Plain Sailing: the Cloth That Turned The Tide of History: Episode #54
Jo Andrews
A coarse plain cloth has a greater claim to being the most important textile in history than any sumptuous silk brocade or royal robe. Sailcloth is the fabric that has made it possible for humanity to explore the world, trade across seas, build great empires, and wage wars for millennia, and yet history pays very little attention to it. Textile archaeology has begun to fill in some of the gaps, but there is still a huge amount that we don’t know about how sails were made and how sail-making changed the communities that undertook this work.
Flax is Back! The Great Linen Revival: Episode #53
Jo Andrews
There is a global flax revival underway. In the great linen belt of North Western Europe, the land under cultivation has more than doubled in a decade, and linen production is steadily increasing worldwide. After years of being spurned for ‘easier’ man-made fibres, or cotton, once again linen is being valued. It may only be around half-a-percent of the world’s textile fibres at present, but this time it is being grown not just for fine fabrics, but also because it’s gentler on the land. It needs less water, fewer pesticides and fertilizers, and new uses are being found for it too, from creating surfboards to skis, from acoustic insulation to car doors.
Elizabeth Wayland Barber & the Age of String: Episode #52
Jo Andrews
Exactly thirty years ago a book came out that changed the way we think about textiles and fibre and the role they’ve played in the human story. Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years by Elizabeth Wayland Barber became a best seller. What she said was revolutionary. Until then people thought that textiles were a by-product of civilisations and that processes like weaving were around five or six thousand years old. Wayland Barber was the first person to understand that they were central to the development of human society. She said spinning and weaving were far older than we realised and went back to the beginnings of human social development. She coined the phrase The String Revolution and suggested the Stone Age would have been better called the Age of String.
America’s Cotton Feedsacks: And How They Changed The World: Episode #51
Jo Andrews
The American cotton feed sack is the stuff of legend. From the 1850s onwards it was skilfully repurposed by women across America into all kinds of garments and household goods. By the late 1930s, they began to be highly patterned, and by the 1940s – when feed sacks had their heyday – it’s estimated that more than 3 million Americans were wearing feed sack clothing. Out of necessity, it was made into dresses and shirts, quilts and curtains, sheets, mattress covers, pajamas, and, even undergarments.
Australia’s Convict Quilt: Something to Be Proud Of: Episode #50
Jo Andrews
An extraordinary quilt handstitched by convict women on board ship as they were transported from Britain to Australia in 1841 has just gone on display in a new exhibition at Australia’s National Gallery. Many of those who made the quilt were illiterate and led tough and impoverished lives. And yet these social outcasts and exiles – working in desperate circumstances – created one of the most important cultural artefacts in the colonial history of Australia.
The Forgotten Medieval Craft of Cloth Staining: Episode #49
Jo Andrews
From the grandest palace to the poorest cottage, so called ‘stained’ cloths brought colour and joy to everyday life in England for hundreds of years. These specially painted and stamped fabrics formed the backdrop to funerals, ceremonies, processions, masques and tournaments that required banners, flags, pennants or scenery from 1300 onwards.
But this world of dazzling medieval colour and pattern has been mostly lost to history because so much of the cloth has perished, and the craft of the stainers has been so little understood. Now Haptic & Hue re-discovers the secrets of making stained cloth and looks at how it was used.
Invisible Hands: Tapestry Weavers and Artists: Episode #48
Jo Andrews
Great tapestries have been used to decorate and embellish homes and palaces for centuries, and yet the hands that created these works remain almost completely forgotten. Art institutions treasure their ancient tapestries woven painstakingly over many months and even years and know almost everything about them, except the names of those who created these extraordinary pieces. Modern artists, like Picasso, Henry Moore, and Marc Chagall see their work rendered into a different and exciting form by tapestry weavers, but no one remembers who the weaver was or is.
The Garment That Sweeps Through History: The Everlasting Cloak: Episode #47
Jo Andrews
There’s a piece of clothing that has a good claim to being a universal garment. It is thousands of years old and yet it featured on the catwalks last year. It’s stylish and at the same time the humblest and simplest of garments. It has been worn and enjoyed by rich and poor alike. It has been repurposed and re-shaped throughout human history and it has fulfilled many functions.
Ukraine’s Revolutionary Act of Embroidery: How Identity Survives in Stitches: Episode #46
Jo Andrews
As the war in the Ukraine brutally shows, few people have had as hard a struggle down the centuries to maintain their identity as Ukrainians. For hundreds of years, they have been occupied and subjugated by one power after another, the Ottomans, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russia, Poland, the Nazis and Russia again. Through it all Ukrainians have held onto their traditions, one of the strongest and most powerful of these has been the beautifully and skilfully stitched motifs on plain linen or hemp shirts.
Images from Haptic and Hue’s sixth season of podcasts