Drawloom

A drawloom is a hand-operated loom built to weave figured, patterned textiles by controlling each warp thread individually rather than raising warp threads together in fixed groups. It works through a figure harness, a system of cords attached to individual warp threads, that a second operator, the drawboy or drawgirl, pulls in a set sequence to raise exactly the threads a given row of the pattern calls for, while the main weaver throws the shuttle and beats the weft into place. The earliest confirmed drawloom textiles come from the state of Chu in China, dated to around 400 BC, with the loom itself credited to development in China during the Han dynasty before it spread west along trade routes into Persia, India and eventually Europe, where it became the standard tool of figured silk weaving for centuries. The drawloom's warp-by-warp control is the direct mechanical ancestor of the automated pattern selection the Jacquard loom introduced in the early nineteenth century.