Cotton Mill Artefacts
The most prominent artefacts salvaged from historic cotton mills are probably bobbins, weaving shuttles, pirns from shuttles, and yarn threading tools. Following the decline of the Lancashire cotton industry, the machinery from the mills was decommissioned and scrapped, leaving behind a wealth of durable, highly collectible artefacts.

Bobbins or spools hold the cotton yarn during their high-speed rotation. They are made from dense hardwoods such as maple, birch, or beech. They typically feature steel rings on the ends to prevent damage from friction and heat caused by their rotation.

Bobbins performed three critical functions during cotton processing:

1. They collected newly processed yarn. As raw cotton was processed through drawing and roving frames, it was pulled into loose strands called roving. The roving frames lightly twisted these fibres into tightly bound yarn and wound them onto empty bobbins.
2. They transported yarn between processing stages. A cotton mill relied on a sequence of distinct machines. Once a bobbin was completely filled at one station, it was removed and taken to the next. An example is from spinning to twisting. Yarn from a spinning bobbin would be transferred to a twisting machine to ply multiple strands together to make a stronger thread.
3. From twisting to weaving. Full bobbins were taken to the weaving shed for the looms. Warp threads are wound onto a large cylindrical roller known as a warp beam, while weft threads are wound onto pirns that fit into shuttles.

A weaving shuttle is a specialised device used on a loom to hold and carry the crosswise weft yarn back and forth through the vertical warp threads to create woven fabric. It acts as a delivery device, sliding through the opening created between the two split layers of warp yarn.

A pirn holds yarn in a weaving shuttle. It acts as a specialised bobbin that secures the weft thread. As the shuttle shoots back and forth across the loom, the yarn unwinds from the pirn to form the fabric.

A yarn threading tool is a dual-purpose threading tool functions as both a loom reed hook (aka sley hook) and as a loom heddle hook (aka threading hook). Referring to the illustration, the wide hook is the reed hook and the narrow hook is the heddle hook.

When setting up a loom, the reed hook is used to pull individual warp threads through the narrow slots in a weaving reed. This is known as sleying the reed. This process ensures the warp threads are spaced evenly and held at the correct position before weaving begins.

When setting up a loom, the heddle hook is used to pull individual warp threads through eyelets in the loom's heddles. In weaving, a heddle is consists of a flat metal strip with a small eyelet in the centre and its function is to separate and guide individual warp threads. Each vertical thread of the warp is drawn through the eye of its own independent heddle. When a group of heddles is raised or lowered by the loom's harness or shaft, it separates the warp threads to create an opening called a ‘shed’, allowing the shuttle to pass the horizontal weft thread through the opening to form fabric.

Cotton Mill Ephemera
Cotton mill ephemera encompasses paper items, documents, and transient everyday objects created during the Industrial Revolution.

Types of cotton mill ephemera include:

• Billheads, letterheads and trade cards. Illustrated receipts and marketing items featuring intricate engravings of the mills.
• Advertising. Throughout the 19th century and into the 20th century, these advertisements targeted trading and consumer textile marketing.
• Share Certificates. Decorative paper documents issued by mill companies during the 19th-century mill building booms.
• Wage books and ledgers. Hand-written record logs tracking the daily output and weekly pay of weavers, spinners, and piecers, etc.
• Photographic postcards. Vintage real-photo postcards capturing imposing mill skylines, chimney stacks, and groups of mill workers in clogs and shawls.