(Hi, I don't know if this is the vibe for a tumblr ask but I am curious what you think!) I was wondering if there is anything you have learned from PIH or in Sierra Leone that we can implement in order to improve access or quality of care for people in the US?
Thanks!
This is a great question. There is so much the U.S. healthcare system can learn from the Sierra Leonean healthcare system.
One obvious thing that comes to mind: Healthcare systems are only good if they deliver care to everyone. With almost no money in the health budget, SL can't afford or implement a national insurance scheme, but they still have a national mandate to guarantee free healthcare to all children. This is reflected in declining (although not declining nearly fast enough) rates of child mortality, whereas in the U.S. child mortality has actually risen in the last few years in part due to gaps in care.
Another thing: Rich healthcare systems like the U.S. would do well to get more people access to care through community health workers, who live in the communities where they work. CHWs are able to check on people living with complex or chronic conditions like TB and diabetes and ensure they're able to take medicine; they can also identify high-risk pregnancies (something we don't always do a good job of in the U.S., especially among uninsured people) and refer people to clinics or hospitals when more specialized care is needed. CHWs save the healthcare system money while also making it more humane and dignified, and while it wouldn't be easy to roll out an at-scale CHW program in the U.S., pilot programs have shown a lot of promise here.
My resolution last year was to do one thing before bed that would make my morning feel easier, and thatâs become a daily habit that Iâm carrying into this new year.
Some nights even filling up the kettle and setting an empty mug out for my morning tea felt hard. But I was always thankful for it in the morning.
Other nights, one thing would lead to another, and Iâd wake up in a clean house with everything ready to go.
And, on a rare few nights, the one thing that I could do to make my morning easier was going straight to bed and allowing myself to rest.
What stayed the same each day is that I would take a moment to think of what I could do for my future self and do it, even after a hard day. And I would wake up knowing that I had done my best and any effortâno matter how smallâwas a kindness to myself.
This is the self care we donât talk about enough. The number of times Iâve thanked my past self for doing the thing is incredible. And those little tiny things make your life so much easier. Pumping up your bike tires, finally greasing the squeaky door hinge, etc. means future you in experiencing chronically less stress overall and that adds up in a massive way.
And if you are like me and have a kinda terrible short term memory, you get the additional benefit of relief every time you go âawww I have to doâŚâ and then you donât. Itâs like a little snow day, year round. And who doesnât want tiny constant year round snow days. Do the thing
My resolution last year was to do one thing before bed that would make my morning feel easier, and thatâs become a daily habit that Iâm carrying into this new year.
Some nights even filling up the kettle and setting an empty mug out for my morning tea felt hard. But I was always thankful for it in the morning.
Other nights, one thing would lead to another, and Iâd wake up in a clean house with everything ready to go.
And, on a rare few nights, the one thing that I could do to make my morning easier was going straight to bed and allowing myself to rest.
What stayed the same each day is that I would take a moment to think of what I could do for my future self and do it, even after a hard day. And I would wake up knowing that I had done my best and any effortâno matter how smallâwas a kindness to myself.
This is the self care we donât talk about enough. The number of times Iâve thanked my past self for doing the thing is incredible. And those little tiny things make your life so much easier. Pumping up your bike tires, finally greasing the squeaky door hinge, etc. means future you in experiencing chronically less stress overall and that adds up in a massive way.
I've seen this clip many times, but never really appreciated the power of "what was her problem?" Just casually assuming that lesbians come in a wide variety of shapes and being inclusive. As a transbian who is probably still closer to Homer shaped than to my ideal, that's huge!
From the Nashville Zooâs fb page! Hereâs the petition, please please please take a moment to add your name (even if youâre not from Nashville!). If you are from Tennessee, contact your representatives and make it clear that the people do not want this data center. This is an AZA accredited zoo which is home to several species of critically endangered animals, we NEED to protect it. Make your voice heard!
although if we ARE talking about passive aggression my technique is generally (and I have had a LOT OF PRACTICE developing it lmao) is to interpret what I think they're implying and then say "are you asking me to (x)?" in a very polite tone with a friendly (sincere! not mocking!) smile. I find that this often 1. ceases the tiresome cycle of ignoring passive aggressive behavior -> behavior escalates -> ignore it -> it escalates, and on and on that you get if you simply ignore it, 2. lets the person know that in the future they can just fucking ask you directly for god's sake, and very importantly 3. although I strive not to sound condescending when I do this, it is inescapably and obviously something that I learned to say when talking to toddlers. the people I use this with the most (mostly older female relatives but not infrequently on men as well) will often catch a hint of that and sort of realize that their method of approaching me was childish, not in a derogatory sense, but in the sense that they don't need to try to get me to do stuff in the way they got used to working in the past. they can do it differently.
obviously how effective this is varies wildly based on the relationship, or lack thereof, that you have with the other person. but I find it effective with people who are In Your Life but don't meaningfully have any control over you. quite often it DOES result in increased directness in the future, especially if it's something I end up doing fairly often. and it's not rude; I'm just politely seeking clarification about what is being communicated. it makes the person have to think about what effect they were expecting their behavior to have on my behavior, and then just... tell me straightforwardly. but without escalating the situation or making the person feel 'called out' most of the time.
its very simple but I so much more often see people say "always ignore passive aggressive communication" and while I think that's absolutely a good approach much of the time, especially especially from strangers. it is not especially EFFECTIVE at helping them change how they're approaching communicating with you in the future. in my experience. so. I prefer to use my method when I determine that it might be effective.
She frequently makes requests by telling me what I want, eg "oh wouldn't you like to.." "don't you think it's be nice if..."
It used to drive me up the wall, but now as an adult with better understanding of what's happening I say "Actually I'm fine with x, but I'd be happy to do y if that's what you want?"
One day she actually asked me, "Why is it so important to you that I say that y is what I want?"
and i got to say "Well I don't like being told what I want. I have enough life experience to know my own desires and limitations, and I can advocate for them when I need to. However your opinions do matter to me and I want to take them into account. It's much less stressful for me to do so when I'm not guessing what's in your mind."
And folks, she Actually Listened.
Later that day she wanted something that ended up not being possible, but because she said so directly I was able to help her find a different way to achieve the same goal!
She still slips up, of course, but it was so good to see her Understand.
I love thissssss. yes I have had similar experiences modeling this behavior for older female relatives. I think a lot of them got real used to having to be indirect to get their needs met and it becomes maladaptive but they get stuck.
alright I've got to do some quick math to explain attitudes towards AI to my boss.
we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)
please rb for larger sample size!
Question 1/3
What is your age, and do you feel AI is a net positive or net negative in our lives today?
Bear religion probably fucking rocks. You're a fucking bear, you're the deadliest thing on earth, once a year an endless supply of salmon just flings itself up the river to gorge on and then you nap for 3 months.
The most delicious food in the world is protected by tiny demons who can defend it from everyone except you. Your natural armor is thick enough that you can just eat the damn hive while they buzz around you. God's chosen animals right there
Regular bears tell stories of angel bears sent by the Bear God, pure white and twice as strong as any normal bear could be, who rule the summit of the Earth and kill all who stand in their path.
And they are right, those bears exist and totally do that. Humans just have fake angels as a cope.
love the idea of bears being the chosen species actually. having a near death experience and glimpsing heaven and realising it's just full of bears, no humans at all, humans not ensouled actually, humans an accidental byproduct of God's plan for bears
First attempt at tablet weaving! Setting up the cards took most of the day but I managed 1/2 a pattern before bedtime. If you count 2am as bedtime. And it looks mostly like it should!
dead serious normalize having an average boring ass life where you have enough to meet your needs we do not need to be remarkable we just need to be alive
Yes it did. I just let it slide because I was taught that I'm "too sensitive" anytime something bothered me. But now I'm finally standing up for myself.
"You never struggled with this when you were a kid."
Yes I did. I just burned myself out in order to do it so I wouldn't be punished. But now I'm accepting myself enough to not force myself to do what I was never meant to do.
"You didn't have these problems when you were younger."
Yes, I did. I just spent my child/teen years with structured institutions like school while not having to worry about whether I had a roof over my head or food to eat and spent my early adult years using up every bit of adrenaline I will ever have to ignore the fact that I've been chronically burnt out my whole life.
At the risk of sounding anti-intellectual, I think that college should be free and also not a requirement for employment outside of highly specialized career fields
technically you can, if you don't care about degrees.
Free Harvard courses.
Free Courses from Stanford.
Free Courses from MIT.
Free courses from Yale.
Free courses from Princeton.
Free courses on Coursera.
Free Courses on EDx
Free Courses on Alison
For paid, there's The Great Courses+/Wonderium. 20$ a month for unlimited courses.
When searching, the phrases you're looking for are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), or you can do a general search of say, "free online college courses."
Oh, and so you don't get surprised like I did, have an avoid: Hillsdale College is a conservative Christian site and not a valid MOOC place. Sign up with them and you will get things like THIS IS WHY THE LEFT IS TURNING YOUR KIDS TRANS AND GAY in your inbox.
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.)
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.
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.)
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?
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 âopen a dead animal and let the doctor see whatâs wrong with itâ and most of it is messy.)
1) Kill and skin animal. This means removing the whole skin, in as intact a piece as possible, which while harder than it seems would be something your fictional leather-working society would be way better at than me.
Actually, scratch that. Step 1 is know what kind of animal gets you the type of leather that you want. Cowhide and horsehide are thick and tough but provide a lot of usable skin. Young goats are supposedly great for thinner, softer leathers, but my professional experience doesn't give me a lot to go on there. The phrase "kid gloves" means that they are leather gloves made from young goats, aka kids, which tells you that the leather is thin and flexible.
The main cost of this step is having enough of the animals you need to slaughter. If youâre hunting, then itâs all meat to you, but if you are a farmer pre-industrially, meat might be a byproduct of animal husbandry and not the point of it. One of the main reasons to keep a herd mammal â horses, cows, sheep, goats, llamas â is milk. Milk is liquid protein and once you figure out how to make cheese it can store for longer than meat can, at least without a fuckton of salt, which is often worth its weight in gold historically. (You could also smoke it but fuel is expensive and smoking things is technically a little trickier than salting them.) If you kill too many of your female animals, you donât get milk, and you donât get baby animals. If you keep too many male baby animals until adulthood, they start fighting and may injure you, your valuable female animals, or the structures you have built to keep your valuable herd animals in your possession instead of your neighbors. As a herder, your reliable access to meat and hides is mostly culling immature males from your herd, which tends to lead to smaller amounts of usable hide.
2) Scrape that shit. Harder. If you do not remove literally all the connective tissue beneath the skin, your hide will rot. Your hide may still rot if you donât tan it properly or wait too long to tan it. Or if you tan it wrong by dumping shit in water and waiting for the magic of fermentation to work right without even knowing the difference between an acid and a base.
The scraping is also a great way to tear the hide or put holes in it. If you, for example, want to make leather out of a cow that has been lying around in the summer for a day because you wisely prioritized the meat⌠it can get kinda fragile, depending on what the bacteria do. I have to sharpen our 21st century steel knives literally every time we do a cow or a horse, just to get through the hide at all, and I have still seen cowskin tear like thin cloth if itâs deteriorated enough.
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. Itâs a relatively low risk (compared to things like accidents with your hunting gun) but itâs 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 didnât 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 itâs 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 â from start to finish you need animal wealth, mineral and plant resources, time, and a lot of water that you donât need urgently for something else, like irrigation or watering your livestock. Youâll 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. Itâs 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 â 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 canât 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.
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 â which is roughly Fantasy Medieval/Renaissance in technology â 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.
âOoh, you can tell how ~horny~ I am for you because I crashed your car in order to get into your pants.â 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.)
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!
