The Plastic Reel

 The English Sewing Company News published an article in the May 1967 edition that would catch the eye of any Sylko fan with its title "Plastic Spools for Sylko". I have often wondered when the change from wooden to plastic reels occurred, and the following write up gives a heavy clue:

"A new company which will manufacture plastic spools is being established at Skipton by the thread division.  Called Plastic Spools Ltd, it is a joint venture with Crane and Percival...The company will be housed next to Skipton Mill in a building which is at present used for storage and where wooden spools were made temporarily in the early 1940s. It will be equipped with modern machinery costing more than £125,000 and will cater for the entire Sylko 100 yards and Trylko production. Trylko was successfully introduced on plastic spools last year, as was Super 6 Cord two years ago."

The mill buildings at Skipton in 2022

There's much to mull over there. I think we can surmise that this means that the  changeover from wooden to plastic reels for Sylko began to take place in 1967/68. No doubt there was a crossover period as work on plastic reels got established and stocks were built up while wooden bobbin stocks were used up. Probably for a time, there was both types in store. But this is later than I imagined - I always saw the plastic revolution as being an early 60s thing.

The reference to wooden spools being made at Skipton temporarily in the 1940s is tantalising...could this in fact be a reference to the wartime dumpy reel? Were these all made here and not in Neilston, where all the standard wooden reels came from? Conjecture but exciting nonetheless. 


Trylkos went to plastic slightly before Sylkos in 1966

I've got reels and downloads in my Etsy shop


  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sylko Label Change Mystery

Image
 You can always tell the older wooden Sylko reels with their white and gold labels. These obviously pre-date the blue and white ones that are better known, because there are no colour names, only numbers and they are less modern in design. The big question for me is when did the changeover take place? When did the colours start to be given names on their labels? I would guess that it took place sometime in the mid-late 1920s. My reasoning is that I have an old style reel with a colour number D229 - this is the highest number that I own with labelling of this type. I also have an advertisement from 1930, stating that at that point in time, there were 280 shades. It is easier to date 1930s shades (see the post on the Colour Council) and at that point around 10 new shades a year were being introduced.  IF that rate was the same in the 1920s, then D229 was introduced in around 1925. But that if is everything. What we need is company documentation. And that still doesn't pinpoint even s
Read more

15 Colours Sylko

Image
While studying the history of the Sylko cotton reel, it came to my attention that those colours numbered between 280 and 399 were likely to have been first introduced in the 1930s. An analysis of the basic colours strongly supports something that I already knew - that green was an incredibly popular colour in this decade. Between shade numbers D281 and D399, there are 15 types of green, compared to just 7 of red, 7 of yellow and 11 of brown. Only blue comes close to green, with 13 shades. Overall, blue is the most common Sylko shade over the 6 or 7 decades of the cotton brand's existence - D1 is a blue shade and this remains a popular and safe choice for clothing. I must add that there are some gaps in my list of colours, so there may be even more than 15 shades of green. It certainly had a boost in this period. This observation among the Sylkos was simply a reminder that I do associate the 1930s with the colour green. A darker shade a kind of bottle racing green. Or as Sylko dyers
Read more

The English Sewing Cotton Company Members

Image
  This is an illustration from the 1947 book 'Through the Eye of a Needle" - a 1947 review of 50 years of the English Sewing Cotton Company. It shows the names and locations of all the companies that combined together in order to streamline and strengthen the English Cotton business. This happened as a direct response to the Scottish merger of Clarks and Coats. The root companies blossomed into those 8 outlets shown on the tree. Neilston, Glasgow was where the bobbins were made, while all the packaging was made in Hazel Grove. For a pdf download of the full book, visit my Etsy shop, SewSylko.
Read more