The China National Silk Museum has started to post photos and videos from the “A World of Looms” exhibit.  The focus was on loom technology and the cultures surrounding the cloth created on these looms.   I encourage folks to go to this link, page down and read the article.  Further down view the photos and the looms on hand at the museum.  Some looms are part of the temporary museum exhibit.  Some are part of the permanent museum collection.  Looms have been arranged in the category of basic, treadle and patterned looms, an intriguing point of view of technology division.

In addition, the speakers gave permission to the museum to post videos of each of their talks specific to each country and loom.  These talks are available in YouTube and are posted here.  Each of the 13 presentations represent years of research and experience on the part of the individual curators, anthropologists and weavers who participated in the conference.  It was amazing, as a weaver, to attend and watch the students learning and asking questions of the demonstrating weavers.  I took many photos and am still trying to arrange them for sharing with other weavers.  There will be more information available from a weaver’s point of view eventually.

In the meantime, here are a video of the China National Silk Museum permanent loom collection and the temporary “World of Looms” collection.  The weavers have gone home, the halls and looms were silent and textiles were definitely missing the personalities of the hands that made them weave.  More to come!

Finally, two of the conference opening session speakers, Eric Boudot and Chris Buckley, have co-authored a book “Roots of Asian Weaving” which gives a good breakdown of ethnic and cultural flow of technology in the weaving.  It is available on our side of the ocean, both in a hefty hard copy or in a digital format, here .  It will make a great guild reference book.