My annual ‘Winter at Home’ stint has begun by being a ‘real’ Winter! As most of you will know, most of the country has been in the deep freeze as a result of the first Winter snows which covered pretty much all of the high-lying ground of the country. It even reached us here in the Lowveld, with several overcast days and a bitingly chilly wind, strong enough to blow a tree down onto the power-lines into the estate and put the electricity out!
I have been sitting in my office in pullover and fleece and even socks and ‘proper’ shoes, although I have to admit that at times my sheepskin slippers have seemed like a good option too.
The weather aside, it is good to be back and beginning to focus intently on the new on-line course which will be out at the end of October. This one is going to be about double weave on the Rigid Heddle and I am really pushing the boat out to give as much information as possible. It will be closely followed by two more double heddle courses, although these will be nowhere near the size and scope of the first – but this double heddle thing opens up a whole new range of possibilities, and dare I say challenges? So fascinating!!
Ever since I was a child, one of my favourite things in the Winter is to curl up with a good book. My tastes in literature have changed substantially as I’ve got older, but one author that never fails to grab my attention is Bill Bryson. I remember the first time I read one of his books ( Notes from a Small Island), I was on an aeroplane – can’t remember where I was going so clearly t wasn’t a very exciting trip, but I can remember the book, which lets you know that it is a goodie!
It seems very apt that right now the book I am reading is called ‘At Home’, also a Bill Bryson classic. In it he details the social development of our world, going through each room in his house and digging into the origins and history, the customs and courtesy’s and, dare I say, because he is Bill Bryson after all – the oddities! It has kept me well amused these past couple of weeks, and last night I entered “The Dressing Room”.
What I found there was a fascinating history of cotton, weaving (!), spinning, the industrial revolution.
Did you know that in the sixteenth and early parts of the seventeenth century, cotton was more valuable than silk? Linen was seldom used for anything more exciting the sack-cloth, and if you owned more than a certain sized parcel of land in England, you were required, by law, to put a certain percentage of that land under Hemp, which was used to make rope for the Royal Navy! It also filled the bowls of many a clay pipe I believe….
Bryson’s description of spinning and weaving is masterful, and although I’m quire that I shouldn’t do this, I’m going to include a short snippet of this description and hope that the copyright gods don’t find out about it:
“Turning bales of fluffy cotton into useful products like bedsheets and blue jeans involves ttwo fundamental operations: Spinning and Weaving. Spinning is the process of turning short lengths of cotton fibre into long spools of thread by adding short fibres a little at a time and giving them a twist. “
He goes on to say that “weaving is affected by interlacing tow sets of strings or fibres at right-angles to form a mesh. The machine for doing this is a loom. All that a loom does is hold one set of strings tight so that a second set can be fed through the first to make a weave”.
How succinct is this description?
He goes on to say that cotton is very difficult to both spin and weave (true…. As many of us will know), and that efforts to make these activities easier and more efficient formed the groundswell of the industrial Revolution.
Before the mechanisation of these processes, spinning and weaving were cottage industries which supported a large portion of the population. Weaving was men’s work, and the women were the spinners.
It seems to me that there are references to spinning and weaving around every corner of our lives. Both activities are so commonplace that we don’t really even think about them any more – we simply take it for granted that the sheets on our bed come from the shop.
The more I learn about what I love so much to do, the more fascinated I become, and I feel really rather privileged to be a part of a craft that while no longer quite so esteemed as it once was, is still a quiet reflection of the very ‘fabric’ of society.
Until next week.
