Craft Versus Scale

Tamsin Achari: Welcome to The Long Table. I'm Tamsin Achari, and we are recording in the textile pavilion, under a ceiling hung with sixty metres of handwoven cloth. The question: can anything made by hand be made ten thousand times? Ximena Robles is a weaver from Oaxaca who now works in Glasgow, on a floor loom she built herself. Callum Ferrier runs a wool mill in the Borders with eleven power looms and twenty-six staff. Ximena, can your cloth be made at scale?

Ximena Robles: A version of it. Callum's mill could make my pattern tomorrow. It cannot make the unevenness, the place where the weft packs a little tighter because I was tired at four in the afternoon. And the unevenness is what people buy.

Callum Ferrier: I would push on that. We can make it uneven. We can program irregular beat-up, vary the tension, slub the yarn. What we cannot do is make it uneven in a way that means anything. Ours would be designed unevenness. Yours is a record of a day.

Tamsin Achari: Does the buyer care about the difference?

Callum Ferrier: Some do. Most care about the price. Ximena's throws are four hundred and twenty pounds. Ours, in the same weight of lambswool, retail at ninety-five. A retailer told me last year that he would happily sell both, the uneven one at four times the price, and both of us would be happy.

Ximena Robles: He may be right. That is the uncomfortable part.

Tamsin Achari: Someone near the front just said shame. Ximena, why is it uncomfortable?

Ximena Robles: Because I want my work to be ordinary. In my grandmother's village, handwoven cloth was what you used to carry tortillas. Here it becomes a luxury object hanging on a wall. Scale is the only way it goes back to being something you use.

Callum Ferrier: And that is where we could actually work together. We have done this twice. A designer weaves a length by hand, we study it, and we make a mill version that is honest about being a mill version. Different name, different label, a royalty of eight percent back to the designer.

Ximena Robles: Eight is low.

Callum Ferrier: It is the number we can afford on a ninety-five pound throw. I would rather tell you that here than in a contract.

Tamsin Achari: So, craft and scale can coexist as long as nobody pretends one is the other?

Ximena Robles: As long as the label tells the truth. Made by hand means one person, one loom, one day.

Callum Ferrier: And made in a mill should not be said quietly. There are twenty-six people's skills in our cloth too.

Tamsin Achari: Ximena Robles and Callum Ferrier, thank you. This has been The Long Table.