Textile, woven

Description

This woven invitation was produced by the Phoenix Silk Manufacturing Company in 1881. It was manufactured at the company’s mill in Paterson, New Jersey, but the invitation itself is for the opening of the company’s Adelaide Silk Works mill in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The invitation was woven using a loom with a Jacquard attachment, a machine able to weave complex designs by following instructions fed into the device on a series of punch cards. To create the designs, an artist would plot the picture to be woven onto squares of grid paper, which was then translated onto punch cards by a card maker. The small, elaborate images on this invitation were likely chosen to demonstrate the skill of Phoenix’s weavers, and the intricate level of detail Jacquard looms were able to produce. This object is one of a large group transferred to Winterthur from the American Textile History Museum when it closed in 2017.