hurriedly greeted a few half-grown little girls to bring a basket of spun yarn.
Luo Chong looked at it and blurted out another word: "Not enough."
"Ah? There are so many of them. My mother never used so much when she taught me to weave. Isn't it too wasteful?" Xiaodie looked at the woolen yarn that she had finally made and felt a little reluctant to part with it.
Luo Chong raised his eyebrows unconsciously: "What do you know? Just take it when I tell you to. I've told you that your mother and I have different ways of weaving. Be good, go and get it. Bring all the yarns you've spun these days."
Xiaodie pursed her lips and didn't say anything. She looked at Luo Chong with grievance and turned around to take the children to move the yarn.
After a while, five or six baskets of bobbins full of woolen yarn appeared in front of Luo Chong. Luo Chong looked at it and began to gather the women around him to unwrap the yarn. Each of them stretched out their hands, used their hands as axes, and wrapped the yarn on the bobbins around their hands to form a bundle of yarn, ready to lay the warp.
Luo Chong demonstrated it to them and then left it alone. This was a delicate job that could not be completed in a short time. It was more troublesome than spinning.
The yarn spun by the spinning machine is thicker than the linen cloth on Xiaodie's body. Sometimes you have to admit that things made by hand are indeed finer than those made by machines. How big is the difference between the two? Let's put it this way.
The diameter of the alpaca yarn spun by the spinning machine is about 0.5 mm. If the warp is arranged, there are 20 strands per centimeter, while the linen produced by the weaving tribe can be arranged about 30 strands per centimeter, but their arrangement is not so dense. However, in terms of the thickness of the yarn, it is obviously better than Luo Chong's yarn.
After waiting for about two hours, with the efforts of dozens of women, half of the wool in the baskets was dismantled, and then Luo Chong called a halt. After all, some of it had to be left for the weft. In the same area of cloth, the weft sometimes consumes more than the warp.
Keep a distance of 40 centimeters between your hands when winding the yarn. Add the width of your two palms, and the yarn will be about one meter around once. If you wrap it 50 times, it will be about 53 meters. Add the loss of the machine, and you can leave 50 meters of clean cloth. That's how a 50-meter-long bundle of yarns is made up of 2,000 strands.
What does 2,000 strands of yarn mean? There are 20 strands per centimeter, and when all are woven together, it's only one meter wide. With this width, it's difficult to make a quilt cover or bed sheet. You can only use two pieces of cloth to splice vertically. It's not enough to make a larger flag.
Arranging the yarns one by one is too troublesome. Luo Chong asked Xiaodie to hand him a group of ten strands, and then he took out 10 thread ends, twisted them into one strand, and tied it to the wooden strip of the warp axis, and arranged them from left to right. It took nearly half an hour just to tie the warp. My god, there are 200 strands.
After all the warp threads are tied, the warp shaft is shaken to wind all the threads on it. 2,000 wool threads fall vertically and are pulled over the horizontal bar in the middle of the machine. Then the precise thread division begins, dividing the threads into two groups, odd and even, and threading them onto two groups of longitudinal rods respectively.
Fortunately, Xiaodie knew how to weave, and she understood as soon as Luo Chong explained it to her, so the two of them worked together to complete this step.
"I know this. Weaving requires using bone needles to pick up and down the threads to form layers. The women in our weaving tribe all know this." Xiaodie said proudly.
"But you pick up and down, which is a waste of time. My loom only needs to be picked once, and it will be able to automatically form layers in the future. It is much simpler than the weaving method of your weaving tribe." Luo Chong hit him mercilessly.
"Tsk, I haven't tried it yet. I'll see what you will do if you can't separate them." Xiaodie also quarreled with Luo Chong.
The two of them were talking while threading the threads skillfully, but Xiaodie was faster than Luo Chong. It can be seen that their long-term work of picking threads has indeed trained them to be fast and accurate.
Two people, one in a group, accurately passed the two sets of warp threads through the lifting rod, and then arranged the threads through the weft knife in turn, and finally divided them into 200 strands of thread bundles and tied them to the cloth winding shaft, and then turned the steering wheel on the right side of the machine to tighten all the warp threads, and the thread arrangement work was completed.
Not counting the time to remove the bobbins at the beginning, it took more than two hours for the two of them to arrange the thread. Luo Chong swore that in the future, when changing the thread of this machine, he would directly connect the thread at the end of the winding shaft and then pull it directly over. It didn't matter if it wasted two or three meters. He would never thread the thread this way again .
Dozens of bobbin shafts that were prepared at the beginning had been wound and placed in a winnowing basket made of thin rattan for standby.
After everything was ready, Luo Chong moved Xiaodie's stool and sat down in front of the machine, ready to test it himself.
"Get up, aren't you going to teach me how to weave? How can I weave if you sit there?" Xiaodie said, pulling Luo Chong's arm.
"I'm trying it first. I haven't tried this machine myself. I don't know how to teach you if I don't figure it out myself first. Don't pull, don't pull, just watch from the side."
Luo Chong struggled against Xiaodie's pull, then put his two feet on the pedals below and stepped on them. The hemp rope pulled the lifting rod, causing the odd and even warp groups to open instantly. This sudden change really attracted Xiaodie's attention.
"Wow, that's amazing, now we don't have to pick up the thread by hand." Xiaodie screamed in surprise.
Luo Chong didn't say anything, he was still debugging, stepping on the two pedals back and forth, lifting the longitudinal rod with the two sets of warp threads up and down, quickly opening and closing, opening and closing
again, pushing and pulling the weft knife back and forth, no problem, very smooth, now we can start.
He took the one-foot-long and two-finger-wide wooden shuttle from the side, which was pointed at both ends in a boat shape and shiny because of insect wax.
He took out a bobbin from the winnowing basket nearby, stuck the two ends of the bobbin shaft into the cabin of the wooden shuttle, then pulled the thread end out of the small hole on the side of the shuttle, tied the thread end to the frame column on the right, and the first mechanical weaving of the Han tribe began.
(End of this chapter)
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