The Mysteries of the Marshes: The Ancient Textile Secrets of Europe's Bog Bodies
Haptic & Hue
If we need proof that textiles can rewrite human history, then it lies with the bog bodies of northern Europe. Textile archaeologists are revealing a whole new past about people who, in some cases, are older than Tutankhamen, but much less celebrated. Across northern Europe there are hundreds of bog bodies, who long ago were buried in marshlands and were preserved down the centuries by acidic conditions and lack of oxygen. We will never know all their secrets, but slowly we are discovering more about who they were, and how they lived. It is their textiles that bring us closer to them and tell...
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Reviving Rocking Stitch and Saving Wholecloth Quilting
Haptic & Hue
Here's a surprise! An extra episode of Haptic & Hue. We said we were taking a break for July and August and yes, we are. But we thought we would give you a taste of what Friends of Haptic & Hue sounds like and invite you to join the other podcast that we make every month. So here is the episode of Travels with Textiles that was uploaded for Friends in May this year, just as UNESCO announced that it was adding an old quilting practice to the list of crafts that have intangible cultural heritage status. Quilting in a flat frame with a rocking stitch has a history that...
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The Witches of Scotland: How a New Tartan Became a Living Memorial
Haptic & Hue
A very special tartan has just started to roll off the weaving looms of the Prickly Thistle Mill in the north of Scotland. This brand-new design in black, pink, red, and grey is part of a powerful campaign to remember the thousands of overwhelmingly female lives lost to accusations of witchcraft between the 1500s and the mid 1700s. This was one of the bloodiest miscarriages of justice Scotland has ever seen. Records suggest that at the time Scotland accused and executed more people than any other country in the world. The Witches of Scotland Tartan sold out long before it went into...
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Textile Waste and the Catastrophe at Kantamanto
Haptic & Hue
Early this year there was a catastrophic fire at the world’s biggest market for selling and upcycling second-hand clothes. Kantamanto market, in Ghana’s capital Accra, was accidently set alight, and most of the small stalls in the retail part of the huge market burnt to the ground. Two people died, many were injured, and the livelihoods of thousands of people were destroyed, driving many of them into debt and desperation. But the impact of the fire spread much further than that. You may not have heard of Kantamanto market, but it plays a vital role in dealing with our...
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Coupons For Clothes: A Wartime Idea Made New?
Haptic & Hue
Creativity and invention aren’t words often associated with hardship and suffering, but in the Second World War women in America and Britain faced with clothes rationing rose to the challenge in many different ways. Those days are long past, but in an era of textile super-abundance, do clothes coupons have something new to teach us about how we buy and use our clothes? Can clothes rationing help cure us of an addiction to fast fashion? In this month’s episode, we hear from a well-known winner of the Great British Sewing Bee who has adopted the wartime system of coupons as a way of...
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Pleats Please: the Story of the World's Oldest Fashion Technique
Haptic & Hue
There’s a fashion technique that’s been in continuous use for over five thousand years – proof, if proof is needed, that there is nothing new in fashion. We have tunics that survive from the time of the Pharaohs in Egypt that use it and you can see it still in the catwalk collections of today. It’s incredible to think that the simple pleat has pleased the human eye for so long and in so many different ways. Pleating adds movement and life to garments and often signals wealth and abundance. Each culture has found its own way to use them, from the stitched smocks of...
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The Quilts That Hold The Heart of Hawaii
Haptic & Hue
What happens when one of the most traditional museums in the world revolutionises the way it presents the story of the past? The answer is not only a riot of craft and colour, but a reminder of the crucial role of textiles in framing our histories. The Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford, in the UK, has just added 15 brand new, intensely colourful Hawaiian quilts to its collection of extraordinary artifacts. These skilfully stitched quilts were specially made for the Museum, which holds more than half a million precious objects from all over the world and from all periods of human...
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Tapestries For Troubled Times
Haptic & Hue
Tapestries for Troubled Times The stitches of the Bayeux Tapestry fix the story of the Norman Conquest of England in our imaginations in an extraordinarily charismatic way. But nearly a thousand years later modern stitchers are picking up their needles to reframe their stories in just as powerful a fashion, showing that textiles can rewrite our histories. The Bayeux Tapestry was created by women in an age of great violence and uncertainty. It became the defining narrative of the battle between Harold Godwinson and William, Duke of Normandy, for the throne of England that took...
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Plain Sailing: The Cloth That Turned The Tide of History
Haptic & Hue
A coarse, plain cloth has a greater claim to being the most important textile in history than any sumptuous silk brocade or royal robe. Sailcloth is the fabric that has made it possible for humanity to explore the world, trade across seas, build great empires, and wage wars for millennia, and yet history pays very little attention to it. Textile archaeology has begun to fill in some of the gaps, but there is still a huge amount that we don’t know about how sails were made and how sail-making changed the communities that undertook this work. Without sailcloth the Greeks could not...
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Flax is Back! The Great Linen Revival
Haptic & Hue
There is a global flax revival underway. In the great linen belt of North Western Europe, the land under cultivation has more than doubled in a decade and linen production is steadily increasing worldwide. After years of being spurned for ‘easier’ man-made fibres, or cotton, once again linen is being valued. It may only be around half-a-percent of the world’s textile fibres at present, but this time it is being grown not just for fine fabrics, but also because it's gentler on the land. It needs less water, fewer pesticides and fertilizers, and new uses are being found for it too, from...
info_outlineWarning: This podcast and the text below uses terms considered offensive and inappropriate today.
An extraordinary sample of indigo cloth has been found in a British record office which is thought to be a rare surviving fragment of fabric used to clothe enslaved people in the Caribbean and North America. The Haptic & Hue team of Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor was alerted to its existence in early January. We travelled to Derbyshire to see it and realised from a note on the back that we were looking at a piece of so-called ‘slave’ cloth, handwoven in Yorkshire in 1783. Millions of yards of this fabric were handmade in Britain and Ireland and sent to the plantations for nearly two hundred years, but until now none was known to have survived.
This episode of Haptic & Hue unravels the story-threads of this tiny piece of cloth which begin on the upland moors of Yorkshire, and takes us to America and the Caribbean, but also involve Wales, the Lake District, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Poland, Russia, and the Baltic. The different light that textiles cast on this history show us how profits from the system of slavery were part of the everyday lives of workers and landowners all over Britain and Europe and didn’t just benefit a few rich plantation owners.
For more information, a full transcript, and further links, https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-5/