History of Muslin Weaving Trade - Latterly Known as Madras Trade:

Queen Anne's Lace offers you timeless cotton lace patterns in lace curtain panels and yardage, woven on authentic Nottingham looms.

Madras Lace Curtains: History

The trade originally started as a hand loom or cottage weaving industry, dating back at least as far as the 18th century and possibly earlier.  The hand loom trade was still practiced until the invention of the power loom which began to make inroads in the middle of the 19th century.  The power loom was motivated by steam engines, and was obviously capable of producing much larger quantities of cloth than the old hand loom.

The power looms came to Scotland in the early 1860's and at that time, the muslin trade consisted, almost exclusively, of cloths which were a plain weave and no pattern was discernible.

Towards the end of the 1860's and early 1870's, the jacquard patterning mechanism was adapted for the power looms and factories producing jacquard type cloths sprung up in and around Glasgow and the South West of Scotland, many of them being situated here in the Irvine Valley, which was also the Scottish center for the Nottingham Lace Curtain Machine trade.

The weaving trade expanded in leaps and bounds, and it reached its height of development in or around 1910, and continued a very high level of activity up to the middle of the 1920's - the principal market for the product by that time being the United States of America.

Around the mid 1920's, the market for the products started to decline, and although at about that time there were some 35 firms producing muslin weaves (mostly quite small firms) up to 2,000 looms being employed, the trade began a steady decline from that time onwards.

The advent of World War 2 obviously helped to some extent to keep the trade going, as textiles of any type were in great demand, but by 1948 the remaining firms locally only numbered 10, producing the muslin type cloth and since then, all have now gone out of business with the exception of the above company, who remain the sole producers of the muslin type cloth (now known as Madras) in the world.

The name Madras was adopted for the particular type of weave previously referred to as Muslin, around the beginning of the 20th century.  The reason for the name Madras being applied to the cloth is not exactly clear, but the information has it that one of the larger firms in Glasgow, by the name of Strang, were doing an enormous amount of business in India, and they called one of their ranges of designs Madras after the city of Madras in that country.

Designs proved to be exceptionally good sellers, so from that time onwards, all cloths made in this type of weave were called Madras, regardless of the design itself.

The Madras weave is a twist guaze, quite different from the ordinary plain one and one ground weaves.  The twist makes the ground less liable to slip, and is obtained by using two reeds, one working against the other.  The design on the Madras is woven into the ground by the use of jacquard patterning mechanism, leaving some of the weft floating between the pattern heads.  This floating weft is clipped away by a machine, which very much resembles a stationary lawn mower, leaving the pattern outline on the fine ground cloth.

The speed of operation of the Madras loom is exceptionally slow, up to only 10 metres per day per machine being obtainable from a skilled weaver - each weaver having to operate two machines.  This accounts principally for the relatively high cost of the article, and the other principal reason is that, only the highest quality of yarns are used in the ground effect, in order to minimize shrinkage and slippage.

Go to the main Lace Curtains page

Order Lace Curtains