A wee video showing some of the processes involved in creating the a tweed! If you don't like the music, mute it then unmute at the weaving part to hear the sound of the loom. 

To actually make a tweed from start to finish takes several months from raw fleeces to finished cloth. 

Once the sheep have been sheared and the fleeces picked clean of vegetable matter and poop, they are sent to the mill for spinning. First the raw wool is put into a machine that gently submerges and withdraws it from the water gradually moving down the belt as the water gets dirty meaning it uses less water overall. The fleeces are then dried and, once completely dry, picked and separated before being fed into the carding machine. Here it gets drawn through lots of rollers which brush the fibers into alignment. It comes out as a soft fluffy rolag and is stored in large drums. The rolags are fed into another machine that spins them into yarn.

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Once back with us we need to turn the yarn into cloth.

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First we have to make the warp. Between 6 and 24 cones of yarn fit on our bobbin stand, the threads are drawn off and wrapped around the warping frame on the wall. Each series of wraps gives the total finished length of the tweed. We normally weave around 60 meters, for the gotland it was 20. So depending on the number of threads used its anything between 29 to 116 wraps.

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Once all wrapped the warp is chained up to keep it tidy, then beamed onto the loom.

The final step is tying 696 knots to join the old and the new warp together so the warp can be pulled through the heddles onto the loom ready to weave!

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Before we can start weaving we have to wind the pirns using the other machine we have in the corner. These go inside the shuttles and cary the weft through the warp to make the cloth.

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When each peddle is depressed that turns the lower shaft. That turns the teardrop shape cams which causes the picker arms to fling inwards, driving the shuttle. The lower shaft has a cog afixed to it which turns a larger cog attached to a block of cams. These control the heddles (the metal reeds in wooden frames) causing them to be raised or lowered in a set order. This raises or lowers the warp threads in a set order to create the 'shed' the shuttle flies through. That is the gap in the warp created by the heddles lifting different threads up in turn. This creates the over/under/over/under weave of tweed. We can change the order of the threads to get different weaves e.g. herringbone, twill, honeycomb, basketweave etc.

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The lower shaft also turns the arm which controls the complex series of cogs on the righthand side of the loom that pull the fabric through the loom at exactly the right speed as it is woven. On each side of the loom are two large wheels, these turn the top wheels which turns the top shaft. That pushes the beater in and out every shot (press of a peddle) to beat the cloth to the correct tension. On the left hand side of the loom is a very complicated series of rods and cams that should control which way the shuttle box turns and how frequently. We have disabled ours however to put less stress on the loom after our lower shaft snapped twice!

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Once the weaving is finished it gets pulled off the loom, folded into a bale and gets sent to a mill in Galashiels where it goes through a number of finishing processes. First it is washed, drawn through giant rollers that beat the cloth causing it to shrink (full) and bind the individual yarns together. This gives the cloth its strength and durability. Then it is stretched to its finished width and drawn flat through a drier to set the tweed. Then it is drawn through another machine with fine blades that crop the surface leaving it smooth and fluff free. Finally it is pressed and measured and sent back here!