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Jan Bartek - AncientPages.com - New scientific research has revealed a piece of tartan found in a peat bog in Glen Affric around forty years ago can be dated to circa 1500-1600 AD, making it the oldest known surviving specimen of true tartan in Scotland.

The Scottish Tartans Authority commissioned Dye Analysis and Radiocarbon testing on the woolen textile to prove its age.

Scotland's Oldest Tartan On Display For The First Time!

Glen Affric tartan - Scotland's oldest-known true tartan discovered by The Scottish Tartans Authority to go on display for the first time at V&A Dundee's Tartan exhibition.

Credit: Alan Richardson Pix-AR

The first investigation was dye analysis carried out by analytical scientists from National Museums Scotland. Using high-resolution digital microscopy, four colors were visually identified for dye analysis: green, brown, and possibly red and yellow.

The dye analysis confirmed the use of indigo/woad in the green but was inconclusive for the other colors, probably due to the dyestuff degradation state. However, no artificial or semi-synthetic dyestuffs were involved in making the tartan, which pointed to a date of pre-1750s.

Further clarification on the age of the tartan involved radiocarbon testing at the SUERC Radiocarbon Laboratory in East Kilbride. The process involved washing out all the peat staining, which would have otherwise contaminated the carbon content of the textile.

The Radiocarbon testing results identified a broad date range between 1500 and 1655 AD, with the period between 1500 and 1600 AD the most probable. This makes it the oldest-known piece of true tartan found in Scotland – the Falkirk ‘tartan,’ dating from the early third century AD, is actually a simpler check pattern woven using undyed yarns.

The Glen Affric tartan, which measures around 55cm by 43cm, is now on display for the first time at V&A Dundee’s Tartan exhibition.

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The piece will be the oldest exhibit among more than 300 objects. The exhibition examines tartan’s universal and enduring appeal through iconic and everyday examples of fashion, architecture, graphic and product design, photography, furniture, glass and ceramics, film, performance, and art.

“The testing process has taken nearly six months, but the effort was well worth it, and we are thrilled with the results!

In Scotland, surviving examples of old textiles are rare as the soil is not conducive to their survival. As the piece was buried in peat, meaning it had no exposure to air and was therefore preserved.

The tartan has several colors with multiple stripes of different sizes, and so it corresponds to what people would think of as a true tartan.

“Although we can theorize about the Glen Affric tartan, it’s important that we don’t construct history around it. Although Clan Chisholm controlled that area, we cannot attribute the tartan to them as we don’t know who owned it.

“The potential presence of red, a color that Gaels considered a status symbol, is interesting because of the more rustic nature of the cloth. This piece is not something you would associate with a king or someone of high status; it is more likely to be an outdoor working garment," Peter MacDonald, Head of Research and Collections at The Scottish Tartans Authorit said.

Scotland's Oldest Tartan On Display For The First Time!

New scientific research has revealed a piece of tartan found in a peat bog in Glen Affric, Scotland around forty years ago can be dated to circa 1500-1600 AD, making it the oldest known surviving specimen of true tartan in Scotland. Credit: Credit: Alan Richardson Pix-AR

“The Glen Affric tartan is clearly a piece of national and historical significance. It is likely to date to the reign of James V, Mary Queen of Scots, or James VI/I. “There is no other known surviving piece of tartan from this period of this age. It's a remarkable discovery and deserves national attention and preservation. “It also deserves to be seen and we’re delighted that it is to be included in the Tartan exhibition at V&A Dundee,” John McLeish, Chair of The Scottish Tartans Authority, said.

“We knew The Scottish Tartans Authority had a tremendous archive of material and we initially approached them to ask if they knew of any examples of 'proto-tartans' that could be loaned to the exhibition.

I'm delighted the exhibition has encouraged further exploration into this plaid portion and very thankful for The Scottish Tartans Authority's backing and support in uncovering such a historic find.

To be able to exhibit the Glen Affric tartan is immensely important in understanding the textile traditions from which modern tartan derives, and I'm sure visitors will appreciate seeing this on public display for the very first time," James Wylie, curator at V&A Dundee said.

Tartan at V&A Dundee opens on Saturday, 1 April, until 14 January 2024.

Written by Jan Bartek - AncientPages.com Staff Writer

Source: Facebook

Source: AncientPages.com

#scottish #Glen African Tartan

metmuseum

Piece. 18th–19th century. Credit line: Gift of The United Piece Dye Works, 1936 https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/224180

heaveninawildflower

Sampler (Mexico, 18th–19th century).

Linen embroidered with silk.

Image and text information courtesy MFA Boston.

metmuseum

Edging. late 19th century. Credit line: Gift of The Lady Reigate, in memory of her mother, Mrs. William Redmond Cross, 1979 https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/229635

nemfrog

A quartered repeat pattern in terracotta and cream, blending Renaissance, Moorish, and Persian paisley influences.

Modern ornamentation. 1886.

Internet Archive

heaveninawildflower

Piece of embroidery (Chinese, late 19th century).

Silk satin embroidered with silk and gold-wrapped threads.

Image and text information courtesy MFA Boston.

metmuseum

Piece. ca. 1830–40. Credit line: Gift of William Sloane Coffin, 1926 https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/222034

calleido

a caparison (1621) made for king gustavus adolphus of sweden by brothers aert & pieter spiering

mayonezli

Handmade antique Ottoman peşkir with silver and silk embroidery on hand-woven cotton

metmuseum

Piece. late 18th century. Credit line: Rogers Fund, 1909 https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/216418

memories-of-ancients

Four cornered wool hat, Huari culture, Peru, 600-800 AD

from The Walters Art Museum

basiliskonline

jeanjauthor

THIS, writers. Unless your characters are very wealthy (can pay people to be very industrious in growing, spinning, weaving, sewing on their behalf) or live in a post-textile-industrial-revolution world (aka modern/futuristic), they're not going to have that many clothes.

What they will have is protective outerwear. Aprons are a very real necessity for a lot of jobs, from cooking to blacksmithing and beyond.

Women wore aprons and housecoats into the 1940s and 1950s when doing cooking & cleaning because it was still a bit expensive to own a lot of clothes...so this is within 100 years. Within living memory for many folks.

Coveralls were created to protect clothing, and were handed out as uniforms by factories because the workers complained that their own clothes were getting damaged by their workplace. (Unions helped with this, strongly encouraging the companies doing the damage to their regular clothes to step up with replacement garments that could get damaged and then replaced by the company whose work was damaging them.)

Businesses started having their employees wear uniforms to make them look good and as a signature of their company (UPS brown, for example), but unless the design teams are idiots, those outfits are going to be stitched in ways that you can move easily & comfortably while doing your assigned tasks.

In corporate culture in Japan, the salarywomen are often given a uniform dress to wear, and I know of one business that held a work-slowdown because the way the sleeves of those dresses were cut and stitched, they literally couldn't bring their arms forward to type on their computers in a comfortable way. The company balked at replacing the uniforms, until a section manager agreed to let his female workers wear their own "office-dressy" clothes for a day...and productivity leaped forward by over 200%, literally because they could move their arms and position them comfortably.

Another example of those who effed it up are the officers' uniforms for the Germans during WWII, which were focused on looking fashionable--and they were!--but were horrible to don quickly, awkward wear in actual combat, etc, and it took them far too long to "drop trousers" to use the bushes in a swift, efficient, and safe manner. (Not saying they didn't deserve to be shot for supporting such an evil regime, but you should be able to go to the bathroom without worrying that it'll take you over a minute to put your clothes back together enough to run for cover in summer.)

Prior to the 1700s, servants in manor houses & noble estates often did not wear a uniform; they just wore whatever they had, and depended on aprons and watchcoats and whatever to protect their clothes. Then it became a status symbol to put one's servants into uniforms, also known as livery. If you could afford to do that then, by gum-golly, you were wealthy, and people could literally see that you were wealthy!

As for those famous black maid's dresses with white aprons that every manga loves to draw? Black dye was still a bit expensive, but black hid most stains. White aprons were protective, and were to be changed out frequently...and it was far easier to bleach cloth than it was to dye it black, plus the stark contrast was very eye-catching, and since the aprons could be swapped out frequently (very small amount of cloth compared to a whole dress), the fact that your maidstaff were wearing clean aprons was another sign of how wealthy you were, rather than just making the maid wear the apron all day long, progressively getting dirtier and dirtier.

With all this said, how valuable clothing was also affected how armies moved. Throughout most of recorded history, armies were composed primarily of men...but there were almost always 2 categories of women who followed them on the campaign trail. One, of course, was sex workers (for obvious reasons), but the other was Laundresses...and the laundresses would be ransomed first, ahead of the sex workers, if captured by enemy forces. (Not all were women by any means, btw, but the majority were, so I stuck with that gender.)

They worked hard to get the clothing clean, helped with getting leather armor clean, and provided other grooming services such as lice-combing. "But Jean, why would getting the soldiers' clothing clean be that important?" Dudes, dudes, my dudes...if you need to take a piss or a shit, combat will not stop for you. Peristalsis will happen mid-sword-swing. This was one of the sources of "deadly infections killed many of the fighters who went to war," and laundresses literally cleaned that shit up.

When you're a warrior in an army, marching off through the forests of Gaul, you can only carry so many spare sets of clothes because you're also carrying your armor, your weapons, and your rations, etc, etc. You will want to take care of your clothes, because you don't have many replacements, and you won't get many replacements.

So, writers, when you're writing about pre-industrialized cultures...go easy on how many clothes people own. Also realize that accessorizing can make an old outfit look new, which includes small parts of the clothing that can be swapped out for other pieces in a mix-and-match style.

...One last note:

The most expensive, time-consuming part of building a Norse ship to go a-viking on wasn't the actual ship, which took many men 2+ years to craft. It was the sails, which took many people, males and females, 3+ years to spin and weave and stitch together. There are literal stories of brash sailors robbing other norsemen of their sails because thieving it was faster & easier. (It also explains a lot of the fury of certain blood feuds between clans & holdings, if you think about it.)

thaylepo

Bringing this back to writers again, your period fantasy or historic characters are also going to know how to do upkeep and basic repairs on their own clothing. Laundries and tailors might be a thing in their world, but spot-cleaning and being able to mend small tears before they become big ones is crucial when off doing quests or campaigns or world-saving missions or what have you. Garments are expensive to replace. It may be sexy to have your hero discard their bloody, torn, and ruined shirt after a fight, but even if the garment is ruined beyond repair or wearability, woven cloth is still so valuable that it's worth keeping and cleaning to be turned into something else (legwraps, bandages, resewn into a hat, or used as patches to repair other garments, etc.).

We live in an unprecedented era of wastefulness, where our clothing is often so cheap (and cheaply made) that it's barely worth the efgort of repairing once it begins to wear out, and so easy to replace that we end up amassing more than we need of it. Even less than a hundred years ago, this kind of frivolity was reserved for the EXCEPTIONALLY wealthy. Even fairly well off people would continually recycle their old garments again and again. (Think of Cinderella's mice making that old pink dress into something new with just bits and pieces of the sisters' discarded accessories.... taking ribbons or lace or whole sections of an old dress to use in a new one was very common until quite recently!)

And never underestimate the usefulness of rags. If the clothing is beyond all repair or salvage, it has a new life as rags. You can wrap food in them, stuff them in your shoes for warmth and fit, pad your pillow with them, use them for cleaning, for bandages, for tying and belting your drawers, for patches.... rags are invaluable in a world where paper towels and disposable hygiene products do not exist.

alex51324

This, and I'll add, vast secondhand market in clothing. That one simple tunic would cost the equivalent-in-labor of a new car today, and it would change hands as many times as one.

People in Ye Olden Times--the earliest garments we have evidence of, up through the middle ages (and well beyond, for all but the wealthiest people)--didn't wear simple, box-shaped garments because they didn't know how to sew anything fancier.

They did so because a Big Rectangle had the most resale/re-use value, since it could be tied, laced, belted, or otherwise fastened to fit a wide range of bodies. The same garment could be worn throughout pregnancy, as well as before and after. If it was no longer needed, it could be passed down or sold to virtually anyone. And when it became worn at the seams or hems, it could be re-sewn as a slightly smaller rectangle, and still fit a lot of people.

In Renaissance Europe, clothing got a lot more structured--and to a significant degree, this was as a status symbol. If you wore a fitted, short jacket over tights and those silly-looking puffy shorts (or a doublet, nether-hose and trunk hose), everybody who saw you would know that you could afford to buy all that fabric and then waste a bunch of it by cutting it into very specific shapes.

And if it fit well, then they'd also know that you were (probably) the first owner of said garments. Because the clothes were still expensive, they'd still be passed down, but there was a lot more need for clothing resellers, where secondhand clothes could wait for a buyer whose body they would fit. (Used clothing was a common gift or tip for servants, and if it was something they couldn't wear, they'd sell it.) In this way, clothing styles would percolate their way down the class ladder, both in the form of actual garments that had once belonged to a very rich person, and dupes made with simpler/cheaper materials and techniques, and perhaps modified for practicality.

And that's how you get fashion cycles: once something starts showing up on too many of the common people, the rich would move on, either exaggerating the trend to a point that, outside of that fashion context, looks ridiculous--

Like these silly, silly shoes:

(Note: these are probably exaggerated; the name of this picture is "Young Man Meeting Death," and we're presumably supposed to see him as a frivolous type of person who is about to find out why he should have lived a more serious and pious life.)

--or going in a different direction entirely.

So yeah, if you're writing secondary-world fantasy, give some thought to where the clothes are coming from, and how that's going to affect the styles and choices the characters make. If your working-class character in a Vaguely Medieval Fantasy Land is wearing fitted clothing, either that society has magic spinning and weaving technology, or your character is a serious fashionista/o, who is putting in a lot of time and effort into the project.

Similarly, if that type of setting has courtiers in a dazzling variety of impractical and elaborate garments--and several different outfits of it apiece--that implies a significant degree of urbanization and upward mobility, driving a secondhand market for those items, as well as providing the skilled labor to make and maintain those types of clothes. (You know these?

There was an entire trade centered on washing & ironing these things. Separate from actually making them, I mean. It involved tiny, specially shaped irons, and buckets of starch. Royalty or major nobility might have a servant dedicated to this highly specialized labor, and people a little lower on the ladder would send them out to be done. Ideally, you'd have each of your ruffs washed and re-set every time you wore it; people did re-wear them to save money, but they got droopy fast--hence the emphasis, in paintings featuring this trend, of crisp stiffness.)

nerathul

How would this all compare to leather and hide based clothing? As the material doesn't need spinning and weaving, only tanning, cutting and sewing would it be cheaper and more common?

quill-of-thoth

So. Not a tanner or a cloth maker here but - tanning can be very chemically specific. For those curious my perspective is of an animal pathologist's assistant. I have cut up several cows.

You do have the opportunity to amass a lot of leather if you hunt large animals, but post the adoption of farming and herding, most people are not feeding themselves that way. And there is just more small game overall. Leather is not necessarily easier, quicker, or less expensive to make than cloth, it just depends on what resources you have that are most abundant.

So the steps to making leather are as follows:

(Under the cut because, uh. I know this stuff from my job, which is “open a dead animal and let the doctor see what’s wrong with it” and most of it is messy.)

3) Assuming you have completed steps 1 and 2, you need the chemicals to tan the animal. Historically brains have been used a lot. DO NOT DO THIS if you are a modern person who wants to hunt for meat or leather. Prion diseases like CWD live in the brain, as do a lot of viruses that will kill or disable you painfully and slowly. It’s a relatively low risk (compared to things like accidents with your hunting gun) but it’s a risk you do not have to take. Yes, this is why some states want you to turn in the heads of any deer you shoot, regardless of how many points they have. This is part of how we tell you if the deer you shot is actually safe to eat, and not full of said viruses that will kill or disable you painfully. The other thing that you need is a steady location and a fuckton of water, because these bitches need to soak for a long time. Way longer than soak times for retting flax or other plant stem fibers. And in multiple different solutions of the foulest smelling shit that you can imagine: in addition to brains, the steps included soaking in urine, possibly dung if you didn’t have enough brains, salt curing, soaking until the hair is loosened and then scraping all that off, and then the actual tanning, which is soaking it in a high tannic acid tree bark solution until it’s ready. You can skip some of these steps, especially if you are, say, a paleolithic hunter gatherer. But your leathers will degrade faster. They will be less comfortable and less good for your range of motion. So the production of leather is not necessarily less time consuming than cloth. It is also resource expensive at many steps – from start to finish you need animal wealth, mineral and plant resources, time, and a lot of water that you don’t need urgently for something else, like irrigation or watering your livestock. You’ll also want to do your tanning away from where you eat and sleep, because, the odor of fermenting cowhide is not fun. Finally, it is way more difficult at every step to construct a garment out of leather: cutting it, using an awl to punch holes in it so you can actually sew, or boiling it into shape. It’s also a specialized process when it comes to the chemical aspect, more so than cleaning wool or beating flax, both of which you can produce way more of (eventually) as a small household in the middle of nowhere. Spinning and weaving are both activities you can pick at slowly – you can also get a very small child to spin yarn acceptably with practice, freeing up your adult hands to do things like the weaving, while you really can’t bring your tots into your leather working and expect them to do anything but get underfoot. And shitty cloth smells way better than shitty rotting leather. And none of this even scratches the surface of the material property reasons why a society may prefer leather for some applications (saddles, shoes...) and cloth for others.

jackironsides

Addendum to the leather reblog above, but salt is also historically very expensive, and pretty crucial to most of the older European methods of hide treatment I was able to find when reading up on tanning a few months ago. I can't remember if you still need it if you're using alum, but alum is still something you're going to have to buy in order to process your skins. (From what I read, tanning with brains was an Indigenous American technique, which was rapidly adopted by the colonisers bc of its efficient use of resources that are easy to hand, but modern American sources tend to drown out everything else when looking at historical stuff online without institution access, so I wouldn't state that categorically.)

The original thread is why I cringe every time I read a fic in my home fandom – which is roughly Fantasy Medieval/Renaissance in technology – that has main characters tear each other's clothing to show how excited they are for boning down.

In a premodern context, if someone tore my clothing carelessly, let alone deliberately, we're not fucking. We're no longer on speaking terms. They're dead to me. A shirt is bad enough; at least those were comparatively disposable, and could probably be repaired in a way that's unnoticeable when you wear it (shirts in most premodern European societies are underwear, not outerwear), but a doublet? Fuck right off into the sun.

‘Ooh, you can tell how ~horny~ I am for you because I crashed your car in order to get into your pants.’ That's what you sound like. Tear your own fucking shirt if you're that keen.

It's such an incredibly modern trope to me. I could MAYBE understand it if it's supposed to be a flex on how wealthy someone is, but my poor as shit blorbo with his hand-to-mouth existence who owns three shirts MAXIMUM should not be doing this. Would not be doing this.

The earliest I could see that trope as plausible in my mind is the Victorian period. There was still a healthy second-hand market for clothing, but clothing production had become far more mechanised than it ever had been before, and tearing a shirt probably wouldn't send you to the poor house. (But please still don't tear a suit jacket or a woman's bodice. That's hours of sewing work alone, even after the advent of treadle sewing machines. What's wrong with you.)

aetherograph

Don't forget dyeing, which had to be re-done and was itself a whole fucking profession.

Indigo is one of the hardest natural dyes to start a pot of, especially without a thermometer or indigo white, so once you got that pot started you kept it going. Indigo also has to be processed into a water-soluble form by treating it with ammonia. How do you source ammonia in a pre-industrial world? Well, the local piss barrel at the tavern is full of something that will certainly turn into ammonia if you let it sit. There were almost wars over the argument of whether the dyers should have to pay money to take the piss from the tavern or whether the publican should pay THEM for the SERVICE of taking away the piss, which after all is garbage.

Dark or vivid colours are expensive, and natural dyes are not fast--that is, they fade with washing and sunlight and wear, so you have to keep re-dying them every so often. Black in particular was VERY expensive, moreso than ANY other colour. Certain fibers dye very well and certain ones do not.

Yellow and green were favourite colours of the common folk--bright yellows in particular were very easy to get with cheap dyestuffs, and you see bright sunshine yellow very often in medieval art of ordinary folks. Denim blue was middling expensive. Purple, pink, and orange did not exist as perceived colours--remember, colour is a function of language. Meaning if you don't have a word for the colour, you don't perceive it. Red was difficult and the only thing more expensive than red was, as I said, black.

Dyers and fullers had smelly jobs and worked with piss--their workshops were, like the tanner's, on the edge of town, and downwind if possible.

Oh yes, what's a fuller. Well, wool is full of oils and stuff from the ship, and you need to eliminate those if you want the fabric to be thick and warm and insulating. So you need to soak it in urine and use your feet to rub it over a special textured surface to get all the oils out and shrink and felt the fabric. Loden, felt, and duffel are all fabrics that require fulling in order to become.

Spinning was done by most everybody all the time every day; that's why you see pictures of women with long distaffs leaning on their shoulders as they go about, in some art of ordinary life in the middle ages. You could spin all day while doing everything else. Weaving, however, was a profession, usually male, and weavers were very respected people in all societies that had them.

Pulling the fleece was an activity that you had to do before the wool could be spun. The process for turning a sheep's wool into a garment consisted of many more steps than shear, spin, weave, sew.

Shear

Pull the fleece: this involved sitting around with everyone and pulling the long guard hairs away from the undercoat. A lot of stories, songs, and gossip happened during this process. It also leaves you with very nice soft hands from all the lanolin.

Comb the undercoat hairs with a brush or comb to line up all the fibres in the same direction. This leaves you with rolags or roving.

Spin using a distaff and drop spindle. This takes forever. But there was a very important, revolutionary machine that came up the silk road to Europe and changed--and I cannot emphasise this enough--EVERYTHING.

This machine eliminated the drudgery of spinning, spreading from the East to Europe starting in the late 1200s. It freed up women's time to do more, and made spinning itself a job you could make money doing--the word "spinster" is the term for that profession, and elderly women suddenly could have money of their own, support themselves. This was very important!! This was a labour-saving machine that gave more power to women in Europe and made the making of fabric and fiber faster and easier than ever before!

5. Dye the threads. It's much easier to dye skeins of yarn than it is to dye fabric or garments in pre-industrial ages, so dyeing would be done at the yarn stage. Dyeing the yarn also means you can do things like have the weft be one colour and the warp another. This results in some of the most exciting and beautiful fabric in existence:

6. Weave the fabric. The loom was another piece of technology that was constantly being improved upon, because society was built on looms. In fact, the predecessor to the computer was the loom! Look up a video of a jaquard loom sometime, you'll see it uses punchcards to "program" in the different patterns of the fabric it produces. The song "four loom weaver" is actually "power loom weaver". Power looms were another improvement that made weaving faster. The luddites were the first labour strike and organization, and it was about? That's right, WEAVING.

7. Fulling, polishing, and other finishing techniques. Moire is made by calendaring. Felt is made by fulling. Polishing, waxing, and all kinds of other techniques are used to make all the different varieties of fabric that exist. The way we live now is sad and pathetic, we don't come into contact with much in the way of variety of fabric anymore. Everything is disposable, paperthin and made of plastic or cotton or bamboo, knits mostly. When you get into historical costuming, you meet all kinds of fabrics--lush brocades, velvets, and coutils, and silk. But it's NOTHING compared to the hand-woven fabrics of times past.

Machines can make fabric fast, but it's looser than when a human is doing it. The density of some hand-woven fabrics is so great that you don't need to hem them! Likewise, the translucency of some ancient linens made in Egypt is still a mystery we're trying to figure out how to reproduce, because machine-spinning and machine-weaving meant we LOST these techniques. People who spin and weave and hand-make fiber their whole lives can make it as thin as a spider's gossamer, and not even machines can do that today. Machines are wonderful and humans should not have to labour so much if a machine can do it, but it's worth noting that just because it's made by machine doesn't mean that it's better quality, just that its cheaper and faster to make. I'm sure if we tried, we'd find ways of machines being able to do it, especially with the "sort things and detect things" algorithmic programs software engineers have come up with, the ones that detect cancer and so on.

8. Sewing the garment. I'm putting a note here for sewing bc sewing by hand is a lot easier and faster and better than by machine sometimes. I hand-sewed an entire pair of pants and the hems were utterly invisible when I was finished, it was astonishing. I also used a running stitch for most of it and that's. That's the normal stitch to use, you just backstitch every ten stitches or so and then keep going. It wastes far less thread than a sewing machine. To make those pants I only needed three stitches: running, backstitch, and whipstitch. And I learned by watching Nicole Rudolph when she's sewing, she does the same stitches for the most part! There's speciality stitches for locking in the ends of corset bones (flossing) and so on, but the majority of the long seams are just the running stitch! Needles and pins were precious commodities in pre-industrial times, and there are letters between John Adams and his wife Abigail that illustrate this, which were famously made into the latter half of the song "Piddle, Twiddle and Resolve" in the 1969 musical 1776.

Needles were at first made of bone, hand-carved, in very ancient times; but needles and pines of steel and brass were also produced later on as metalworking tech started being able to do so. These were very precious, and the little tiny strawberry that hangs off a traditional tomato pincushion, the one full of what feels like sand? That was for cleaning the rust and tarnish off your needle, so it would go through the fabric easier. You can still buy bone and brass needles in the traditional style from historical merchants, and try for yourself sewing the historical way!

Many people in fact already practise an ancient form of fabric and garment-making: Knitting and crochet! There's a much older predecessor to these, called nalbinding, that is very interesting and practised with roving rather than spun and plied yarn, and uses a flat wooden or bone needle. It creates very dense, not very stretchy things, and was used by the Norse. Nalbound things are VERY cold-proof, and eventually felt--and that's a good thing, felt is very warm stuff! My mom made me a nalbound hat once and I miss it every winter.

Now, garments were not just fabric of course. People have liked decorating everything since time immemorial, and embroidery, buttons, beads, and other things were used. Another type of decoration, one very popular in the SCA, is TRIM! Trim is made by weaving on an inkle loom, which looks like this:

This one doesn't have the cards visble, but the pattern can be produced with cards that can be turned:

This produces a brocade, and yes, you can weave letters or all kinds of patterns into the "tape" that is produced. Depending on what fiber you use, and how fine the threads, these can be trims or hair-ribbons or shoulder-straps or all kinds of things!

Lace was also a very precious and complex form of decoration, and pieces of lace were so incredibly expensive and treasured that they were passed down as heirlooms. We're used to lace being white or maybe cream, but at certain points in France, blue lace could be found. And nothing is really stopping you from dyeing your lace, or using dyed threads to make it, other than fashion and convention.

Of course, places outside Europe (which is my speciality and has been my whole life) have their own fabric and decoration techniques, from the wax resist of batik to the special tie-dye from Japan called Shibori, to ikat, to the quilling of many North American Indigenous people (not to mention wampum beads, hand-carved of shells!). Everyone likes to decorate themselves and their clothing!

patheticprogrammingperson

@elodieunderglass, this seems right up your alley, at least in the latter parts.

elodieunderglass

Thank you so much!

headspace-hotel

have some questions re: brain tanning, because I listened to this fascinating podcast for a class that talked about how Native Americans were reviving the practice. I don't know if chronic wasting disease is a concern with brain tanning or not. but generally yeah laypeople shouldn't mess around with animal brains

also, black wouldn't be expensive in areas where wool or fleece bearing animals came in black. alpacas and llamas can be black

lizardlicks

Hello! Shepherd and hand spinner here. Black animals are not truly black.

Here's one of my Icelandic ewes, Presley:

Icelandics are what's known as a primitive breed, that is, she's very close to the kinda sheep early shepherds would have been keeping. Icelandics and other primitive breeds have this neat ability to shed ( otherwise known as roo) their coats in the spring, unlike modern breeds, like my wensleydale, which MUST be shorn.

You can see looking at Presley's cost that she is not actually pure black. She has steaks of silver, and the tips of her wool are sun bleached to a more brown color. Sun bleaching happens with almost every dark wooled animal. Here's some lambs from a couple years ago. Only about a month old in this pic, but their black coats are already turning brown at the tips (when shorn, the wool nearest the skin is still very dark/black).

Having spun up many, many naturally black fleeces I can tell you: if you want your cloth, yarn, thread, etc to be truly black, it must be dyed. There's too much variance in animal fiber to get a consistent, deep color. White animals similarly are more of a cream color. Here's the fleece of my white ram, Appa.

He has almost no markings and this is about as white as a sheep can be, which isn't very. But crucially, it's MUCH easier and cheaper to bleach a creamy wool to true white than it is to dye a dark wool to true black. A sufficient concentration of ammonia would do it, and you can find that in... Urine!

Hell, urine was the traditional source of ammonia used in the process of fulling woolen cloth (the final step after weaving where the cloth is shrunk and felted), so it would have been pretty readily available (comparatively).

So yes. Black cloth, as in truly black, the kind you would want if you wanted your workers's uniforms to look at all polished and presentable, would need to be dyed, which would cost more.

#history #cloth #leather #weaving