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 “open a dead animal and let the doctor see what’s wrong with it” 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 you’re hunting, then it’s 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 – horses, cows, sheep, goats, llamas – 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 don’t get milk, and you don’t 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 don’t 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 it’s 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. 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.
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.)
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!
I'd like to add some more information about tablet weaving, the trim that can be made with the cards!
Tablet weaving is an ancient technique, the earliest direct evidence we have of it is also from the bronze age. It is known in almost every continent except Australasia and Antarctica. The technique is a form of warp twining, wherein the long warp threads are twisted around each other and the weft is inserted in between, forming these rows of cords bound together. The warp threads are strung through small square cards or tablets, which usually have four holes, one in each corner. The pattern can be formed through the colour of the yarn put through each hole, whether the threads are inserted from the front or the back, and whether you turn the cards away from you or towards you when weaving.
This diagram is from Peter Collingwood's 'The techniques of tablet weaving'.
There are dozens of techniques in tablet weaving which range from very simple to extremely complicated and time consuming. One of the bands found in the Oseberg ship burial in Vestfold, Norway, dates to 834 CE and is very simple to make - here's a reconstruction of it I made in blue and yellow silk yarn, just like the original.
Some bands however were extremely complicated, like these twill motifs from Hallstatt, which date to c. 500 BCE.
Here's another example I made from a band from Byzantine Egypt:
Some bands from Scandinavia and Northern Europe were made using metal to produce shiny bands, often used as headbands. They were most often made by twisting very fine silver or gold stripes around a core of silk yarn, and using it as an extra weft on top of the band to produce geometric motifs. This was perhaps the most expensive and time consuming technique, even more so than the complicated twill shown above.
This is not my image, I couldn't find the source
Tablet weaving was not purely a decorative technique though. Tablet woven bands were very often used as a starting band for woven textiles, and they could also be used to finish the bottom of the weaving and the sides too - usually on cloaks. Therefore it was a ubiquitous technique found almost wherever the warp weighted loom was, and this also explains why the technique gradually fell out of use after the introduction of horizontal looms in northern Europe. Tablet weaving did still stick around for a long time after, becoming more and more specialised and I believe it still survives today as part of traditional costume in parts of Eastern Europe.
I am writing my undergraduate archaeology dissertation about the labour that goes into tablet weaving, by hand processing a sheep fleece, spinning the yarn on a drop spindle and weaving several surviving examples of tablet weaving from early medieval northern Europe. Tablet weaving has been studied a lot more recently in the last 20 years, but it remains mostly a craft rather than an area of study so I would love to see it better studied in academia (what I am hoping to do with my dissertation and hopefully in my master's!)
as a kid, I walked into a closet, saw an enormous snake, and then walked out. I walked up to my dad, as you do, and said "dad there's a huge snake in the closet"
so he smiled smugly, grabbed his knife (I think it was a machete?), walked off, and then I heard him scream followed shortly by three panicked slams
it turns out he didn't actually think he'd find a huge snake in there, but it sure was there, and he sure did chop it into three pieces
I was already on board with his sweet wholesome open-to-love-and-nurturing heart but I was fully unprepared for getting to that last tweet and seeing how off the hook HOT dude is
Congressional Republicans can end this at any time, you know. They can just do that. Stopping the tariffs wouldn't even take that many of them, not even 10 total.
People keep saying, "How can one man have the power to do all this?????" One man doesn't. One man is being supported in this by an entire political party, and that political party was elected to the majority in both of our houses of Congress. This isn't one man.
The story of Balto is interesting. He led a team of sled dogs across the Alaskan wilderness in the dead of winter with diphtheria antitoxins to stop an outbreak in Nenana Alaska. Diphtheria is a deadly infectious disease that could wipe out a third of a town’s population. It is mostly unknown to the public today because of vaccines. Balto’s body is preserved in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
Let’s not forget Togo! Who, at 12 years old during the serum run, lead his team 200 miles through much more dangerous conditions during the first leg of the journey before Balto ran the last 55-mile stretch.
The town of Nome, situated in Western Alaska, was a relative hub for even smaller communities in the region, but in winter was utterly cut off from… nearly everywhere. The harbour iced over in winter, there were no roads connecting it anywhere else, the nearest railroad line was nearly 700 miles (1000+ kilometres) away in Nenana. Air travel was still new at the time and planes couldn’t handle the inclement winter weather.
In 1924, the community had a single doctor and a few nurses who served approximately 10 000 people, including large Eskimo populations in the area (the town itself had a population of roughly 1000 people - bear in mind how few children lived in this community when you see the casualty counts). He had realized his diphtheria vaccine stock was expired and had ordered more from mainland USA months earlier. When it failed to arrive on the final ship of the season, he was a little concerned, but diphtheria was fairly rare, and he figured he’d just restock in the spring.
Of all the rotten luck, January 1925 was when a diphtheria outbreak hit the region.
There was a scramble, in the mainland USA as well as Alaska, to find a way to get the vaccine to this town in the middle of winter. There were attempts to fly a vaccine supply over, but the planes were grounded by storms. This was part of the United States in the 1920s. There was no way to get there.
Except by sled dogs, running the vaccine from that train station in Nenana, 674 miles away. Over 1000 kilometres away, in the dead of winter in Alaska, by 20 mushers (mostly native Athabaskans) and 150 sled dogs running in relay, switching off at tiny villages and rest stations along the way. It was bitterly cold. As in, -85°F (-60°C) at the coldest. There were blizzards, hurricane force winds, and at some points visibility was so poor the men couldn’t see their dogs in front of them.
No man or beast should have been out in that. You freeze in seconds if you’re not moving. Multiple dogs died from being run so hard in such cold weather. Mushers grappled with hypothermia and frostbite. One needed hot water poured over his frozen hands because he was frozen to his sled. Another’s face was black with frostbite. Some strapped themselves up and lead their packs when their lead dogs collapsed.
This relay team traveled 674 miles in 5.5 days. Togo and his owner, Leonhard Seppala, did by far the longest and most dangerous run, travelling over 260 miles (about 420 kilometres) including the initial travel to his pickup spot. Gunnar Kaasen and his lead dog, Balto, did the final 53 miles (85 kilometres) into Nome, where they were greeted as heroes.
Prior to the vaccine arriving in Nome, 5-7 children officially died of diphtheria, with dozens of confirmed cases who may well have died without treatment - but it’s suspected the surrounding Indigenous communities were much harder hit, with numbers impossible to confirm.
When you think that this happened less than 100 years ago, how desperate this community was for a vaccine, how much these mushers risked and lost to get it to this town as fast as they possibly could…
When Noem testified before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, ranking member Senator Chris Murphy gave such powerful, informative, and important opening remarks I have to share:
transcript:
"I say this with seriousness and respect, but your department is out of control.
"You’re spending like you don’t have a budget. You are running out of money for this fiscal year. You are illegally refusing to spend funds that have been authorized by this Congress and appropriated by this committee. You are ignoring the immigration laws of this nation, implementing a brand new immigration system that you have invented that has little relation to the statutes that you are required to follow as spelled out in your oath of office. You are routinely violating the rights of immigrants who may not be citizens, but whether you like it or not, they have constitutional and statutory rights when they reside in the United States.
"Your agency acts as if laws don’t matter, as if the election gave you some mandate to violate the Constitution and the laws passed by this Congress. It did not give you that mandate. You act as if your disagreement with the law, or even the public’s disagreement with the law, is relevant and gives you the ability to create your own law. It does not give you that ability.
"Let’s start with your spending. You are on track to trigger the Anti-Deficiency act. That means you are on track to spend more money than you have been allocated by Congress. This is a rare occurrence and it is wildly illegal.
"Your agency will be broke by July, over two months before the end of the fiscal year. You may not think that Congress has allotted enough money to ICE, but the Constitution and the federal law does not allow you to spend more money than you have been given or to invent money.
"This obsession with spending at the border has left the country unprotected elsewhere. The security threats to national security are higher, not lower, since Trump came to office. To fund the border you have illegally gutted spending to cybersecurity.
"As we speak, Russian and Chinese hackers are having a field day attacking our nation. You have withdrawn funds for disaster prevention. Storms are going to kill more people because of your illegal withholding of these funds. Your myopia about the border fueled by President Trump’s prejudice against people who speak a different language have shattered most of this country’s most important defenses.
"Now let’s talk about the impoundments. When Congress appropriates funds for a specific purpose the administration has no discretion whether or not to spend that money unless you go through a specific process with this committee.
"Let me give you two of many instances of this illegal impoundment. The first is a shelter and services program. Senator Britt may want to zero that account out, but that account is funded in a bipartisan way. You may not like the program. Your policy is to treat migrants badly. I think that’s abhorrent, but it doesn’t matter that you don’t like the program. You cannot cancel spending in this program, and you cannot use the funds, as you have, to fund other things, like ICE.
"You have also cancelled citizenship and integration grants, which help lawful permanent residents become citizens, helping them take the citizenship test. I know your goal is to try to make life as hard as possible for immigrants, but that goal is not broadly shared by the American public. That’s why Congress, in a bipartisan way, for decades has funded this program to help immigrants become citizens.
"Now let’s talk about why encounters at the southern border are down so much. This is clearly going to be your primary talking point today. You will tell us that it represents as success. But the prime reason why encounters are down is because you are brazenly violating the law every hour of every day.
"You are refusing to allow people showing up at the southern border to apply for asylum. I acknowledge that you don’t believe that people should be allowed to apply for asylum, but the White House doesn’t get to choose that. The law requires you to process people who are showing up at the border to apply for asylum.
"Why? Because our asylum law is a bipartisan commitment, an effort to correct for our nation’s unconscionable decision to deny entry to Jews to this country who were being hunted and killed by the Nazis. Our nation, Republicans and Democrats, decided, wrote it into law, that we would not repeat that horror ever again, and thus we would allow for people who were fleeing terror and torture to come here, arrive at the border, and make a case for asylum.
"Finally let’s talk about these disappearances. In an autocratic society, people who the regime does not like or who are protesting the regime are often picked up off the street, and spirited away, often to open-ended detention. Sometimes they’re never seen again.
"What you are doing, both to individuals who have legal rights to stay here, like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, or students who are just protesting Trump’s policies, is immoral and, to follow the theme, it is illegal. You have no right to deport a student visa holder with no due process simply because they have spoken in a way that offends the President. You can’t remove migrants whom a court has given humanitarian protection from removal.
"Now, reports suggest that you are planning to remove immigrants with no due process and send them to prisons in Libya. Libya is in the middle of a civil war. It is subject to a level 4 travel advisory, meaning we tell American citizens never to travel to Libya. We don’t have an embassy there because it is not safe for our diplomats. Sending migrants with pending asylum claims into a war zone, just because it’s cruel, is so deeply disturbing.
"Listen, I understand that my Republican colleagues on this committee don’t view the policy as I do, don’t share my level of concern for the way the government treats immigrants, but what I don’t understand is why we don’t have consensus in the Senate and on this committee on the decision by this administration to impound the spending that we have decided together to allocate in defense of this nation.
"We as an appropriations committee worked interminable hours to write and pass this budget, and so we make ourselves irrelevant when we allow the administration to ignore what we have decided. And then when we look the other way when the administration rounds up immigrants who are here illegally and have committed no offenses worthy of detainment, we also do potential irreversible damage to the Constitution.
"These should not be partisan concerns—destroying the power of Congress, eroding individuals’ Constitutional rights. This should matter to both parties."
_
I never knew that our asylum laws arise from when we didn’t take Jews escaping from the Nazis. Both parties said never again. Yet here we are.
Everything this "administration" is doing is impeachable, and this Congress has a responsibility to get these criminals out of office and keep them out.
Contact your representatives and demand that they hold Homeland Security to account if they want to keep holding their offices - if they in fact want those offices to still be a thing in the future.
snowghoul
2087
vaporwave
