The History of Chenille Fabric

"Chenille" is French for "caterpillar." It's an appropriate name, since chenille is a fuzzy fabric that had a metamorphic development. Three distinct "chenille" products emerged between 1754 and 1895 in France, Scotland and the United States. The first was an embroidery-like fabric intended as an appliqué for hand embroidery work. The second was a mass-produced shawl that inspired a machine-manufactured technique. The third was a hand-needlework technique for cotton bedspreads that was brought into factory bedspread production.

France

Hand embroidery "knot stitch" is any stitch in which thread is looped around the needle one or more times and then knotted on the upper surface of the fabric. Knot stitches add texture to an embroidery piece, but are very time-consuming to produce. In the 1780s, an appliqué chenille fabric was introduced as a labor-saver for nature images, such as trees or grass. The fabric had a linen base, with fuzzy woolen threads forming a mat on the upper surface. This chenille was also popular as a dress bodice decoration or twisted into a thick, hanging caterpillar fringe

Scotland

In the 1830s, Alexander Buchanan worked as a foreman for an industrial fabric mill in Paisley, Scotland. Buchanan devised a method for mass producing a chenille fabric that he sold as fuzzy shawls. His technique wove tufts of colored woolen yarns onto an existing blanket fabric. Then, the blankets were cut into thin strips that were raveled and frizzed on heated rollers. Another Paisley shawl manufacturer, James Templeton, invested several years developing Buchanan's technique into the machine manufacture of tufted-pile carpets of a quality that successfully imitated expensive hand-woven Oriental carpets.

Dalton, Georgia

Catherine Evans (later Catherine Evans Whitener) of Dalton, Ga., was 15 years old in 1895 when she invented a shortcut to the tufted appearance of candlewick embroidery. Candlewick was a New England version of English 17th century tufting for white-on-white bedspreads. After reading about it, "Miss Cathy" decided to make a white-on-white tufted bedspread as a gift for her brother and his wife. Her first step was sewing a layer of cotton cloth in a decorative pattern onto a cotton base. Then she sewed running loops of cotton yarn onto the pattern and clipped the loops to make tufts. She shrank the fabric in boiling water to hold the yarn in place as though it had been embroidered. At the same time, the yarn frizzed like pom-poms.

Production

Miss Cathy's bedspreads became a piecework cottage industry in Dalton households. Her family made materials available to women who did hand tuft work. In the depths of the Depression of the 1930s, they could make a maximum of 24 cents daily, working 10 hours a day to produce three bedspreads. Singer Sewing Machine Company of Chattanooga, Tenn., developed tufting machines with many needles that could mass-produce the tufting. In 1933, the passage of Roosevelt's minimum wage labor law created an incentive for rural men to work in Dalton's cotton fabric mills. The tufted designs were marketed as chenille.

Carpet

As in Paisley, Dalton's next step was the imitation of expensive chenille Oriental carpets. Singer tufting machines were built with as many as 1,500 needles for carpet production. During the 1940s, chenille was not considered necessary to the war effort, and when the government shut down Dalton's chenille factories, 3,000 workers were left without jobs. Only about 1,000 found work in factories making cotton naval supplies. After the war, the chenille factories re-opened with an emphasis on carpeting. Broadloom (12-foot) carpeting was invented in Dalton, and 90 percent of worldwide wall-to-wall carpeting production is done within a 30-mile radius of Dalton.

References

• French Chenille 18th C
• Scot Chenille 19th C
• Catherine Evans Whitener

Resources

• Dalton Georgia Chenille 1
• Dalton Georgia Chenille 2