Category Archives: Quick Fabric Blog

Quick Fabric Blog

Why is Africa being ignored?

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I have not been able to cover textile use in Africa. Africa doesn’t have climates that are able to preserve textiles the way parts of Europe and Asia do, but that doesn’t mean the textile history of Africa isn’t just as rich. The oldest site they have excavated is at Kissi, which was founded around 500bce and then abandoned, to be then occupied nearly constantly from the first century ce to the 12th century ce. The site is humid, and thus metal, glass and stone remain for modern archeologists to find, while textiles and even most ceramics have disappeared from the record.

What textiles, leather and fur have been found resulted from the large amount of metal items they were buried with. The large amount of copper objects corroded, and the resulting mineral salts went into the organic matter. This aids in the preservation of textiles. The found bits are too small to guess at how they were used, but it does let us know that they did exist.

The textile remnants seem to be entirely made from hair and wool, most likely from camel.  And, just as in other sites, while there is spun thread and woven fabric, spindles and looms have not survived. While some archaeologists think this is because the people in ancient Kissi imported all their thread and fabric, it is more likely that there is simply no historic record of the tools.

An interesting aside about Kissi in particular is that the bulk of the fabric found at a site that dates from about 500bce to 1100 ce is all one weave, called Rep.

Sample of a Rep weave

We do know that much later, the people of Kissi imported cotton as a luxury, and was worn only by the wealthiest, which poor people wore hides and grasses.

But a reminder- Africa is a huge continent, and this is only one site from the southern part of western Africa that has been excavated that luckily had some rare fabric saved. It’s important to keep in mind that Africa is not devoid of a rich history, but rather has few sites that have been found that stand the test of time (outside of the very famous ones we all know and love).I look forward to more sites being discovered, giving us more information about early people in Africa. 

Quick Fabric Blog

A fiber from an insect

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Shortly after sheep and other animals were being domesticated for their wool, the Chinese people were domesticating moths for their silk.

The idea that moth cocoons could be used for thread was not a solely Chinese discovery; there is evidence that wild silk moths were incredibly popular in Greece for their fibers. About 5000 years ago, though, China carefully curated their moths until they had just a few breeds that basically would eat only mulberry leaves. Within a thousand years, the moths had become unable to reproduce without the help of humans or fly as adults.

The production of silk from these domesticated moths led to the ancient empires of Rome, Greece and Egypt finding it much simpler to import the silk than to attempt to produce it themselves. The formed what we now call ‘The Silk Route’, a trading web to bring silk and spices from Eastern Asia to Western Europe. In return, Western Europe sent honey, wine and livestock. They also traded paper, gunpowder and disease, changing how humans interacted with each other over a millennia and a half. The Roman Dodecahedron talked about earlier was probably influenced by gold beads that traveled the Silk Route as well.

In many of the areas that still produce silk, the dead pupae are still often cooked and eaten, mostly as a savory snack food And in a curious circle, there is now an ‘Ahimsa silk’, made from wild moths who have left their cocoons, and considered a more ethical fiber.

What did animal fibers mean for humans? It started another textile revolution. But first, Africa.

Quick Fabric Blog

The Start of Wool

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It’s hard for me to comprehend that for millennia, humans used either fur or leather, or plant based fiber. Animal based fiber came later in our history, with the domestication of animals. Wool and silk seem like such basic fibers it’s hard for me to believe they are relatively modern.

While sheep were domesticated around 13-11,000 years ago, they were used for their milk, meat and skins. They weren’t used for their wool until 8 thousand years ago. The earliest woven sheep wool garments are from 6-5000 years ago. The earliest woven plant based textile evidence dates to about 34 thousand years ago. Goats were domesticated even later than sheep, and their wool less selected for.

Llamas and Alpacas were domesticated even later than sheep and goats, but followed the same trajectory of being used for meat, skins, and milk for a millennium or two before people started to use their wool. It’s believed that instead of cutting off the whole fleece in one go, early shepherds would comb their animals hair and use that for spinning and weaving. This is extremely believable. But it’s also possible that they simply picked up the wool.

Very old breeds of sheep do not shed over the course of the year, as many other animals and modern sheep do. They ‘roo’, which means as the weather gets hotter, they shed their entire coat in sheets, much like a snake sheds its skin.

As we’ve already seen, spinning and weaving took an extremely long time to make fabric. A large hunk of sheep wool, messy and clumpy and dirty, could easily become felt, especially since the wool would probably be cleaned after being collected off the sheep. Working wool while cleaning it would mat the wool into itself and form a dense thick cloth. This would save so much time from having to spin and weave the wool and would create a dense warm and water resistant material for shoes, outerwear and bedding.

More on animal fibers later.

Quick Fabric Blog

What About looms?

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Weaving as the practice of lacing grasses and twigs and branches and anything else that could be bent and interlaced together dates back as long ago as clothes and thread, about 30,000 years. Loom weaving came about approximately 12,000 years ago. So there is a huge gap between the technologies of thread and the technology of looms.

It is highly unlikely to think that our forebears did not think to weave thread they spun together in the same way they had learned grasses and branches could be woven. And the oldest evidence that they did apply weaving to string long before looms are found dates back to 27000 years ago, with a find where a long lost (apparently) linen woven fabric left an imprint on clay.

So, it is fairly obvious that people were weaving thread long before we have a record of it. But don’t think of it as modern cloth— or even a simple weave like burlap. If you have ever seen a friendship bracelet, you can see a type of weaving that can be done without a loom. Knotted and woven fiber could very possibly been used for clothes and embellishments as well as strapping long before looms came on the scene. Obviously, items such as these would have taken many hours to complete, but one thing our forebears had was time. I can’t see why such labor intensive items would not have been respected for the creativity and skill and time they would take to make. If you see the fairly recent outfit worn by Egtved Girl, you’ll see she was buried with a knotted and woven skirt. While she is only about 3300 years ago, her outfit could easily have been made with technology millennia before.

Weaving and knotting isn’t just for clothing and embellishments. String and the skills to manipulate it would have been used to make nets for carrying and trapping. String likely was also used to wrap things to make hand grips, for decoration, perhaps to mark property. And some archeologists point to the type and placement of selvages on some  imprints or woven remains as evidence of the existence of certain types of looms that we have yet to find remnants of.

Even if looms weren’t around before 12000 years ago, there were ways to weave that didn’t require formal equipment.

More on that next week.

Quick Fabric Blog

Quick Fabric Blogs: yarn and cords and twine oh my!

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It’s not hard to see how tying clothes around you, sticking sharpened bone or sticks through coverings to keep them from falling off easily, or poking holes in them and threading sinew to hold them on was a logical next step. While woven plant matter has not survived the archaeological record well, there is good reason to believe that people were weaving grasses, stems and leaves long before there was thread. Far more complicated than conditioning skins, these weavings could also be used as mats, coverings, shelters, shoes, bags, and carrying tools. It’s not too much of a stretch to see how a simply playing with grasses could lead to weaving a flat matt which could then lead to weaving a three dimensional item. Playing and working with these grasses could very well led to the disintegration of the grass into long fibers in a similar way that drying and pounding sinew gave long fibers to work with. Unlike sinew, these grass fibers were not strong on their own.

At some point, about 30000 years ago, someone playing with or working with grass fibers rolled them on something. By rolling the fibers over and adding more fibers to the roll as the old ones were used up, they developed the very first string, a technological revolution that is often ignored in history. Craftspeople speculate some one was fiddling with plant or animal fibers and was rolling them on their thigh while fidgeting. This would twist the shorter fibers into longer ones, and was very possibly the way thread (yarn, cord, twine, string)  was invented. While it is obvious that this fiber could be used to tie and lace and sew much like sinew, it probably didn’t take long to realize that this worked much better for weaving than sinew or strips of fur would.

I adore checking the history and evolution of words, as they can tell us so much about human history. The word for sinew, very likely the first material used for binding things by humans, comes from the Proto Indo European root word ‘sai’ which means to tie and bind. You can almost hear someone asking ‘give me that thing that ties’ and the hearer knowing exactly what was meant, an example where the thing is named after what it does.

Yarn and cord come from the Proto Indo European root word ‘ghere’ for intestines/ guts!

Here the word harkens back to what these items came from or replaced. It’s also why we call it our spinal cord, and why instruments (made of animal organs for a very long time) allow you to play ‘chords’.

String is from the Proto Indo European root word ‘strenk’ which means tight or narrow. To me, this implies that it is a later appellation and refers to the fineness of the thread as opposed to the material or technique used to make it or its purpose.

If you have spun, my small discussion may have made you say ‘you forgot to double it!’ Single cords were used for ages, but allowing the cord to twist back on itself makes for a stronger and thicker tread or twine. Thread literally means twisted (from the Proto Indo European root word ‘tere’  to rub or turn) and twine means doubled (from the Proto Indo European root word ‘dwo’ for two. All these words are very old, which is fitting for such an important invention and variations. I love seeing how the words changed so logically, and I assume the roots for the Proto Indo European for at least sinew and cord were carried by early explorers into the Levant.

Quick Fabric Blog

Quick Fabric Blogs: The earliest of the early

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Last week we talked a little about how humans have been adorning their bodies with various coverings. This week we will start to discuss the different types of coverings humans started to develop.

As far as archaeologists have been able to figure out so far (giving hard answers to such things is pretty impossible, especially as textiles and coverings are so hard to find intact in the archaeological record),   the earliest materials our ancestors used would have been long grasses, large leaves, fur, leather, and sinew. The very first non decorative items humans made out of these materials were likely shoes and carrying items. You can probably imagine how to tie leaves around your feet or even wrap food in leaves to make it easier to carry and stop it from decaying quite as quickly.

It’s also easy to imagine our ancestors carefully removing all the edible flesh from the animals they killed to eat. Scrapers have been found nearly everywhere, proving that early people were cleaning the skins of animals thoroughly. As untreated skins become hard and rot, but chemically altered skins do not, it probably didn’t take long for people to realize that using a common product all humans carried with them (urine) and working the skin to keep it flexible while it was curing, and people had fur: to line sleeping areas, tie to their feet, use as decoration, create bags to carry things in, form walls to block sun and wind, and bundle up in as it got cold. Making leather was simply scraping the fur off the other side.

Internal organs of animals also found uses not as food. Bladders were easy to hold liquid in when clean (and formed early balls for play when filled with air), and the tendons and the ‘silverskin’ of the animals, which were not very edible, were treated much as the skins were. They were cleaned and dried and them pounded until they were flexible and stringy. Between this sinew (which we still use today) and naturally forming vegetation, people were able to create items that could be shaped permanently or made into larger items by using sinew to stitch (the earliest needed found to date is 30000 years old) several pieces of fur or leather together. Knowing how much humans like to decorate ourselves, many archaeologists are sure these items were held together with rudimentary embroidery stitches and decorative items.

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Quick Fabric Blogs: the beginnings and the basics

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It is very difficult to have proof of anything that happened tens of thousands of years ago, especially when it’s as transient as clothing and fiber.

For many thousands of years our ancestors lived in areas where covering the body in protective items were not needed at all. Areas to sleep in could have leaves and vines and animal products like skins or fur and feathers as cushioning and covering.

But humans love decorating themselves. Early hominid finds nearly always include beads and jewelry and bits we tied around ourselves.

So the start of clothing is most likely an embellishment not *just* a need for protection from the environment. The fact that shells with holes drilled through them dating to 150,000 years ago, shows exactly how much early humans cared for decorating themselves. These shell beads have been found in at least 5 caves throughout northern Africa, allowing experts to speculate about communication, trade, and the very human desire to adorn in the extremely early world.

Dating has shown that shortly after the caches of beads were lost or left behind, humans were skinning animals. They could have used their skins merely in their beds, but knowing that we already adorned ourselves, is it unlikely to see us adorning our bodies with skins? A strange and possibly uncomfortable way to track the use of clothing- something that rarely lasts anytime as long as shell and bone- is to track the evolution of lice.
Humans have suffered from head lice for a very very long time. Long enough that the lice that like living on human heads evolved to be a different louse than is its closest relative on our closest relatives— the chimpanzees and the bonobos. Pretty much the same is true for pubic lice.
Body lice, also known as ‘clothing lice’, is *specific to humans* and tracing the genes of body lice and when they split from the other lice can basically tell us when humans started to wear clothing. And what that tells us is that, about the same time we were drilling holes in shells to adorn ourselves, we were decorating our bodies with coverings. While even Africa can have inclement weather humans wanted to protect our bodies from, the history of the body louse shows that we were consistently wearing body coverings before any one left Africa to explore the other parts of the world.

Quick Fabric Blog

Quick Fabric Blogs: Intro

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I don’t have as many cool tips as I wanted to have for finishing projects to have a Finishing Friday. I do, however, probably have a decades worth of small infodumps on various ‘fabrics’, so Fridays will be Finishing and Fabric Fridays now, if that’s ok. There is so much fun stuff about fabric (I will be using that word for a ground which is used either for embellishing or wearing.) I will also be going through different dyes and fibers as well. This will not be a comprehensive listing of all fibers, dyes, and backgrounds, but I hope it will give a wide enough base the length of time spent and confusion encountered when trying to choose a fabric will be minimized.
I will roughly be starting out with as early as we know about, and end with the most modern fabrics we have as of yet. I will try to keep it in chronological order, but that will not be completely possible. 
So I hope you will have fun joining me!