Stage 2. Trust us when we say that weaving is absolutely fascinating and very skilled. The weaving process is wonderfully complex and West Yorkshire is universally renowned for its expertise in this field. Each new generation of weavers passes on their accumulated skill-based knowledge, alongside advances in new technologies that are constantly supplementing and invigorating timeless techniques. (This is becoming a dying art where new blood must be encouraged to enter this field of work, but we’ll save this story for another day.)

Think of a piece of wool fabric as a complex arrangement of textile lines that intersect and have to sit in a specific order (both on the warp and weft) to create the variety of designs and weaving patterns. As if a synchronised dance, where each individual dancer (the yarn) must be coordinated and move to the rhythm or the whole composition becomes a tangled mess. The order of the intertwining is the weave.

Two sets of yarns (warp and weft) sit at right angles to each other. The warp runs throughout the length of the fabric, parallel to the selvedges. The weft runs across the fabric, selvedge to selvedge.

Next, a weaver’s pick sheet is drawn up. Pick referring to the grouping of the weft yarns that set the design and characteristics of the final product. We create this with guidance from the expert weaving team, like the engineering blueprint of how to weave the yarns together, determining how many yarns are needed to make each section of the design, particularly important in plaids and checks.

Upon all the yarns being woven up, we now have something that looks like fabric, a very rough a rugged fabric. 2 out of 3 stages done. Now onto the finishers!