Hello and welcome, Green Kitchen readers!
Michelle and I discussed first jobs when we met on Thursday, and mine was working as a rug weaver in San Francisco. The company, outsourced to Central America some time after I left, was in an industrial building on Folsom St. There was a sex shop across the street, and the entryways always smelled like pee, but I learned a lot about weaving.
I was one of five weavers, and we did all of the weaving and finishing in-house. That included blocking 12' x 20' rugs on our hands and knees using a gravity-fed steam iron hung from an IV stand.
The rugs weren't pieced, the looms were all around 14' wide, truly industrial scale machines run on human power. More than once I had to advance a warp by jumping on the crank wrench, on my home loom the same thing was accomplished by winding the beam with a little effort from my arm muscles.
These are some samples of what we made, I still think they're gorgeous ten years later.
This is done with a plain cotton warp, and a weft made of bias tubing and groups of chenille yarn. Four or six strands were treated as a single weft yarn. I had learned this trick in college, but had never seen it used with just one color of yarn. It's a good way to get the correct weight of yarn using what's available
Giant knitted cord weft.
One of the most popular patterns. This is all bias tubing, with the stripes done in plain cotton.
All tubing
Plain cotton warp and all chenille weft
All tubing.
A close-up of the sewn tubing. It was made from a poly/cotton blend, about quilting weight. It was cut and sewn off-site, though there was a special sewing machine for it in the shop too.
These rugs were expensive, of course, so the market was limited to interior designers with rich clients. One of the 6' sample looms was available for us to make personal projects, but after weaving for 8 hours a day, the last thing I wanted to do was warp up something for myself.
Now I wish I had done it, it would be such a neat thing to have, and I could pass it along to Merrick one day along with the rag rugs his great-great-grandmother wove, but at the time I was more focused on getting home so I could flop face first into bed.