How Harris Tweed is made - From wool to yarn.
If you had asked me a year ago how Harris Tweed gifts are made, I would have answered something like this: Wool goes to the mill and turns into yarn. The yarn is transported to the weavers in their yards and they weave it into tweed. Then the tweed is transported and processed into many wonderful things. Sounds plausible enough doesn't it?
Looking back, I can't believe how clueless I was. Not that I was totally wrong, but similar to "Boy meets girl, children go by and everyone is happy until the end of their days" is simple. There is much more to the process. When I visited the Hebrides last year, I gained the knowledge by following the process from start to finish.
Stage 1: The wool reaches the mill
To be fair, we are not going to start from scratch. That would mean looking at sheep, and sheep are of a known size. You might imagine that the sheep that provide Harris Tweed's wool are the local Hebridean sheep, but that's not entirely true, or even more than true. There are not enough sheep on the islands to provide the wool needed for tweed, and most of those that do exist are of the type that will provide the wrong type of wool. So wool from the Hebrides goes mainly to the mainland to be made into carpets, and many, many bundles of wool from the mainland go to the Hebrides to be made into tweed.
The wool arrives in big bags, washed, fluffy and ready to be dyed. The factory I visited, Kenneth Mackenzie Mill in Stornoway, does the whole process of turning wool into Harris Tweed, but it all starts with dyeing the raw wool.
Stage 2: dyeing the wool
The dyeing process takes place in large teapot-shaped containers. And here I experienced something like a revelation. You know how people always talk about the earthy, natural colors of tweed? How does it reflect the colors and tones of nature in the Hebrides? I admit I hadn't really thought it through, but I was hoping they dyed the wool these colors, so I was more than a little curious when I saw this on the wall:
Stage 3: color mixing
With a selection of primary colors, there are formulas to create almost any color imaginable. Unlike mixing paint, where you put all the base colors in a saucepan and stir, mixing wool fibers is a bit different. And here I found the first of many wonderful mechanical devices. If you have a penchant for real machines, from a pre-digital age where functionality was based on designer cunning rather than binary gimmicks, then you would love to see these machines. It reminds me a bit of Wallace & Gromit, but without Gromit and always the right pants.
Stage 4: yarn spinning
There is no way around it, if you want to weave you need yarn, both for the warp and for the weft, as with the yarns that run vertically and horizontally from the perspective of the loom. The warp threads are taut and the weft thread comes and goes to create the fabric. Yarn, but the yarn is key and once the colors are mixed it is spun. If you think about it, it is quite amazing how it is possible to even twist all these rather short wool fibers into threads that are strong and almost infinite, but it turns into one thread. And it is collected in cones.
Step 5: check the thread
After spinning, the uniformity and strength of the yarn should be checked. And here is another one of those amazing machines. The thread is wound from one cone to another, checking for excess thickness and weak points. If there is a weak point, the thread breaks there. Could you think that a light could be flashing, a bell ringing, and an operator running to tie you up? Not at all, this machine just finds the ends, puts them back on, and continues to roll. This is actually steampunk and remarkable to watch.
Stage 6: preparing for childbirth
This is why the yarn has been formulated according to the specification of the colors needed to weave a particular tweed. This is also not trivial, there is a lot of planning here! Note that a single width tweed has a total of 696 warp threads and the more modern double width tweed has twice that. They can all be the same color, but they will most likely be a variety of colors, so each color should be long enough. This may not mean anything until you stop thinking about how it works. Each yarn must be tied in the correct order on the loom so that the pattern can be woven, a task that requires a systematic and precise approach and is sure to come back to weigh on weavers.
Weavers who weave Harris Tweed scarf on commission from a factory set up the ready-to-use warp yarns for fastening. Independent weavers who weave tweed to their own designs should order the various yarn colors on spools and make their own calculations and adjustments. We will see more about this in the second part.
