Date: 1984
Origin: Bradford UK
Bamboo (ref ESS1787)was drawn up at E&S Smith by head designer Mr Allan Stringer in 1984. The fabric woven was a wadded double-face fabric used for a bed throw. The end customer was the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group.
A very slow weaving fabric at 75 weft picks per inch this design was one of the last designs where all of the point paper work and the punch cards were produced ‘in-house’ at the Mill. The drawing on the point paper is a condensed scale. Each of the 224 rows relates to 5 weft picks and the columns relate to 2 warp ends each to utilise the 1200 needles/hooks in the Jacquard machine.
The set of perforated cards that produced the 15-inch-long x 12-inch-wide fabric design repeat had 1120 ‘cards’ in it. By the time all these cards had been cut and were sewn together the set of cards weighed approx. 25 kg! From start to finish Mr Stringer would have toiled for around 60 hours to complete his work. Thankfully the fabric was a regular order!
