Browse & Search Podcast Episodes

In Britain, the Canadian wartime quilts were often loved and cherished. But gradually, as the years passed they faded from memory. A few hundred have survived and…

This month’s episode is devoted to knitting and its history. We explore the origins of knitting and what we know about some of the earliest…

This episode of Haptic & Hue is about one group of people who designed and made craft textiles at a particular moment in America’s history. The Folly Cove Designers came…

We know that fashion dolls were owned by Mary Queen of Scots, and Jane Seymour, wife of Henry the Eighth of England. Elizabeth the First of England was…

It is hard to imagine today how we would feel if we had to place our own child in a foundling hospital, if this was part of our family…

The quilts of Gees Bend were born of need, but when they were first exhibited, in the early 2000s, they were recognised as fresh, and…

It’s nearly five years since the pioneering Anglo Trinidadian textile designer, Althea McNish, died in near obscurity in London. In that time her reputation and…

When colonial administrations in both Canada and the US tried to stamp out the culture of the First Nations people, the blankets and robes of…

Handmade hooked rugs are the stuff of everyday life, but in Canada they became a vital form of income for impoverished seafaring families in Labrador…

About ten years ago a doctor in The Netherlands started what sounds like a simple and practical project. She sent off embroidery kits with a print of…

In Denmark more than a hundred marsh bodies have been found – some in extraordinary states of preservation. They date from the late Bronze and…

Quilting in a flat frame with a rocking stitch has a history that stretches back certainly to the 16th century and maybe much further. This is…

Content Warning: This podcast contains descriptions of violence and torture.    Cloth has a great power to hold the memories of those we have loved,…

You may not have heard of Kantamanto market, but it plays a vital role in dealing with the world’s textile excess. This is where many…

In this month’s episode of Haptic & Hue we hear from a well-known winner of the Great British Sewing Bee who has adopted the wartime…

It’s incredible to think that the simple pleat has pleased the human eye for so long and in so many different ways. Pleating adds movement…

The Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford, in the UK, has just added 15 brand new, intensely colourful Hawaiian quilts to its collection of extraordinary artefacts.…

The Bayeux Tapestry was created by women in an age of great violence and uncertainty. It became the defining narrative of the battle between Harold…

Sailcloth has been vital to humanity down the centuries: without it the Greeks could not have fought the Trojans, there would have been no Viking…

  Flax is a fibre that looks back as well as forward. Like no other yarn, it is the ancient fibre of civilisation. Linen has…

Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s book: Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years with its radical ideas, put textiles at the heart of the human story. It played…

Today feed sacks are valued by collectors and makers in America and beyond, and there is a lively global market in them. But these soft…

The Rajah Quilt – named after the ship the women were transported on – has nearly 3,000 individual pieces. It is one of the only…

This episode uncovers the secrets of the 14th century cloth stainers which lie in a pocket-sized book, transcribed more than six hundred years ago, by…

  This episode of Haptic and Hue looks at tapestry weaving and the process of collaboration that goes on between an artist and a weaver…

The cloak has kept us good company throughout the centuries, it has marched with armies across plains and deserts, it has been sanctified and worn…

The embroidery of Ukraine is one of its secret weapons and an incredible defence against the cultural annihilation that has been practiced against it. What…

Haptic & Hue’s Book of the Year for 2023 is Barbara Burman’s The Point of The Needle. In it Barbara says ‘stitching and stitches are…

This episode of Haptic & Hue tells the little-known story of how two separate sewing schools on different sides of the Atlantic gave women all…

Savile Row, in the heart of London, has been at the centre of high-quality men’s tailoring for 200 years. It has supplied handmade suits, from…

This tells the story of how fresh and fashionable art-textiles were among the first items people were able to enjoy in the peace that followed…

In this episode of Haptic & Hue’s Tales of Textiles, we look at where tartan comes from and how it acquired its many meanings and…

The Ballet Russe was such a phenomenon that artists like Matisse and Picasso were happy to design for it, joining in-house artists like Leon Bakst…

This podcast and the text below discuss terms considered offensive and inappropriate today   This episode of Haptic & Hue unravels the story of a…

This episode looks at how different Carnivals developed and how textiles and masks play a central role in the ideas behind these festivals. We start…

In this episode of Haptic & Hue we talk to one of the world’s most eminent textile archaeologists, Margarita Gleba. The evidence that she and…

This edition of Haptic & Hue is about the clothes of a community, the community that lived at Mount Vernon in America when it was…

This episode celebrates Haptic & Hue’s pick as its book of year for 2022 which is Clare Hunter’s Embroidering Her Truth, Mary Queen of Scots…

Yosegaki Hinomaru were good luck flags signed by the friends and families of Japanese soldiers going off to war. Soldiers carried them close to their…

The Folly Cove Designers were an extraordinary group of people who created beautiful and inspirational textile designs in a small community in Massachusetts. They had…

This episode of Haptic and Hue is about the past, the present, and what could be the future of second-hand clothes and textile recycling. Once…

This episode of Haptic and Hue is about one of the most intricate and complex human skills ever developed – lace-making. But it is not…

Five hundred years after the Renaissance it is often paint and art that survives, rather than the fabrics depicted. But the extraordinary skills needed to…

This episode of Haptic and Hue’s Tales of Textiles looks at the system where mothers leaving babies at the London Foundling Hospital often left small…

This episode of Haptic and Hue’s Tales of Textiles tracks the story of the Huguenots, who they were, and why a summer wedding in Paris,…

This episode of Haptic and Hue’s Tales of Textiles begins with a mystery quilt that turned up on a cold winter’s morning 30 years ago.…

This episode of Haptic and Hue looks at how women in the past were united by their ability to use a needle skilfully. From the…

Shoddy cloth and its sister mungo were first produced in Batley in West Yorkshire, a town that became so filthy from the trade they said…

This podcast explores one of the great textile cities of the world. For hundreds of years, Lyon was a byword for weaving skill and savoir-faire.…

The is episode explores the curious origins of African Wax Cloth and the twists and turns in an extraordinary story that is behind the creation…

North Country whole cloth quilts are very different from patchwork quilts. Their showmanship lies in the swirling design of the quilting stitches on a completely…

Paisley has many names and even more meanings. It is the sleeping dragon of patterns – retiring under the hill for decades of slumber before…

Karun Thakar believes that every fabric in his collection has a story to tell us about the people who made them and the way they…

Welcome to the third season of Haptic and Hue’s Tales of Textiles. This series is called The Chatter of Cloth and each of the eight…

Whether you live in London or Los Angeles, Berlin or Bombay, our buses, metros, and trams use a patterned wool fabric called moquette. It comes…

This episode explores the ultimate textile with a message – a flag. One commentator calls flags a kind of window onto history that can link…

This episode looks at why and how cloth and money have been inextricably linked throughout history. Cloth and money go hand in hand as much…

This podcast looks at the special place cloth plays in mourning a much-loved father, the loss of a child or partner in political repression, or…

A Feeling of Warmth looks at the alchemy of giving wool a purpose in the age of man-made fibres and diverting it from being dumped…

This episode looks at the case for mending and thinks about how different cultures approach this, from the wool-rich districts of Yorkshire with their darning…

A talented, young Costume Designer, Sinead Kidao, who has worked on films like Beauty and The Beast, Little Women, and The Dark Knight Rises, talks…

Mark Twain once wrote: “without his clothes a man would be nothing at all; that the clothes do not merely make the man, the clothes…

The women of Gees Bend used anything and everything that came to hand, and over time they honed their skills and their designs. Isolation, poverty,…

Catch her out of the corner of your eye as she skitters across the stage of history. She has seen revolutions, war, disaster, pandemics, peace…

Sewing, mending, knitting and all the fibre skills are seen as ‘Women’s Work’ in Western cultures. Why is this? We hear from men who were…

This episode tells the story of the top designer of fabrics to the French fashion industry. It looks at the way in which a modern…

This episode could not have been made without Rebecca Devaney, who tells her story of becoming an Haute Couture embroiderer. She trained at Ecole Lessage.…

With thanks to Janet Phillips for sharing her reflections and her life with us.   You can order her new book, Exploring Woven Fabrics, on…

This episode features:   Ashley Gray, Director of Gray MCA – an expert in mid-century textiles and co-curator of the recent exhibition on Modern British…