Stories

Notes from sheds that kept the sheets

These are accounts from mills we have drawn for. They name the room, the book, and what was awkward. They are not a scoreboard.

Warp ticks in a Khlong Sam Wa hall

Loom-shift chart · 2025

A night-shift hall a short drive from our studio had been writing every silence as a “stop”. The day fitter was walking looms that had only run out of weft, while two machines with real warp trouble sat quiet in the book. The owner asked for fourteen nights, twenty-six looms.

Lada sat with the night clerk, who still remembered which ticks were warp because he had used a heavier pencil for them — a habit nobody had told the office about. The chart split only those heavier marks. The rest stayed in a single stop band, labelled as cause not recorded.

At the hand-over the day supervisor wanted the unsplit ticks guessed into warp. We left them unsplit. He was annoyed for about ten minutes, then said the fitter would rather have a true gap than a false loom. The sheet is on the office wall. We did not mount a second copy; they later commissioned the wall chart for the following month only.

We had fourteen nights of cloth meters in three different hands. Lada sat with our clerk and separated loom stops from warp breaks before she drew anything. The night supervisor uses the sheet when he talks to the day shift about which looms actually ran.

Siriporn Kaew · owner, weaving shed, Min Buri · loom-shift chart

The dye-lot ledger made me write “held” where I had been saying “a bit dark”. The buyer stopped arguing about the lamp once the spread showed we had judged the card in the dye house, not in the office. I still wish the binding were less stiff; it does not lie flat on the vat bench.

Wilaiporn Chai · dye-house lead · dye-lot ledger

The remnant chart made the month’s seconds pile obvious. I asked them to lighten the plum ink. Under our office tubes the first version looked muddy, and the second drawing was easier to read at arm’s length. That redrawing took an extra few days, which I had not planned for.

Anan Rung · cutting room, Lat Krabang · seconds chart

Preecha measured the wall twice because the door swing ate the first width. The cloth-meter sheet is readable from the doorway. He refused to mount it on the damp partition, so we moved notices off the brick wall instead. That was the right refusal.