Category Archives: weaving, dyeing, fiber arts, murder mysteries, librarians

Mad for Madder (and red)

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Madder (rubia tinctorum) has been used for centuries as a red dye. It is well known as the dye for Turkey Red or, as I mentioned in an earlier post, the red coats for the British during the eighteenth century. Wild madder yields a subtler pinky brown. (When I grew my own, I ended up with a pale salmon pink.) Unlike many natural dyes, madder contains natural mordanting agents and does not need to be mixed with iron or tin or other materials.

When Spain entered the New World, another source of red dye became available to Europe; cochineal. ((Cochineal was already known to and used by the Aztecs and the Maya people as well as the Incas and pre-Incas in Peru. It was also known in Bronze Age Crete.) Insects similar to small beetles live on the cactus found at the higher altitudes in countries such as Peru. A visitor to Peru will see this grayish bloom on the cacti growing wild in the Sacred Valley. It looks like some form of fungi but is actually an insect colony. Cochineal is  the blood of the female of this species and dyes vibrant red, pink and purple. I have read that the Pope’s robes were dyed with cochineal. Without a proper mordant, cochineal is not colorfast.

Spain held a monopoly on cochineal for years, making the bright scarlet very much sought after and very expensive. It was the color of the rich and paintings from this era contain frequent splashes of red clothing, wherein the subjects demonstrate their wealth and high status. Efforts to transport the insects to Europe failed, although they were brought into Australia and caused a whole raft of problems.

The bright red is similar to the use of Tyrian purple in earlier times in the fact it displayed the wearer’s status and wealth.. The purple dye was discovered in antiquity and traded by the Phoenicians. It is made from the shells of the common Mediterrean Sea Snail. It was both rare and expensive (the Phoenicians held on to their monopoly for years) and became the color of royalty. It has never been produced synthetically commercially.

Cochineal is still used as a dye and appears in both candy and lipstick. Think of that when you put something red on your mouth.

Next up: indigo.

Weavers and weaving

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In prehistoric sites, remnants of string skirts have been found. Plant fibers, twisted into cords, and knotted together. Think macrame. From this simple beginning arose weaving. Every culture has some form of weaving from the simplest form of loom to the more complicated ones used by hand weavers today.

The Egyptians used a ground loom that, to my modern body, looks uncomfortable to use.

How do we know the Egyptians were weaving so long ago? Well, there are pictures inscribed next to the hieroglyphics.. And also, remnants of clothing has been found in excavations. In 1913, Sir Flinders Petrie found a pile of linen cloth about thirty miles outside of Cairo. Years later, researchers from the Victoria and Albert Museum were sorting though the pile when they came upon a remarkably well preserved dress. It was nicknamed the Tarkhan dress and the age was estimated at 5000 years. Almost fifty years later, the dress was carbon dated and discovered to be from about 3000 B.C.E. Easily from Egypt’s first dynasty, maybe even before.

In Peru, the women employed a back strap loom.

The early Scandanavians used a loom with weights tied to the bottom threads.

The Navaho, who still weave blankets and so for sale, use a simple four piece frame.

In every culture, weavers enjoyed fairly high status. Although not aristocrats, they were among the skilled craftsmen – what passed for the middle class of that time. Without weavers, there would have been no cloth.

Textiles were time-consuming to make, and thus expensive, and learning to weave takes time. In the Middle Ages, an apprenticeship took between seven to nine years. Weave

I wanted to pay homage to this valuable craft. In my Bronze Age Crete mysteries, Martis comes from a family of weavers. (Yes, even in Bronze Age Crete, the women were weavers. Loom weights were found in Akrotiri. And the Minoans, who were the sailors of this age, traded the textiles all over the Aegean.) She does not want to be a weaver, hoping for something more exciting and adventurous – like jumping over a charging bull.

In the Will Rees mysteries, he is a weaver, a traveling weaver. Since women were not supposed to work or leave home, men like Will Rees traversed the early USA with a loom in their wagon bed, weaving for the farmwives.

What saw the end of several millennia of weaving as a profession?

Well, Rees is already seeing the end of his career with the importing of calicoes and other fabrics from India. But the real end to this profession came with the Industrial Revolution and the mechanization of weaving.

Death in the Great Dismal

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Very excited to reveal the cover for my next Will Rees mystery: Death in the Great Dismal. It will be released early fall. In this book, Will and Lydia travel to the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia to rescue a free black woman, taken from Maine and enslaved, who has fled to the swamp. One of the other maroons is murdered – but Will and Lydia are on the case.

I have had many wonderful covers but this one is exceptional.

Will Rees # 7 – Simply Dead

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The Shaker Murders has not even been released yet and already I am doing the edits on the next one. The crazy world of publishing!

The Shaker Murders will be published in the U.S. February 1. (It is coming out this month in the UK. Go figure.)

And now the next one, Simply Dead, is complete and will come out in the U.s. in 2020. This is also set in Maine, during the winter though, and involves the Shakers once again.

I am working on #8 which I have titled A Circle of Dead Girls. I have set it against an early traveling circus. More information to follow.

Stay tuned.

 

The Luddites

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A friend called me a Luddite the other day after a fit of yelling about computers.. (I am actually good with computers. But after my laptop crashed in June, I still haven’t gotten my finances straightened out. According to Quicken, I am $14,000 in the hole. Hence my rant about computers in general and online banking in particular.) But I digress.

The name-calling prompted me to research the Luddites. Yes, it was a real group – of weavers and other textile workers in the early nineteenth century. New weaving and spinning machines were coming into the factories.The owners said that the machines were more efficient – they probably were – and would make cloth cheaper – and they did. (The word ‘shoddy’ came into being shortly thereafter. Coincidence? I doubt it.)  The weavers were not opposed to the new machinery; that was not the issue. The problem was greed.

Weavers spent seven years in an apprenticeship before they could set up shop. Now they feared that the time and effort put into this craft was wasted. They had reason to worry. As the factory owners fired the men, they hired women and children, who they paid much less, to work instead.This was the beginning of six year olds working 14 hour days in a factory.

So the men protested. They blackened their faces and broke into the factories to destroy the new and expensive machinery. They purported to follow a fictional character called Ned Ludd(a stocking weaver) or another fictional personage King Ludd. Thus the name.

The British Government sided with the factory owners and made breaking machinery a capital crime. Soldiers were sent to quell the protests. A large number of men (both members of the protests and not) were swept up and accused of being Luddites. Those that were found guilty were either executed or transported. That ended the protests very quickly.

The situation was slightly different in the United States. The first textile factory came into  being in Massachusetts in 1814. Lowell, who had seen the textile machines in Great Britain, wanted to do the same in the U.S. (The city of Lowell is named for him.) He built his first factories beginning in 1816. But the  United States had a smaller population and there was not a large number of unemployed men so there was not the same labor pool. To solve the problem Lowell hired young women, who became known as mill girls, between the ages of 15 and 35. He of course paid them less than men. (To his credit, he chose not to employ children.) The mill girls were housed in company owned boarding houses, were strictly chaperoned and offered other ‘improving’ activities so the jobs had decent working conditions. This changed as the century wore on. The mill girls unionized, went out on strike a few times, and finally joined forces with another union.

Since my character,  Will Rees, is a weaver he is going to be affected by the increasing industrialization. In fact, will lose his profession in less than twenty years. He will be in his middle fifties by then, however, a fairly advanced age for the time, so he will have missed this huge change by only a few years.

 

Goodreads Giveaway coming

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To celebrate the publication of my new book, The Shaker Murders, which is coming out in February, I am giving away copies of the book that comes before it. In the Devil’s Cold Dish, Rees and his family are targeted by someone who wants to destroy them. Rees is accused of murder and then Lydia is accused of witchcraft. As Rees’s hometown turns against them, mobs of angry men descend on his farm to capture Lydia and hang her. He spirits his family to safety and then returns to Dugard. On the run, he attempts to identify the person behind the harassment.

Dental care in the late 18th century

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First of all, there were no dentists perse. There were surgeon dentists since the people who practiced did both. (Most were men but in 1797 the Columbian Centinel lists an ad from Mrs. Dodge, newly arrived in Boston from New York and claiming expertise in “Art Dental”.) Most of these so-called dentists were itinerants (like my traveling weaver Will Rees.) Not only service people like Rees and the dentists traveled but also ministers, magistrates and other professions. The routes began to settle into regular circuits by about 1800.

But I digress.

Many of these surgeon-dentists were quacks, promising all manner of cures. Some were reputable, however, promoting dentrifice (that’s toothpaste to us) and genuinely possessing some kind of medical training.

So what did these early dentists do?

Well, without novacaine and the drills we take for granted, dentistry was a painful affair. Some reputable surgeon dentists ‘plumbed’ the teeth, scraping out the decay and filling the tooth with gold or lead. (I can only imagine how awful this must have been.) Most decayed teeth were simply extracted with a tool that resembles a corkscrew with a hook on one end. Teeth, by the way, were not pulled but drawn. Interestingly, in light of current knowledge on how dental health affects the entire body, doctors of that time already predicted one’s health would improve with good teeth. No less a personage than Dr. Rush, a Philadelphia doctor who gained fame during the Yellow Fever epidemic in 1793, predicted cures for several diseases once a rotten tooth was pulled. It was a case of overreach, however, since not only rheumatism would be relieved but also such ailments as epilepsy.

What about George Washington’s wooden teeth? First of all they weren’t wooden. They were ivory (carved at various times from elephant and hippo teeth,) Washington’s first set were carved of ivory with human teeth inserted and with a hole for his one remaining molar. Sounds awkward and painful both.

And while we are on teeth, Napoleon’s Josephine learned to smile with one hand shielding her mouth since several of her front teeth were decayed. As a child she had a great fondness for sugar cane.

Housecleaning – 1798

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Besides all the other tasks involved in keeping house, wives also kept the house clean. As much as they were able – the standards of cleanliness were lower than ours. (I think women of the the past, both recent and long ago, would be stunned by the clorox infused wipes we use.) But there were no vacumn cleaners then, only brooms and they were mostly twigs or broom grass tied to a pole. The Shakers again invented a machine that tied on the straw for a more modern broom – and their brooms were highly prized.

But I digress.

The brooms had to be used to sweep the dirt and the floors were scrubbed on hands and knees with the harsh soap I mentioned earlier. What about carpets? Yes, they were swept. But every Spring well – run households had an annual and dreaded Spring Cleaning. All carpets were taken and beaten thoroughly to rid them of the accumulated dust, dirt and other unsavory objects.

Floors and windows, if the house had them, were washed and bedding was aired. Anything silver was polished, and not with the handy silver wipes either. Elbow grease was the common technique. Curtains were washed and rehung.

Children were impressed into helping and more affluent women hired help, usually unmarried girls from around the neighborhood. Spring cleaning usually took several days and contemporary accounts, especially from husbands, express frustration and annoyance at the disruption.

But the lot of women, and the work expected of them, was improving. See next week’s blog.

Speaking Engagements

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I had a great talk at the Newburgh Library last Wednesday. I have two more coming up. On Sunday, October 23, I will be talking at the Orangeburg Library – in Rockland County, New York. The talk begins at 2.

The following Sunday, I will be speaking about witchcraft at my own library – the Goshen Public Library in Goshen, New York. Hard to believe but I have never spoken there. I felt shy pushing myself into a slot where I work.

Come and ask questions.

Devil’s cold Dish Release

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So excited to announce the release of my new book, The Devil’s Cold Dish, tomorrow. It is the fifth in the Will Rees series.

devils cold dish