The Oriole Mill

Last week several of the members of my bee visited The Oriole Mill in nearby Hendersonville.  Our cohort, Jane, was kind enough to make arrangements for our tour.  We were part of a larger group that was divided into three groups, as we rotated to various parts of the facility.

I've added these photos roughly in the order that we were introduced to this textile operation.  Here is one of the jacquard looms ready to go!

The owner is showing us the Egyptian cotton that she uses in their products.  This particular fiber is chosen because of it's long fibers and resistance to pilling or producing lint.  I was surprised that there wasn't any lint flying around in the air as these massive looms worked.

 This cute "face" fabric was on the loom that they used for our demo.  We got to watch the mechanical shuttles at slow motion to get an idea of how the woven strands get put into place and then got to see the loom work at its usual speed, making the shuttles virtually invisible because they were flying back and forth so quickly.

 This is one of their commercial fabrics on the loom...

 And a closer view so you can see the design a little easier.

 In the design and sewing area we saw racks like this of fabrics they have produced.

 As sewers, we were particularly interested in the sewing room...

 And here is a stack of completed baby coverlets next to the sewing machine that forms and sews on the bias binding.

 The final stop was the warping room.  Each fabric requires thousands of strands of yarn many, many yards long.  Spools of the warp thread/yarn are shown here and they feed together...

 ... and are expertly wrapped around a large drum.  When the proper length is reached, the worker ties off the ends and starts the process all over again.  Eventually these threads will be transferred to a spool that fits a particular loom.

 This worker has a long history working in the textile industry, which used to be an important domestic industry in North Carolina.  About 15 years ago the local textile plants closed as this type of production is now largely outsourced to China.

 Looking through some of the machinery you can see a wall where product samples are displayed.

 Here are just a couple more shots of machines in action.  The strands of yarn made interesting images... I'm not sure my little camera really knew what to focus on!

I do like the way the strands coming down from the header look.  These are the strands that lift specific warp threads so that the pattern can be achieved.  The orange strands will create the pattern and the lighter yellow strands at the end will form the salvedge.  (Autocorrect does not like my spelling of that last word, but I think I spelled it correctly.  It's the narrow band of tighter, unpatterned fabric at the edge that keeps the edges from raveling.)

I thoroughly enjoyed the factory tour.  Though I'm sad that we have lost most of the domestic cotton fabric production in the United States, I'm happy that there are some people who value and are preserving locally produced heirloom quality textiles.