Uncovering Carlisle’s Textile Revolution: Upperby School

  Year 4 are currently reading Charlotte’s Web. Charlotte is a spider that weaves words into her web to save her friend, Wilbur from dying. She keeps weaving to make the farmer, Zuckerman believe that Wilbur is “Some Pig”, “Terrific”, “Radiant”, and “Humble” and proves to be a supportive and a true friend to Wilbur  It is a wonderful story of support, care and compassion. Charlotte used her intelligence and skills to communicate her wishes. In imagining themselves as weavers in the early 1800s, the children had used their skills to weave paper protest banners, which they used to communicate their message to those that needed to know – similar to Charlotte’s quest to save Wilbur. Spiders are natural weavers and as part of the project, we explored spiders and their webs. In their sketchbooks, they created and designed individual spiders and inspired by orb webs learned how to fold and cut out paper to create webs. The following week they made spiders to their ow

On the 21 st November, Year 4 visited Carlisle Library where Stephen White talked to us about what it was like to live in Upperby 200 years ago. He showed us pictures of Upperby School going back in time, when Upperby was a village.  We were given copies of maps showing where the mills were located in 1811 and also copies of the newspaper then, The Carlisle Patriot.  After Stephen’s talk we visited the children’s area of the library, where we found out how to join the library and its services. We also took part in a quiz based on books available to loan from the library, which was fun.

Over the next two weeks, we continued to practice our weaving skills on the card looms. Some created remembrance weaves on the first session on the 7 th November, using poppies as inspiration. Bradley had been doing some weaving at home with his Nan and Katy had woven a small piece which she brought into school to show us. We learned that shapes could be woven into our work. Laura from Laura’s Looms took inspiration from the colours in the landscape where she lives and works in Sedbergh when designing her fabrics. Using pictures of landscapes, some of us selected similar colours to include in our weaves.

On Wednesday, 31 st October, Laura from Laura’s Looms and Izzy from Wildflower Weaver based at Farfield Mill visited the school to teach us how to weave and spin fleece. They worked with Mr. Garrat’s class in the morning and Miss Ion’s class in the afternoon. Classes were split into two groups, Laura showed one group how to weave using cardboard looms. She had also brought a four shaft table loom and a heddle loom and everyone had chance to weave on these. Our shuttle was a plastic needle, which we threaded with coloured yarn. We then used the needle to guide the yarn over and under the warp threads on the cardboard looms. It was tricky and when you got to the end and started to come back it was important to remember to go over the warp if the previous row was under, as this formed the woven fabric. Izzy took the other group and showed them how to take fleece, which had been thoroughly washed, card the fleece so all the fibres are in a line and straight

At least half of Carlisle's mill workers lived in poverty and Stephen White told us around 1823 some petitioned the King pleading to be sent to America and in 1826 the mill workers rioted in protest over their living and working conditions. Sadly conditions failed to improve and although the Reform Act of 1832 gave more people the right to vote, ordinary workers had no way of making their voices heard.  Wages were being cut throughout the country and the workers gathered together (The Chartists) to demand a People's Charter - to provide for fair treatment of the workers. We discussed how if we had lived 200 years ago we could let people know how unhappy we were with the way we were being treated.   There was no television, no radio, no internet and no social media.  We would need to put our feelings and demands onto a poster which would get our message to those who needed to know. In preparation for learning to weave in a few weeks time, we took strips o

The following week, we discussed what it would have been like to have lived as a weaver in the 1800s and then and made drawings in our sketchbooks. Using recycled materials - cardboard cones from the weaving industry today and pieces of tweed material from Linton Tweeds and other basic materials, we each designed and made individual weaver sculptures. We learned a lot of new skills during the process of making our figures and dressing them how they may have looked two hundred years ago.   We considered how they may have felt about their working and living conditions and some of the faces show scars from injuries obtained while working in the Mills and others show their unhappiness.