Lancashire Mill Trip..

19th November 2014

Today we were given the opportunity to visit a number of weaving mills all very local to manchester, in the Lancashire area.

The first one that we went to was called 'Mitchell Interflex Ltd' a county brook mill, They are Weavers of high quality fabrics for industry, furnishing, fashion, leisure and military. They produce yarns of a both very high quality and quantity such as silks, cashmere, lambs wool and a wide range of other end-uses all in a variety of compositions.

The second place that we visited was called 'William Reed Weaving' spring bank mills, Nelson,  

they manufacture a full range of medium and high tenacity, continuous filament fabrics in nylon, Polyester and Acetate, using yarns ranging from 22 dtex up to 1100 dtex. loomstate or fully finished . Out of all four places that we visited today, I probably found this one the least usefull and interesting, as it was very industry based, large batches of fabric that was used for very random things, such as hot air ballons.
 

The third place that we visited was called 'Blackburn Yarn Dyers Ltd' Grimshaw Park Dye

Works/Haslingden Rd Blackburn. They do Commission packages and beam yarn dyers of cotton and
blended yarns, utilising vat, direct, disperse, reactive and sulphur dyeing processes.

The final place that we visted was called 'Arrive Herbert Parkinson Ltd' Harvest Mill, Darwen, Lancashire. A weaver of jacquard furnishing fabrics, the Company was acquired by the John Lewis Partnership in 1953 to provide an exclusive range of soft furnishing products. With an experienced design team, and extensive flexible manufacturing facilities, Herbert Parkinson offers businesses a

full development and manufacturing service for soft furnishing products.

 

I thouroughly enjoyed going on this trip today, as it gave me a real insight into so many of the textile industry's, this then gave me a massive opportunity to gain some possible internship and work experience ideas along with the ideas of some of the things I could go into my self at the end of the three years in univercity.

This image was taken from Blackburn Yarn Dyers, two large cones of yarn, in the middle of the dying process, here you can see the yarn after it had been dyed and in the final stages of being all cleaned up ready to go onto smaller cones.

This image was also from Blackburn Yarn Dyers, transparent yarn on much smaller cones, in one of the first stages of te process of being thurilly cleaned.

This final image was taken in the William Reed mill, where here it was very muc about industrial work, as everything we saw was very much on a larger scale.