The manufacture of textiles in Elztal is one of the oldest business sectors. In order to make textiles, the first requirement is a source of yarn. The yarn is processed by knitting or weaving, which turns yarn into cloth. The machine used for weaving is the loom. For decoration, the process of colouring yarn or the finished material is dyeing.

     Textile also refers to the yarns, threads and wools that can be spun, woven, tufted, tied and otherwise used to manufacture cloth. The production of textiles is an ancient art, whose speed and scale of production has been altered almost beyond recognition by mass-production and the introduction of modern manufacturing techniques. The earliest weaving in Elztal was done without a loom.

     When producing a long piece of material, the warp threads are wound on a roller called a beam, and attached to the cloth beam which will serve to hold the finished material. The warp was originally made of linen until the spinning process was refined enough to provide strong cotton yarn.

     The thread that is woven through the warp is called the weft which is threaded through the warp using a shuttle, which carries the weft through separated warp threads. The original hand-loom was limited in width by the weaver's reach, because of the need to throw the shuttle from hand to hand.

     Rather than having to lift each thread individually, alternate threads can be separated by introducing a bar between the threads: the gap created is called the shed.