498 • REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1899. 



population called the Penusylvania Dutch. The framework, or hed- 

 dle frame, has thirty-one healds or upright bars, perforated, and 

 thirty-two slits, in all accommodating sixty-three warp threads of 

 various colors. The ordinary yarn beam is replaced in this example 

 by a reel, on which the warp is distributed. This reel is held fast by 

 a stick pushed through between the spokes of the reel and resting 

 against the upright posts which support the shaft. By removing the 

 stick additional warp may be unwound (tig. 11). Still more rude is 

 another example in the U. S. National Museum, probably from Penn- 

 sylvania, consisting of a heddle frame cut out of a thin piece of board 

 one-eighth inch thick. Provision is made for twenty warp threads, 

 by means of ten healds and ten slits. On one margin of the frame 

 the outer portion is perforated and on the other side it is not. This 

 upright is nailed in the end of a very rude box, having a bottom and 

 two sides but no ends. The box is 2 feet long. At the rear portion, 

 on either side, a post is fastened, and in this a reel, on which the 

 yarn is wound. The structure is similar to that of the Italian speci- 

 men and to others from Pennsylvania, but this is the rudest example 

 of the kind in the Museum. 



NEW ENGLAND HEDDLE FRAMES. 



The writer is greatly indebted to Mrs. Alice Morse Earle, author of 

 the charming work on Life in Colonial Days, for a photograph of a 

 loom belonging to this stationary type for making silk braid, from 

 Long Island, set up and in operation. The furniture of the room and 

 the costume of the weaver are all in harmony with the instrument 

 itself, and reproduce, as nearly as possible, the time in which these 

 heddle frames were in common use throughout New England and the 

 Eastern States. There is room for thirty-three warp threads, though 

 it is possible to weave with a smaller number. Mrs. Earle, after 

 speaking of the large, home-made looms seen in all thrifty New 

 England houses, makes the following observation on the heddle frames: 



Smaller looms, called tape looms, braid looms, belt looms, garter looms, or "gallus 

 frames," were seen in many American homes, and useful they were in days when 

 linen, cotton, woollen, or silk tapes, bobbins, and webbings or ribbons were not 

 common and cheap, as to-day. Narrow bands, such as tapes, none-so-pretty' s, rib- 

 bons, caddises, ferretings, inkles, were woven on these looms for use for garters, 

 points, glove ties, hair laces, shoe strings, belts, hatbands, stay laces, breeches sus- 

 penders, etc' 



In 1894 the author visited the town museum in Bristol, Connec- 

 ticut, and saw two specimens of the second type of heddle apparatus, 

 one of which was given to the U. S. National Museum, and is here 

 figured (tig. 12). It will be recalled that in this type the heddle is 

 fixed and the weaver moves the inner or cloth end of the warp up and 



' Alice Morse Earle, Home Life in Colonial Days. New York, 1898, p. 225. 



