Women Weaving (Montreal)

I forgot I had this posted on my website. I purchased this picture, a Keystone stereoscope card of Montreal Women Weaving, a few years ago. That’s why it is double.

It does not look Sweat Shopish, does it?

No doubt, the photo was factory sanctioned.

They also provided a description of the work.

Linen is a cloth made from the fiber of flax. When flax is used for its fiber, it is cut before it is ripe. The flax is pulled and the seeds are pulled off. The bundles are laid on piles and rotted until the woody portion has decayed. The freed fibers are then shipped to spinning or weaving mills like in the picture.

The first step is to heckle the fiber, combing the long fibers from the short. Then the fibres are sorted and coiled into bundles known as slivers. After the fibers are drawn to proper length they are placed in the roving machine here. You see the hanks of roves hanging on the right. The woman on the left is placing one of the hanks in the mill on a spindle. From the spindle the thread is wound on the bobbins. You see thousands of bobbins on top of the machine. The white ones are full of thread, the black are empty.

Cambric and Crepe and Competition

Weaving Machine. 1910 era

Well, I have found a 1914 Textile Industry Magazine from Canada that pretty well has everything I need to know. Here’s a bit comparing US and Canadian tastes.

Competition with Goods from the United States.

The Canadian mills are not keeping pace with the demands of their home market, but they are enlarging, and if a line is imported in considerable quantities they soon get out an imitation. Their print designs are largely based on the American, which are more novel and more suited to the Canadian taste than the usual English designs. They have practically driven American gray sheetings off the market with similar pure-sized goods.

Their standard construction in gray sheetings, by the way, seems to be the 64 by 60 in widths of 33 to 36 inches. On some lines of American goods,such as ducklings fleece, printed scrims, Stiefels,and blue drills, the Canadian mills, in spite of many attempts, have not yet been able to make an article that will meet the demands of the consumers, and there is still a good market for such articles as “Serpentine crepe,” which they have imitated with the lighter “Japonette crepe” of the same width and construction; “Lonsdale superfine cambric,” which they have imitated with the ” Lansdowne superfine cambric A,” the “Wabasso A cambric,” and others. The Canadians are not entirely copyists, as they have some good designs in their print works, but the neighboring American industry being so much the larger they naturally have to follow their lead in many cases, and if an American specialty invades their market to any extent they try to replace it as soon as possible with a similar one made by their mills.

The preferential duty tends to keep out American piece goods to a large extent, but the importers say that in some cases they could still afford to buy American goods if they were made to suit the market. In most cases American and Canadian tastes are about the same, but there are differences. (Are ‘piece goods’ garments?)

For instance, on butter cloths a large importer at Winnipeg said that he had sold 10,000 pieces of 100 yards of butter cloth, but could get no delivery for several months because of the local mills being sold up. He said he would fill in with American butter cloth, but that his trade demanded 32-inch widths, while he could get only ;5()-inch widths from the United States. Similarly he said he could use American black denim if he could get any, but that American imitations of the Canadian black denim were not satisfactory in color, that the Canadian demanded a bright live black, while the samples sent from the United States had more of a dead, greenish-black finish. In Canada over three-fourths of the trade in denims is in black denims, made with black warp and filling, with a smaller demand for gold back, cadet, and other kinds.