page_title: Kissing the shuttle
section_title: Types of shuttles
hierarchical_section_title: Kissing the shuttle / Traditional weaving / Types of shuttles
caption_attribution_description: Queen Street Mill in Harle Syke, a suburb to the north-east of Burnley, Lancashire, was built in 1894 for the Queen Street Manufacturing Company. It closed on 12 March 1982 and was mothballed, but was subsequently taken over by Burnley Borough Council and used as a museum. In the 1990s ownership passed to Lancashire Museums. Unique in being the world's only surviving steam-driven weaving shed. Construction of a shuttle- the various stages of constructing a box-wood 'self threading shuttle' with labels in English
context_page_description: "Kissing the shuttle" is the term for a process by which weavers used their mouths to pull thread through the eye of a shuttle when the pirn was replaced. The same shuttles were used by many weavers, and the practice was unpopular. It was outlawed in the U.S. state of Massachusetts in 1911 but continued even after it had been outlawed in Lancashire, England in 1952. The Lancashire cotton industry was loath to invest in hand-threaded shuttles, or in the more productive Northrop automatic looms with self-threading shuttles, which were introduced in 1902.
context_section_description: Shuttles were constructed from a dense heavy hardwood with metal tips. The wood was traditionally sourced from a box tree. Imported timbers such as persimmon and cornel were also commonly used. The shuttle was shaped and hollowed using conventional wood working techniques, and the metal tips are pressed onto the block. Strips of fox fur or similar were stuck to the inside of a shuttle to stop the thread ballooning as it left the pirn. There are many designs of shuttle. The Pemberton Loom needed a shuttle with a hinged shuttle-peg to hold the pirn; the later Draper loom shuttles clasped metal rings on the head of the pirn using a spring steel clip. The Draper Company claimed it had developed over 5000 different types of shuttle to meet "the needs of the mills and the whims of the weavers".
  The eye of the shuttle was often made of porcelain. The thread from the pirn had to be led through the eye before it could be used. The fastest way to do this was to suck it through.
caption: The stages in making a hand-threaded shuttle
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