red tennis balls
The tennis balls were collected from Miliken at Lodgemore mill and the stitching began . Whilst in Stroud again I thought i would see if there were any local words relating to the mills and weaving.
Terry Eldridge has given me some words
abb - very old, still in use locally (Cam) means weft .
chain - very old, referring to warp threads, which were looped through like a crochet chain as a means of keeping them tidy prior to going on the loom. Sometimes the word also used when they were on the loom.
flight - airborne fluff that comes particularly off carding machines.
thrum - short lengths of carpet yarn that can be recycled.( not strictly a local word but nice )
nap - direction of pile. ‘raising the nap’ lots of nap on tennis balls
There are two lovely words in carding but not I think particularly local;
slubbing - end product of carding, loosely joined fibres producing a continuous length but having no strength.
They are wound onto a lage bobbin called a doffer- and you take it off.
You can imagine someone shouting over the machine noise doff,doff or doff er.. The slubbings go on to spinning next.
Most of the words are short and I wonder if that is because of the noise .
Do you feel as if you been through the mill? Could be the roller milling machine patented by local engineer James Ferrabee, replacing the fulling stocks, it squeezed and twisted the cloth to achieve the required shrinkage.Soon to be demonstrated at Dunkirk Mill.
