Category Archives: Textiles

Weaving and history

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Hand weaving has been inextricably linked in history from neolithic times right up to the Industrial Revolution. Weaving was a profession. Men (and the professionals were mostly men) had an apprenticeship of between seven and nine years. (That changes one’s view of the Luddites, who were seeing the end of their professions, doesn’t it?)

Weaving has now been mechanized but the machines follow the same process that modern looms employ.

Previous looms were much simpler. The Egyptians looms were similar to those used by Navahos.

The weavers in South America use a backstrap loom, where the warp goes around the back, and the tension is controlled by the weaver. Patterns are memorized.

Modern looms look more like this.

They all utilize sticks that separate the threads in the warp and make a cross. The shuttle carries the weft threads through it. Anyone who has ever woven a potholder on a little frame knows that the threads have to go over and under to make a mat.

Looms were very expensive and heavy so if a woman wove, she did so in her home.

We have words in English that memorialize this craft; for example: heirloom, i.e. heir loom.

In the Will Rees mysteries, his weaving supports his family.

Silk

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One of the common threads (pun intended) in both my mystery series is the importance of weaving. It is not hyperbole to say that without the weavers – most of them women – there would be no cloth and no clothes. Until the Industrial Revolution, when weaving was mechanized, all of the cloth was woven by hand weavers on looms.

Wool is a forgiving thread to weave. It has a little stretch. Linen is harder since the threads have no stretch at all. Silk, with his hair fine threads, is truly difficult.

The myth around the invention of silk goes like this. In about 2700 B. C. E., an emperor’s wife was sipping hot tea when the cocoon of a silkworm fell into her cup. The hot liquid dissolved the sticky coating and the threads unwound. Genetic traces and archaeological finds put the domestication of the silkworm to between 4000 and 5000 years ago, though wild silk may have been woven by then. Chinese archaeologists say they found traces of silk in the soil in a tomb from around 8500 years ago. Wow!

Millennia of selective breeding created the B. Mori moths that are blind and white. They lay eggs on mulberry leaves. The larvae feed on the leaves and then spin the cocoons. The silk is made up of two proteins – fibroin and sericin. The process of stretching and spinning these proteins through an opening near the worm’s jaw creates the solid fiber. Although finer than a human hair, silk has tremendous tensile strength.

One thing I didn’t know: silk is used in medicine. Because it decays slowly in the human body, leaving nothing behind, and is strong, silk is used for surgical sutures. It has been used for centuries as bandages. And the Chinese used it in armor. Silk help shield any wounds.

Currently Reading

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This week I read a very interesting nonfiction discussion of pretty much everything relating to textiles and a woman’s fashion in a particular place and time.

Kate Strasdin came into possession of a dress diary, a book filled with swatches of the fabrics that made up Anne Sykes, and some of her friends, during the middle of the nineteenth century.

Since her family, and the family of her husband Adam Sykes, were involved in Britain’s textile industry, Anne had access to all the newest cottons, silk from the East, and, later in the century, the newest in the aniline dyes.

Using the fabrics a a springboard, Strasdin references cultural consequences such the enslaved peoples in the United States who picked the cotton that kept the British factories humming.

When Adam Sykes relocates to China, Strasdin discusses silk and, at the same time, the differences in culture, the Opium War, and more.

Colored photographs of the fabric swatches illuminate the text and there is a QR code at the back that brings the reader to more examples.

Fascinating!British History