Cotton Shuttle , Burnley

iBase ID

288008

Reference identifier

EBU-U01-M312-30-2

Title

Cotton Shuttle , Burnley

Place

Burnley

General notes

Shuttles are elegantly formed wooden tools used for weaving textiles, like cotton, on looms and are usually manufactured from hardwoods like Dogwood, Cornel or Persimmon, that do not splinter.

Within the shuttle is a hollow, which contains a hinged ‘shuttle peg’, upon which is mounted a ‘pirn’, basically a bobbin, around which yarn is wound. It works by passing the lateral horizontal yarn of the ‘weft’ at right angles through the longitudinal yarn of the ‘warp’, so weaving together the two and creating cloth.

Whilst shuttles are very efficient tools there is one problem, in that the yarn on the pirn would quickly run out and need replacing by hand. Weavers were paid ‘piece-rate’, meaning that they got paid by the quantity of cloth produced rather then by the hour, so the necessary task of threading a new pirn of weft yarn onto a shuttle peg had to be done as quickly as possible.

The eye on a shuttle is small and difficult to thread yarn through by hand, so a weaver would accomplish this by sucking the end of the thread through the eye with their mouth instead, shuttles which required this became known as ‘sucking’, or suction shuttles and the practice itself was called ‘kissing’.

Source of additional information can be found: https://northwestnatureandhistory.co.uk/2025/09/15/kissing-shuttles/

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Medium

Photographic print

Colour

Monochrome

Year of image

circa 1920

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Subjects

Place Names > Burnley

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