United States or Japan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Cotton and wool was carded, spun and woven into cloth for clothes, fast colored dyes were made by boiling different kinds of roots and barks, various colored berries were also used for this purpose. Medicine was prepared from roots, herbs, flowers, and leaves.
The spirit of personal liberty that characterized the spot was traditional. Here for half a century the people of Wise County and of Lee, whose border was but a few miles down the river, came to get their wool carded, their grist ground and farming utensils mended. Here, too, elections were held viva voce under the beeches, at the foot of the wooded spur now known as Imboden Hill.
And when winter comes with its long evenings, when the wood fire gleams out over the huge kitchen from the great open fireplace, while wool is being carded and the spinning wheel whirs, and the farm hands make brooms out of twigs and whittle thole pins and ax handles, then must the herder sit by the pile of twigs and logs at the side of the fireplace and feed the fire so that the rest can see to work while he studies his lessons.
According to this plan the carded material was carried through successive pairs of rollers, each pair running more rapidly than the previous pair, thus stretching it out, while it was spun after leaving the last pair by flyers adapted from the old low or treadle spinning-wheel.
It is therefore, first boiled, and then picked and carded like wool, and being afterwards spun, is used in the coarser stuffs of the silk manufacture. The other cocons, which yield the best silk, are managed in a different manner. Before the inclosed worm has time to penetrate, the silk is reeled off with equal care and ingenuity.
The enterprising Puritan woman pulled the long-fibered straggling lock of wool, sorted out and rejected from the uniform fleeces, carded it with her little hand cards into yard-long finger-sized rolls, and twisted it upon her large wheel spindle, producing much such thread as an Italian peasant woman spins upon her distaff to-day as she walks upon the shore at Baiæ.
She watched the gathering of the distant thunder-clouds, which cast a deeper, more sombre shade upon the pines that girded the northern shores of the lake as with an ebon frame. There stood the big spinning wheel, just as she had set it aside; the hanks of dyed yarn suspended from the rafters, the basket filled with the carded wool ready for her work.
He grew his own corn and took it to the common mill; he raised fodder for his black, shaggy cattle which roamed upon the rugged hillsides or in the misty valleys; his women-folk carded wool sheared from his own flock, spun it, and wove the cloth for bonnet, kilt, and plaid. When his chief had need of him, the summons was vivid and picturesque.
White and red carded together give a lovely pink, and any shade of gray can be made by carding different proportions of black and white or half-black and white. Mixing of deeply dyed and white wool together in carding is, artistically considered, a very valuable process, as it gives a softness of colour which it is impossible to get in any other way.
The cocoons of Platysamia Cecropia may be rendered of some commercial value, as the silk can be carded, but the chief objection is the difficulty of raising the larva. "The Polyphemus worm spins a strong, dense, oval cocoon, which is closed at each end, while the silk has a very strong and glossy fibre." Mr.
Word Of The Day