Children at work: Activities

A textile factory

Notes for the carding activity in the Children's Zone

This activity encourages students to think about the early stages of the weaving process. They are expected to read the text and from the description, work out the names of different parts of the machine.

There are some support materials that should help them understand the process that is being described. There is an option to discover whether they were correct by clicking on Syntax the dog and viewing the final result. There is also an extension activity that asks the students to work out what they think the people are doing and how machines may have made their jobs easier.

Click on the image on the right to see an example of the expected outcome to this activity.

Background Information

This picture is of the machine that prepared cotton wool for weaving. The cotton was cleaned and opened and then fed into the machine where the tangled mess was stretched and straightened. This machine ensured that the cotton wool was ready for spinning into yarn to ultimately be placed onto the loom and woven into cloth. Carding is the first process, then drawing, then roving. This picture shows that women and children tended to be responsible of this early stage of the textile process.

Carding
The cotton wool was placed on feed-rollers that pulled it through a variety of processes. The first was to be combed by teeth, which were set in the opposite direction to the rollers. The pointed moving pins on the cylinders were called the "licker-in". The purpose was to straighten the wool into one direction and untangle it.

Drawing
The cotton was then passed onto more rollers that flattened it and pulled it in the opposite direction to the licker-in from the carding rollers. Carding pulls the raw cotton from the middle whereas drawing pulls it from the ends. This was so that the fibres were stretched to their full capacity both in width and length and ready to be twisted into loose thread.

Roving
This was the final process before the fibres were removed from the rollers, placed in tubs and then put onto different machines that spun the fibres together to make a fine thread for weaving. The sliver, which is the name for the cotton wool after it has undergone two processes, was stretched and twisted slightly so that it became a thick, loose thread. The thread was then removed from the machine and put onto a spinning frame or winding frame to be spun into very fine thread, which would be used for weaving.

Click on the image to go to the activity in the Children's Zone