Hooky Mats and Rag Rugs: How the Art of Necessity Helped Define a Nation
Haptic & Hue
Hooked rugs are humble things made of recycled cloth and worn out textiles, originally born of need and lack: and yet they have come to mean much more to the communities that produced and enjoyed them. In America they have become an emblem of homespun pioneer thrift and self-reliance and an important element in the definition of a certain kind of national values. Handmade hooked rugs are the stuff of everyday life, but in Canada they became a vital form of income for impoverished seafaring families in Labrador and Newfoundland. And in northern England and southern Scotland they...
info_outline
The Intelligence of The Hands & The Creative Brain
Haptic & Hue
If you were asked to stitch a picture of your brain what would it look like? A project that looks at the connection between our hands and our brains asked people to do just that. It was aiming to measure creativity and to find out what impact skill and experience has on our actions? These are difficult questions to answer, but this episode of Haptic & Hue looks at what happens to us when we learn activities like knitting, sewing and weaving, how do our hands and brains work together, and which guides the other? About ten years ago a doctor in The Netherlands started what sounds...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outlineExactly thirty years ago a book came out that changed the way we think about textiles and fibre and the role they’ve played in the human story. Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years by Elizabeth Wayland Barber became a best seller. What she said was revolutionary. Until then people thought that textiles were a by-product of civilisations and that processes like weaving were around five or six thousand years old. Wayland Barber was the first person to understand that they are central to the development of human society, and she said, spinning and weaving were far older than we realised and went back to the beginnings of human social development. She coined the phrase The String Revolution and suggested the Stone Age would have been better called the Age of String.
Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s book: Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years with its radical ideas, put textiles at the heart of the human story. It played a major role in creating a new generation of expert textile archaeologists and in getting the subject taken seriously. She helped make it possible for them to search for ancient fibre and textiles and, crucially, to understand that what they were seeing wasn’t detritus or trash but something precious that has a great deal to tell us about human beings and what they are capable of. She was also one of the first people to give us a way to value the work of women in pre-historic societies.
To celebrate the book’s 30th anniversary a new edition has been published with an updated afterword by Wayland Barber. This episode of Haptic & Hue is devoted to a rare interview with Elizabeth Wayland Barber in which she tells us how she came to write the book in the first place and the ideas that lay behind it.
For more information about this episode and details of the discount on the book please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-6/