BestTripTV

Rare Weaving Loom Gets New Life in Peterborough & the Kawarthas

About Keene, Ontario

If you had to make your own clothing, how would you start?  There's a resurgence of interest in crafted, not mass-produced clothing, in sewing of cloth... and even making that cloth yourself.  Luckily, weavers have preserved weaving as a multi-media art form and also preserved the craft of making cloth and rugs and linens as our ancestors laboriously did on increasingly complex looms.

At Lang Pioneer Village, near Keene, in Peterborough & the Kawarthas in Ontario, Canada, an intrepid local weaver in the 19th century got hold of not one, but two, rare, jacquard looms that allowed him to break away from simple straight lines and create patterns out of cloth that otherwise were only available from Europe.  Amazingly, these looms worked like predecessors of computers of today!  Using binary principles to create elaborate designs in cloth.

Astonishingly, his looms survived to undergo painstaking local restoration, and today, BestTrip.TV and visitors from around the world can see what it's like to weave cloth from wool on nearly miraculous jacquard looms. Weaver Faye Jacobs and Audrey Caryi show us how.