Realistic Technology for Pretend People

reference:

the proportions on the header band have improved, but I think I maybe should have doubled the weft threads for the warp.

I started weaving the spear, penelope, and the right border via double-weave with the intent to leave the remaining warp threads unwoven (as they would be on penelope's loom on the pot), but predictably this is giving me tension problems. I either need to increase the loom weights or just weave the black layer and leave the orange warp threads unwoven, and then switch colors once I get to the heddle bars in the drawing, with the black warp threads floating on top. (I guess weft-faced tapestry would be a third option, if I add a ton more tension.)

Hi! So the main thing to remember is that the corset is the support device. The bodice should not have to do anything on that count *unless you aren't wearing a corset* (which was uncommon, but some people couldn't tolerate them, etc.) If your corset isn't giving you enough support, you need a different corset. Historically, there were many different types of corset made for different proportions, sizes, silhouettes, and needs, so it isn't that surprising that modern corsets don't do the job for everyone.

I used to be extremely busty (good riddance!), on the order of a 15" difference, 2XL bust size, ~G/H cup. Below, two corsets that I used daily. They support the bust from below, and underneath the corset you're meant to wear a non-stretch layer--I use cotton and linen chemises. That restrains the top half of your bust from spilling over.

Green is an 1890s style with partial cording, made by Clockwork Faerie Corsetry, and grey is the Redthreaded 1860s pattern that I added larger bust gores to.

I fitted many costumes on top of these corsets! Below, the rainbow dress was a quick make and actually not even lined, let alone boned; it went over the grey corset and was totally smooth. Meanwhile, the blue dress at right was one of the first-ever costumes I made, and while it's also unboned, all that wrinkling is because I didn't understand how to fit the thing to my corset.

For the green corset, this brown 1880s bodice below also has no boning. I won't claim that it's perfectly fitted--it isn't, there were a lot of problems--but this wrinkling could have been mitigated by letting the 2nd darts out a little more at the top of the stomach. The red plaid dress I made over the same corset, and there's none of that wrinkling because the front was fit better. (Also no boning.)

Meanwhile, this silver 1890s gown (also made over the green corset) DID have boning on every seam, and that couldn't save it from bad fit. I really hated this one. I hope its new owner enjoys it more than I did lol

But back to the topic at hand--hopefully you can see how the bust was already contained by corset+chemise, and none of these bodices had anything to do with support. They are just another layer added on top, icing the cake.

The whole thing about corsets and support is that they lift the bust by pushing down on your nice, squishy waist (rather than pulling from the shoulders and putting pressure around the ribcage, as bras do). They create a shell for you to fit clothes to. Bodices are just the very nicely fitted blouse you throw on at the end, and any boning is meant to affect *their* look, not the way your body is shaped.

Historical comparisons:

Left: lady in a stretchy (jersey) bodice, almost certainly no boning (c. 1884, KL26.13). Corset very clearly doing all the work. Middle: big bust shoved up by corset (c. 1885, 25.9). Bodice wrinkling for various reasons, but it's not doing the support work. Right: a dress worn without a corset, so bust touches belly. (c. 1850, 23.546)

Left: This is what a bodice looks like when it is being forced to support the bust: bad. (there's surely a corset under here--they might've retouched the lines--but the strain lines show that the bodice is doing work here.) (late 1870s, 23.80) Right: the corset doing all the work on a very heavy bust = smooth result. (c. 1889, 23.534)

You also really do not want your bodice to have to take any strain because they're usually closed with things like buttons, which (as opposed to zippers, for example) attach to the other side at intervals. Intervals = gapping = strain marks, as seen in that photo above. Also, more likely that your buttons will pop. Your closures should *not* be under that level of strain.

Corsets are designed to take strain; bodices aren't.

Also, VHS tapes did not have menu screens. Your only options were play, fast forward, rewind, pause, stop, or eject.

so, ways to get around this:

turn off AI results. they're literally nonsense to us

don't use pinterest because the sources/provenance is often hard to trace

a standard internet search can be okay, but museum collections are the top tier (list of collections below this list)

instead of broad terms like victorian, regency, tudor, renaissance etc. try using the decade you're looking for. if you're not sure of what decade it is but have a vague image in your head, look on the fashion history timeline and just jump around until you find it. but even changing to e.g. 19th century will give better results than victorian

including terms like womenswear/menswear, daywear, formal wear, evening wear, court dress should increase the value of your search too

including "fashion plates" in your search can give you a nice impression of the intended silhouettes of the era. some of these might be a little stylised but will show you what was considered in vogue

for pre-fashion plate eras or things like makeup and styling, you'll have to look at portraiture or manuscripts. these are harder to actually find what you're looking for, but searching museum collections and limiting results to specific date ranges will be your friend

when looking at art, do bear in mind sometimes artists would paint fabric extra flow-y to show off their skills. it might not have been exactly like that in terms of fabric weight or drape. so, a pinch of salt required!

if you find something on image search where the provenance is dubious, reverse image search and you might find a source! i've been able to trace random pinterest images to real sources, but this does take a lot of time and effort and is often not worth the headache

some online resources and museum collections:

fashion history timeline is an invaluable resource if you're trying to get a feel for everything and should be your first port of call. it'll also link to good examples

the met has a vast number of extant examples of clothing, as well as fashion plates

costume institute fashion plates is a subcollection of the met for fashion plates (1800s-1922)

v&a also has many extant garments, fashion plates, and incredible articles on clothing and aesthetics. read the details of the objects because they'll often reveal a lot about the piece

lacma is good for C19th-20th pieces

nypl digital collection for photographs

national portrait gallery or similar for portraiture, or literally any museum in your country that has historical art

national museums scotland can be useful situationally but might be oddly specific

stout style history is a great collection for finding image references for fat people wearing historical clothes. survival bias of a lot of museum pieces tends towards smaller clothing that couldn't be repurposed, but this aims to counter that. it's not sortable, but is still a really nice resource

wikimedia commons is surprisingly handy! and the images, if you should need to link/repost them, are public domain

auction websites sound like a funny one to recommend. some won't have mannequins and some will. just look up historical garment auctions and you'll find some!

Oh boy am I willing!

Rosie- I hope you dont mind me calling you that- you have just become my new best friend!

Ok so I have NO clue how familiar you are with textiles and their history so we're gonna start with a little infodump history lesson.

Back before industrialization fabric, and clothing, was THE Most Expensive Thing most people would ever own. This is because textiles require HUGE amounts of labor and material to produce. So to start you are either growing plants or raising animals like sheep or alpacas or silkworms to even GET the raw fiber. Then you have to clean it, process it, and get it ready to spin. Now before the spinning jenny was invented in 1764, for THE WHOLE OF HUMAN EXISTENCE we could spin ONE thread at a time AND it had to be done BY HAND. And the skill of the spinster and the material quality used would determine how expensive the base thread would be- please note we are not even to the fabric part of clothes yet. So you take that thread and then you have to put those threads on a loom (this is your warp, more on that later), which up until the 1800s had to happen BY HAND again, and then you have to weave another thread through the warps (this is your weft) to actually make a fabric instead of a bunch of parallel threads. And the complexity of the design and weave structure (cause there is more than 1! Like so SO many more) determines the cost of the fabric. Fabrics that use more material and have a more complicated pattern will of course cost more. (This is not even getting into embellishments like embroidery or lace.) And thats before you have to sew a garment by hand. So textiles are EXTREMELY VALUABLE. they would not be wasted, there were whole systems designed to minimize textile waste, some textiles were literally used as forms of currency and were more valuable than gold or gems.

Now to define some terms.

Soft architecture is a term textile historians use to refer to all the things that define a space that are not actual architecture. So for example the "hard" architecture is the walls and the doors and the windows of a building. Soft architecture is everything that goes inside the walls- the furniture but most important to this lecture the textiles! Its things like curtains and carpets and wall hangings that help define the space beyond the (usually) 4 walls! For example say you have a big open main room in your house- you put down a large carpet too and set up a little TV area but then in the other corner of the room you have an office with a desk. Or maybe you have an open doorway and hung up a beaded curtain. You have divided the space with the rug and furniture or the curtain but you haven't changed the actual structure of the room you haven't added a wall but the space has still been divided into living room and office.

Next up is tapestry. So tapestry is a very specific weaving technique (and im gonna throw some more technical terms at you but I prommy its not as scary as it sounds) defined as a plain weave with a discontinuous weft.

So every woven fabric has a warp- in the case of tapestries this is the line of threads that go up and down perpendicular to the floor when a tapestry is hung on the wall. The warp is the back bone of the fabric its what gives fabric structure and its what's strung on a loom. The weft is the threads that go back and forth through the warp and in the case of tapestries they are the threads that run parallel to the floor. The weft is what makes up the picture in a tapestry and is usually made of one very long thread that goes all the way across the fabric and then back. A plain weave is the most basic of all weave structures its just the traditional over under over under pattern. A discontinuous weft just means that instead of the weft being one long thread from one edge of the fabric to the other, a single row is broken up into a bunch of wefts in different colors. This is how we get the cool patterns without a ton of thread waste!

Now tapestries are usually made out of wool but can also incorporate metallic and silk thread with the wool. These will cost extra. And metallic threads were literal retention of value because they were literally threads wrapped in precious metal- cloth of gold didnt just look gold it was woven from gold, and so they could be burned to recover the metal. This is one of the reasons so few tapestries have survived to the modern day - they were burned to recover the gold and silver used in them.

So back to the wool of it all- you see tapestry traditions pop up in places like the Low countries, France and England because they have a really big wool industry but not a lot of silk production.

Tapestries can be insanely intricate and the big ones take teams of skilled artisans literally YEARS to weave. Little ones, and by little I mean like the size of a fucking shower curtain, still take a long time but they are often used for decorating furniture and private chapels and private areas.

I cannot stress enough how big a flex owning even a small tapestry was. These were only available to Royalty and the obscenely wealthy. The materials, the labor, the craftsmanship, the whole PROCESS of making tapestries made them worth more than gold.

So how do you make a tapestry? First off you have a designer come up with this thing called the petite patron: this is your starting sketch, your proof of concept, a painting around the size of a typical painting that you show to the commissioner and they go yay or nay. Then you have the grand patron also known as the cartoon. Cartoons are true to size paintings used to map out a tapestry. Tapestry is basically just recreating these cartoons- which are works of art in their own right! And these are huge. I cannot stress how fucking BIG tapestries can get. Like the human figures are larger than life-sized big, especially because theyre designed to basically be portable wallpaper or frescoes.

Now why would you have a tapestry? Well the benefits of tapestry is that not only are they a huge flex of precious resources, insane craftsmanship, and literally years of investment but they are also practical. The benefits of a tapestry over a fresco or mosaic is that tapestry is portable and also good climate control in places where youll note- tends to get a little drafty. And at this time the courts of western Europe are also moving around a LOT to differnt castles so they take their tapestries with them to decorate the different locations but also to keep their tents warm when they are literally on the road.

In the 1360's we see a HUGE upswing in tapestry patronage. Like the royal family of France goes from having like 5 in their collection to having several HUNDRED each. The Valois princes, sons of John the Good of France, are mainly to blame for the upswing in popularity but the Tudors are not exempt!

Tapestries helped create the feeling of a room. The finest work along with narrative and propaganda patterns were reserved for like the throne rooms or great halls- places where EVERYONE could see the flex. Tapestries for private areas were generally genre scenes or plant patterned and "of a coarser make" (still took YEARS to weave btw) but just having a "coarse" tapestry was more than pretty much anyone would ever get.

To get an idea Raphael (yes THAT Raphael- the one the ninja turtle is named after) was commissioned by the Pope to design a series of tapestries (and thats another thing tapestries were often parts of whole series designed to be displayed on all the walls of a room) for the Sistine chapel in Rome (yes THAT Sistine chapel). Raphael was paid 1,000 golden ducats (which is roughly over 100,000 USD today according to a quick google search) for each design (I think there was 9 total?) and his designs cost OVER 2,000 ducats EACH to actually weave.

I got to see some of Raphael's cartoons and matching tapestries when I went to london this summer and I swear you go in like "yeah I know they're big" and then you are looking at them in person in a room with like 20ft+ ceilings like "I have severely underestimated their size".

ok, why is sand so expensive? well, lets start by defining what we mean when we say sand

sand, in the geological sense, is a material made up of grains that are sized between 0.063mm-2mm - essentially, its a bunch of Real Small Stuff. now, there are a couple of different categories we can put sand in, depending on what those grains are. Two big categories up top: biogenic and non-biogenic sands. Biogenic sands (also known as carbonate sands), are what it says on the package - they're made up of bits of stuff that was once alive. Marine organisms like coral and calcified algae, shells from gastropods and bivalves, sea urchins, barnacles, etc. That's why theyre also known as carbonate sands - theyre made up of stuff that is made up of carbonate, for the most part. HOWEVER!!! not all carbonate sands are biogenic, though most are at least partially biogenic, however there are non-biogenic carbonate particles. I'll get into it when we cover non-biogenics. With biogenic sands, you've got two options: modern sands (found along oceans and shores today) and fossil sands (sand made up of fossils. old sand).

Now, non-biogenic sands are the stuff we normally think of as sand - rocks. But also, a lot of other stuff too, stay with me. So you've got your rocks - reffered to as lithic fragments, but you've also got MINERALS! all sorts of minerals going on in there, and minerals are actually part of how we analyze sand to determine past environments and sedimentary movement. some minerals are lost as the sand moves through rivers and such (feldspar being a particular one, the bastard). If sand/sandstone has a whole mess of minerals in it, we call it mineralogically immature, and if it doesn't, we call it mature. What does mineralogically mature sand look like? QUARTZ. it's just a bunch of fucking quartz. we also use all sorts of other properties to date sand: roughness, angularity, grain size, lithic contents, mineral contents, etc. etc. Now, i mentioned non-biogenic carbonate sands - these are our chemical sands, like ooids, formered through aquatic geochemical processes that create this really cool looking grain of carbonate surrounding a particle, go check em out if you've never seen them, theyre cool as hell.

So now that we've got a handle on what sand is, who the fuck is buying it and why is it so expensive. well let me tell ya. look around you. you in a place with walls? when you look outside, do you see a sidewalk? a road, perhaps? well baby thats SAND right there. Sand is one of the singular most important construction materials we have. It's used for binding and mortar, and literally makes up concrete. now, these are two different types of sand, mortar sand is fine whereas concrete sand is often angular and coarse. Regardless, that's just a few uses we have for sand. Now, birdie, you ask me, and i hear you, i hear you loud and clear. Birdie, how much sand could it possibly take to build something. well, lets talk numbers. we're going to use an example. Say I wanted to build a road, two lanes, just a regular ass road. I wanted that road to be ten km long. How much sand would I need? lets use an average two lane width (about 7m) and a average thickness (roughly 15cm or 0.15m). we've got 10,000m of road that we want to build. Every meter of that road is going to need about 1 cubic meter of concrete, and thats a low estimate, but we're going to use it for the sake of math. So, we're going to need around 10,500 cubic meters of concrete. So, what does that mean? its concrete, not sand, and how much sand is even in a cubic meter of concrete anyways? Well, in one cubic meter of concrete, you're going to need ROUGHLY (i am not in construction please do not flame me), 700kgs of sand. than is almost a metric ton of sand. and were going to need that, times 10,500. so were going to need 7,350,000 kgs of sand, or 7350 TONS of sand. now if i did the math wrong on this, please, once again, do not flame me. the important thing to know is that for a cubic meter of concrete you need almost one ton of sand. Now, how expensive is that sand? well, your average ton of sand is going to run you somewhere between 50-100 dollars, depending on the kind of sand, but we're going to go right down the middle and say that we'd be buying it at 75 dollars per ton. that is 551,250 dollars in sand. now im sure there are bulk places where companies buy their sand, but i am not them, and i am a mere mortal who would have to buy sand at market price.

so like... why the fuck does it cost half a million dollars to build like 10km of road? why is sand so expensive? well, brief economics lesson, scarcity of a resource causes it's price to go up - we need it, we'll buy it for whatever. Now, why does that matter? because we are fucking

RUNNING OUT OF SAND, YALL

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:

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!)

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?

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.)

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.

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.

Here's one of my Icelandic ewes, Presley:

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

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

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

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

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

On Leather:

In the middle ages, the fact that books had to be copied by hand was only part of the reason books were so expensive. A larger part was that, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Mediterranean got a huge influx of pirates, and that cut most of the trade between the Middle East and Europe. Which meant that Europe lost its access to papyrus (which is made from a sedge that grows in North African wetlands). Which meant that, since paper hadn't made its way to Europe yet, the only thing to write on was parchment. Which is made from animal skin. (Yes, real parchment is a type of leather.) And it was incredibly expensive. And by "expensive" I mean that even a small, simple book cost as much as a house. A large or fancy book could easily cost as much as a mansion. Now, part of that is the labor of the copyist; but a lot of that is just the cost of the parchment itself. No, leather was not cheap.

And even if it were, there were also a lot of other things that you needed leather for that you couldn't use anything else for. Parchment was one of them, but so were shoes. So were saddles and harnesses for animals. The list goes on and on.

Then we come to the basic fact that leather is less comfortable than cloth. It's more rigid; it doesn't move with the body. And it doesn't "breathe", which means air doesn't pass through it, which means your body temperature is harder to regulate. In the summer, you roast even in mild weather; in the winter, sure it will keep the wind off of you ... but if you're doing work, you heat up too quickly, and are more likely to sweat, which then gets trapped on your skin. Linen is much more comfortable to wear.

Which is why we have very little evidence that people who lived settled agricultural lives wore leather on a regular basis.

On the time it takes to make fabric:

A lot of people have done a lot of work in recreating historical methods of all the fiber production crafts. So we know how much it takes to produce a certain amount of fabric, starting from "harvesting the fiber." We also have decently educated guesses about how much fabric you would need per person, and how often it would have to be replaced as it wore out.

Wood Engraving Wednesday

Here are a few delightful wood engravings from a recent gift showing the various processes that go into binding a book. This little pamphlet is entitled A Short History of Bookbinding and a Glossary of Styles and Terms Used in Binding … .printed in London at the Chiswick Press for the bookbinder Joseph William Zaehnsdorf in 1895.These images were probably printed from metal plates that were made from the original wood engravings. The engravings are not attributed, as was the case for most commercial engravings.

Click or tap on the images to see the definitions for these activities as provided in the booklet’s glossary. 

Oh yeah there's a part 2 of the horse desensitizing that I love.

There's this sentiment which goes around, about the incongruity of talking about "homespun cloth" in pre-industrial settings (eg Generic European Medieval Fantasy Novel #3000000). Everything was homespun. Every ounce of fibre was collected and processed by hand, every yard of thread was spun at home (or out and about during your other jobs or visiting your friends or whatever). People practised spinning their whole lives from as soon as they were able, and all cloth was woven from these skeins, so the quality may have been quite uniform and it makes no sense to call out some of it as poor rough "homespun", right? Some people might be more or less skilled at it, some people might be able to buy thread and cloth spun by others, but it's all of a muchness, right?

But. The thing is, "homespun" as a word is older than machine spinning. The OED has quotes for it from the late 16th century, nearly 200 years before the invention of the spinning jenny. It is contemporary to times when all cloth was homespun. OED screenshots below:

And if "homespun" even back then meant something rough, coarse, lower-quality, then like... what was it in contrast to?

I'm particularly interested in the quote in the last screenshot, from a novel published in 1740:

The Ladies, who had not seen me out of my Homespun before, made me abundance of fine Compliments.

What does it mean??? Can anyone look up the source for me (listed as "S. Richardson, Pamela vol. II. 135") and tell me what this character is wearing that is apparently not homespun? Maybe it's like how nowadays nearly everyone cooks at home but you can get a fancier meal at a restaurant - how accessible was spun-by-others yarn&cloth to the people or characters saying "homespun" in this manner?

Although this preceeds the invention of the Spinning Jenny, it does not preceed the existence of *professional garment making*

I think here "home spun" is not about spinning by hand or by machine, I think it is rather about making the distinction between common (as in, used by the everyday people), homemade garments as opposed to those made by tailors and seamstresses, and worn by the upper classes. Especially in the countriside vs the cities, where guilds were well established from the late middle ages (1000-1500)

The Tailors Guild in London dates back to before the 1300's. The 16th Century is no longer medieval. With well established industry, specialised craftsmen, and guilds. And thus vocabulary that denotes class difference between what the everyday person made and what the wealthy could affors to have made for them.

I’ve gotten quite a few asks about spinning, fiber prep, and dyeing, and since I’m utterly incapable of answering a question without writing an essay, they often turn into tutorials. I’ve compiled them here for easy perusal ! More will be added as I find and/or write them.

SPINNING

The basics of getting into drop spindles

A comprehensive guide on how to spin on drop spindles

Processing fleece on hair combs to get perfect hand combed top (a cheap fleece processing tool)

How to get your yarn off your spindle

How and why to block handspun yarn before using it

Niddy Noddy sizing

Blocking linen and cotton yarn

How to tell if your handspun yarn is over or undertwisted

Moving from park and draft spinning to suspended spinning

Debugging: roving twists and knots around the edges while spinning

Debugging: compressed roving

The visuals of 2 ply vs. 3 ply

Whittling supported spindles

Very short video-centric guide for supported spinning

FIBER PREP AND/OR DYEING

Steps of fleece processing, including the many methods and tools you can use

What prep to dye in

20 questions of natural dyeing

Dyeing with onion skin

How to clean a blending board

All about mordants

KNITTING

In the pre-industrial, pre-widespread spinning wheel world, pretty much every woman was spinning hours a day from girlhood to keep her family clothed, just about any time she wasn't doing something else with her hands - here's some analysis about how much work that would have been:

Collections: Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part III: Spin Me Right Round… - A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

How to make a rope (cable)

are you so scared of learning some of your things actually came from other cultures that were actually not Europeans who live in castles?

Andean potatoes are smaller yes, but they are used in traditional ways of eating them such as chuño. They also have an incredible variety of shapes, colors and flavor:

I collected some folkwear underthings that show nicely this is still done in some circles:

The more modern red embroidered label:

But then I've also got actual split drawers were the mark is beautifully concealed in the embroidery:

(These seem to me to be stitched on a machine much closer to my 1901 machine)

My cousin owns actual late victorian split drawers were the mark is embroidered in red thread in beautiful little cross stitches to form cursive letters. (Don't have a photo unfortunately)

it's not a hot take to say that the mass amnesia about fiberwork is linked to the belittlement of women's work in geneal, but i do think there's a special kind of illusion that is cast by "cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the children." you hear that and think "well i cook and clean and take care of children (or i know someone who does) and i have a sense of how much work that is" and you know of course that cooking and cleaning were more laborious before modern technology, but still, you have a ballpark estimate you think, when in fact you are drastically underestimating the work load.

I'm reading a fic set in 1995 where the main character was obsessively refreshing his e-mail on his laptop in class. How? It sure wasn't with wifi. The first computer with wifi connectivity came out in 1999. Was he using a LAN line? Honestly, his computer is basically magic. He watches DVDs on it. DVDs weren't even commercially available until 1996 and players didn't hit the US until 1997.

The same character has a cell phone he carries around with him. I knew 1 person who had a cell phone in 1995. He was a fancy-pants lawyer and his phone was the size/weight of a brick and cost thousands of dollars. Admittedly, 1995 was a pivotal time for the cell phone industry as phones got abruptly smaller and (slightly) cheaper, but the average college student having one would still have been quite a stretch. I was in college five years later and no student I knew had one. Heck, in high school we weren't even allowed to have beepers because the administration thought the only kids who needed them were drug dealers.