Tag Archives: loom

Wool for the loom

Saturday 21st June 2025, 12.40pm (day 5,049)

Loom, 21/6/25

With little else to do today (the football season hasn’t started yet), I visited the Calderdale Industrial Museum and learned some things about local industry around the Halifax area that I didn’t know before. Like, John Mackintosh became very rich and successful, founding the company that bore his name, and whose successors still manufacture Quality Street chocolates in Halifax, thanks only to the cooking of his wife Violet. She was the one who invented modern toffee — he was the one who called himself “The Toffee King”, though.

But for the photo, I’ll go with this mass of red and blue strands of wool, all converging into the Jacquard loom that is currently operating to the right, having been turned on for a few minutes during which time it produced plenty of noise and a few dozen lines of carpet.

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Bobbins

Saturday 18th June 2016, 1.25pm (day 1,759)

Bobbins, 18/6/16

Although it’s the weekend today’s pic still comes from Manchester, where I took Joe to visit the Museum of Science and Industry (and also to indulge his Warhammer compulsions). I hadn’t been to the museum for a while, though it’s featured on the blog a couple of times before, both in 2012 — I don’t think it’s evolved very much recently, I must admit. Anyway, I liked this old industrial machinery, and could impress on Joe that if he’d been alive a hundred years before he’d probably have been working under machines like this by the time he was 10.

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