Textile in a broad sense includes techniques such as felt-making, such as making felt, and some ethnic groups use bark to make bark cloth, all of which are made into fabrics similar to cloth by "beating" rather than "weaving".

The meaning of textile is not only the traditional hand-spinning and weaving, but also includes non-woven technology, modern three-dimensional weaving technology, modern electrostatic nano-web technology and other clothing, industrial and decorative textiles.

Textile, in the narrow sense, refers to the general term of spinning and weaving, both of which require the participation of equipment and manpower.

According to the Big-headed Ant Remnants, their original powerful country had real textile technology. However, this technology requires equipment support, and it also requires a large number of skilled craftsmen and workers to operate.

In the process of fleeing the remnants of the big-headed ants, the equipment was discarded, and the artisan worker ants suffered heavy casualties. The current big-headed ant remnants have only retained the technical information package of the original textile production, and they hope to restore this practical technology in the future. However, the remnants of the current big-headed ant remnants and the remaining craftsmen no longer have the necessary conditions to fully use this technology.

The protagonist spent several days carefully reading the textile information package passed by the big-headed ant relics brought back by the scientific research team, and confirmed that this was indeed the real textile technology with warp and weft intertwined, and couldn't help but admire the craftsmanship level of the big-headed ant relics back then.

In the information packet, relying only on a bunch of simple tools and the collaboration of many ants dancing like butterflies through flowers, the protagonist ponders carefully, slowly savors it, and finally understands the principle of operation in a stylized beauty.

Taking human craftsmanship as an example, the primitive textile technology of human beings is divided into two parts: "spinning" and "weaving". All with the help of the right tools.

Spinning is to twist silk, linen, cotton, wool and other fiber animals or plants into yarn or thread to prepare for the next step of weaving.

The most primitive spinning thread was to rub the fibers by hand to shape them, and later auxiliary spindles appeared.

Spindles can be used to spin yarn, thread, or fine twine. It is generally composed of a small bone stick or a small wooden stick with a bamboo hook or wire hook in the middle. Cotton wool, cotton yarn or hemp batch is fixed on the hook, the spindle is hoisted, and the cotton wool is spun into yarn, or yarn into thread, or hemp into fine hemp rope. The structure of the spindle is extremely simple and easy to make, and almost all ancient human civilizations have similar tools.

However, the textile technology of the big-headed ant remnants is a non-woven technology, which uses ant silk or other silk-like insect silk, which is already a formed filament thread that can be used directly to weave cloth without spinning.

However, in this case, the warp and weft threads used for weaving are very thin, and the finished product is relatively fragile. The protagonist feels the need to use spun coarse silk for some textiles that are looking for durability. And if you can find some natural plant fibers, you also need to use the spinning step to make the thread, after all, most plant fibers are not suitable for monofilament direct weaving due to their length and performance.

The protagonist has already taught a group of worker ants in "Dongyang City" to make thin hemp rope, but the method is more primitive, which is to have several worker ants hold the thread in their mouths and keep crossing them like a dance, winding the twine together without the help of any tools. The hemp rope made in this way can also be used, but the efficiency is worrying.

After thinking of the spindle, the protagonist finally has a way to make threads quickly. It is not complicated to make a spindle, and natural wood can be used, but considering the processing capacity of the ants, it is necessary to find the most suitable shape of wood after the beginning of spring and reduce the amount of processing.

Weaving, on the other hand, requires more complex tools than spinning. Weaving, to be precise, refers to the process of interweaving warp and weft yarns into fabrics on a loom.

Weaving is divided into knitting and weaving.

Among them, knitting is a process in which various raw materials and varieties of yarn are formed into loops by using knitting needles, and then connected into knitted fabrics through strings. The knitted material is soft, has good wrinkle resistance and breathability, and has large extensibility and elasticity, and is comfortable to wear. Knitting is divided into two categories: manual knitting and machine knitting.

However, the machine knitting process is complex, and manual knitting requires the use of large rod needles and flexible five-finger coordination, both of which ants do not have. Therefore, knitting is not suitable for ants.

Another type of weaving technology is weaving, and the technology used by the remnants of big-headed ants can be classified as weaving.

Woven is a fabric made by interweaving two or more sets of yarns perpendicular to each other at a 90-degree angle as warp and weft. The longitudinal yarn is called the warp yarn, and the transverse yarn is called the weft yarn. Weaving needs to use a shuttle to drive the weft yarn through the warp opening that opens and closes up and down, and the structure of one yarn and one yarn constitutes a cross.

Since the weaving method first uses machinery, it is also called weaving.

Primitive human beings have invented a simple loom, which only needs one person to operate, called the waist machine. The waist machine, also known as the "loom", requires the weaver to sit on the ground to operate. This kind of loom has no frame, two horizontal logs at the front and back, one end of the roll is tied to the waist, and the other end of the warp beam is pressed by both feet and the fabric is tensioned, and the person is used instead of the support, hence the name "waist machine".

The waist machine is one of the oldest and simplest looms in the world, our country has appeared as early as the Neolithic Age, the unearthed site is in the site of Shizhai Mountain in Jinning, Yunnan, the unearthed Han Dynasty copper shell storage vessel has a group of textile casting statues on the lid, vividly reproduces the scene of people using waist weaving at that time.

The structure of the original waist machine is divided into heald lifting rod, warp stick and weft beating knife, which realizes the vertical and horizontal interweaving of warp and weft yarns, and weaves the silk thread into cloth by opening the weaving mouth up and down, wearing the weft yarn left and right, and tightening the weft yarn before and after, and constituting the basic fabric. The waist machine was also the prototype of the more complex loom in the future.

It is the emergence of the waist machine that has allowed human beings to bid farewell to the era of ignorance of grass and clothing, and enter the era of civilization of taking textiles.

Western civilization also mastered weaving techniques and tools early on. The Sumerian civilization had horizontal looms (flat looms), similar to the waist looms in ancient China. The ancient Egyptian civilization improved the textile machinery, replacing the horizontal loom with a vertical loom, which could be operated by one or two people to weave a wider cloth width. Weaving in ancient Egypt was made from flax and wool, and the level of weaving technology is very high, judging from the fragments of linen found in the tombs of Thutmose IV and Tuttamhamun.

As in ancient China, women were the absolute mainstay in ancient Egypt when it came to the use of horizontal looms. It was only after the introduction of vertical looms that men took the place of women. Since the ancient Chinese loom was always flat (horizontal), the position of women as the main textile force has not been shaken.