Textile in a broad sense includes technologies such as felting, as well as the technology of some ethnic groups using bark to make bark cloth, which uses "beating" rather than "weaving" to connect various plant and animal fibers. In one piece, it is made into a cloth-like fabric.
The current meaning of textile is not only traditional hand spinning and weaving, but also includes clothing, industrial and decorative textiles produced by non-woven technology, modern three-dimensional weaving technology, modern electrostatic nano-networking technology, etc.
Textile in a narrow sense refers to the general term of spinning and weaving. Both technologies require the participation of equipment and manpower.
According to the remains of the big-headed ants, their original powerful country had real textile technology. However, this technology requires equipment support and a large number of skilled craftsmen and workers.
During the escape of the Big-headed Ant survivors, the equipment was abandoned and the craftsman ants suffered heavy casualties. The current Big-headed Ant survivors have only retained the technical information package of the original textile production, hoping to restore this practical technology in the future. But now the remaining craftsmen of the Big-headed Ant family no longer have the necessary conditions to fully use this technology.
The protagonist spent several days carefully reading the textile information package delivered by the Big-headed Ant survivors brought back by the scientific research team, and confirmed that this was indeed a real textile technology with interlaced warp and weft. He could not help but admire the craftsmanship of the Big-headed Ant survivors. .
In the information package, only relying on a bunch of simple tools and equipment and the cooperation of many ants like butterflies dancing through flowers, the protagonist carefully pondered and slowly tasted it, and finally understood it in a stylized beauty. Principle of operation.
Taking human craftsmanship as an example, human primitive textile technology is divided into two parts: "spinning" and "weaving". All require the help of corresponding tools.
Spinning is to twist silk, linen, cotton, wool and other fibrous animal or plant fibers into yarn or thread to prepare for the next step of weaving.
The most primitive spinning involves kneading the fibers with hands to shape them. Later, auxiliary spindles appeared.
A spindle can be used to spin yarn, thread, or fine twine. It usually consists of a small bone stick or a small wooden stick with a bamboo hook or wire hook in the middle. Fix the cotton batting, cotton yarn or linen batch on the hook, lift the spindle, and spin the cotton batting into yarn, yarn into thread, or hemp into fine hemp rope. The structure of the spindle is extremely simple and easy to make. Almost all ancient human civilizations have similar tools.
However, the textile technology of the Big-headed Ant survivors is a non-woven technology. The raw material used is ant silk or other insect silk similar to silk. It is already a formed filament thread and can be used directly to weave cloth without spinning.
But in this case, the warp and weft threads used to weave the fabric are very thin, and the finished product is relatively fragile. The protagonist feels that it is also necessary to use spun thick silk for some textiles that pursue durability. And if you can find some natural plant fibers, you will also need to use the spinning step to make threads. After all, most plant fibers are not suitable for direct single-filament weaving due to their length and performance.
The protagonist has previously taught a group of worker ants in "Dongyang City" to make thin hemp ropes, but the method is relatively primitive, which is to let a few worker ants hold the ends of the threads in their mouths, cross each other like a dance, and twist the hemp ropes together without using any tools. The hemp rope made in this way is usable, but the efficiency is worrying.
After thinking of the spindle, the protagonist finally had a way to quickly make threads. Making the spindle is not complicated, and you can use natural wood. However, considering the processing ability of the ants, it is necessary to find the most suitable shape of wood after spring to reduce the amount of processing.
Weaving requires more complex tools than spinning. Weaving, or weaving to be precise, refers to the process of interweaving warp and weft yarns into fabric on a loom.
Weaving is divided into knitting and woven.
Among them, knitting is a process that uses knitting needles to form yarns of various raw materials and varieties into coils, and then connects them into knitted fabrics through strings. The knitted fabric has a soft texture, good wrinkle resistance and breathability, and has greater extensibility and elasticity, making it comfortable to wear. Knitting is divided into two categories: hand knitting and machine knitting.
However, the machine knitting process is complicated, while hand knitting requires the use of larger needles and flexible five-finger coordination, neither of which ants have. Therefore, knitting technology is not suitable for ants.
Another type of weaving technology is tatting, and the technology used by the survivors of the big-headed ants can be classified as tatting.
Woven is a fabric made of two or more groups of mutually perpendicular yarns interlaced with warp and weft at 90-degree angles. The longitudinal yarns are called warp yarns, and the transverse yarns are called weft yarns. Weaving requires a shuttle to drive the weft yarn through the warp openings that open and close up and down, forming a cross structure one yarn at a time.
Since the tatting method first used machinery, it is also called machine weaving.
In primitive society, humans have invented simple looms that only need one person to operate, called waist looms. The waist loom is also called a "jug loom" and requires the weaver to sit on the floor to operate it. This kind of loom does not have a frame, but has two crossbars at the front and rear. One end of the cloth rolling shaft is tied to the waist. Both feet hold the warp beam at the other end and tension the fabric. People replace the frame. It is called "waist loom". And so it comes.
The waist loom is one of the oldest and simplest looms in the world. It has appeared in my country as early as the Neolithic Age. The unearthed site was at the Shizhaishan site in Jinning, Yunnan. The cover of a Han Dynasty copper shell storage vessel was unearthed. There is a group of textile statues that vividly reproduce the scene of people using waist looms to weave cloth at that time.
The structure of the original waist machine is divided into heddle lifting rods, warp dividing rods and beating knives, which realize the vertical and horizontal interweaving of warp and weft yarns. The silk threads are woven into cloth through three main techniques: opening the weaving mouth up and down, inserting the weft yarns left and right, and tightening the weft yarns front and back. , forming the basic fabric. The waist loom was also the prototype of more complex looms in the future.
It was the emergence of the waist machine that allowed mankind to bid farewell to the ignorant era of grass-clothing and wood-eating, and enter the civilized era of consuming textiles.
Western civilization also mastered weaving technology and tools very early. The Sumerian civilization had horizontal looms (flat looms), which were similar to the waist looms in ancient China. The ancient Egyptian civilization improved textile machinery and replaced the horizontal loom with a vertical loom, which could be operated by one or two people to weave wider cloth. Weaving in ancient Egypt used flax and wool as raw materials. Judging from the linen fabric fragments found in the tombs of Thutmose IV and Tutankhamun, the level of textile technology was very high.
Like ancient China, women were the absolute main force when using horizontal looms in ancient Egypt. Only with the introduction of vertical looms did men take over women's position. Since ancient Chinese looms were always flat (horizontal), women's status as the main force in weaving has never been shaken.
