Textiles - Blog Posts
Y'all ever open a book on a new subject, read a little bit, and have to put it back so you can process the way in which your mind was just expanded?
A whistle and a light, to attract attention, 2025.
Another round beaded object. I have one more round thing in progress and then it will be time for something else. I have another idea I need to explore.
Untitled.
I'm not sure what to call this one. So much has happened in the last week, distilling it down into a few words is hard.
Anyway, this is the final round beaded object for a bit. I've started work on some other ideas I have.
Open New York
Example of a mid-sized minimalist open concept light wood floor living room library design with white walls and a wall-mounted tv
All of this! I love natural materials; they last beautifully, are easy to mend on your own, and don't look dingy after 3 washes. The only real problem is you must learn how to do laundry properly rather than dump all of your clothes together into the washer with 2 tide pods and then blast them with the dryer 1-3 times. Like... A waxed cotton canvas barn coat is significantly warmer than my polyester polyfill jackets on drippy dark hikes, wool & cotton socks don't give me blisters, silk (actual silk, not nylon and elastane) stockings don't give me rashes on the backs of my thighs. Natural materials are your friends!
Idk exactly how to explain this but the softness of real wool and real linen is very different from the artificial softness of polyester “sherpa”, fuzzy faux-fur, spongey acrylic knits and people have gotten too used to the soft plastics and now associate wool with “itchy” and linen with rough and cotton with “too heavy” and then go and wear 100% polyester fleecy sweatshirts and say it’s so warm and cozy but actually they’re just staticky cooking in their sweat locked inside a plastic membrane and you are paying too much to be wearing filaments of petroleum products and the money isn’t going to the people sewing them either. I’m saying you all need to touch grass and the grass in this situation is good quality textiles made of natural fibres.
Ancient Coptic Textiles.
Front cover:
Tapestry Fragment from Egypt 4th century A.D.
For sale in on amazon from my small business:
Red Read Retale.
Fiber arts, spinners, knitters publication. Stunning!
Find them in my Poshmark listings. If you are new to Poshmark- sign up with my code to get $10 off your first order: REDREADRETALE
Silk Factory
Dining Room - Great Room Example of a mid-sized classic limestone floor and beige floor great room design with yellow walls
Norwich pattern books
These happy-looking books from the 18th century contain records. Not your regular historical records - who had died or was born, or how much was spent on bread and beer - but a record of cloth patterns available for purchase by customers. They survive from cloth producers in Norwich, England, and they are truly one of a kind: a showcase of cloth slips with handwritten numbers next to them for easy reference. The two lower images are from a pattern book of the Norwich cloth manufacturer John Kelly, who had such copies shipped to overseas customers in the 1760s. Hundreds of these beautiful objects must have circulated in 18th-century Europe, but they were almost all destroyed. The ones that do survive paint a colourful picture of a trade that made John and his colleagues very rich.
Pics: the top two images are from an 18th-century Norwich pattern book shown here; the lower ones are from a copy kept in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London (item 67-1885), more here.
Wind waker cloth napkin 40 x 50 cm cotton
Happiness...
Honestly, knowing things about sewing and clothing construction is sometimes a curse I wish I wasn't suffering from.
So my textile hobby is embroidery. Right now, I am embroidering a shirt as a gift for a friend. For the shirt, I just needed something simple, plain, and pink - so I went to Target, because that was what was available to me, and somewhere I was pretty sure would have what I was looking for. It did, and I got a plain pink t-shirt for a not-bad price.
Here I am, a week later and almost done with my project, when I randomly glance down at the hem and feel my heart sink into my feet.
because what. the Fuck. is This???
This is one of the worst hems I have ever seen on a commercial garment in my entire life. If a single one of those threads gets cut, the whole bottom of the shirt is unraveling faster than the life of a college student who only just now realized their final was supposed to be a semester-long project. This is the kind of thing I would expect to see for someone who had to hand sew the hem, because I've rarely ever seen vertical hemming outside of handmade clothes. And looking at the inside, I was even more confused.
Because the inside looks normal? So what the hell happened to the outside?? This appears to be a vertical hemming stitch with a ladder back, which I have never seen before in my entire life.
Let's look at two other examples for comparison.
First, we have a normal cotton t-shirt from a few years ago:
This is a 2 needle flat lock stitch (6mm), the type of stitch I would expect to see. You might be able to snag the inside thread on something, but it wouldn't unravel the whole thing, and you'd have to take some seam rippers to get at the outside in any meaningful way.
Now let's look at something older:
This is the inside and outside of a vintage 50s top I bought about a year ago. Notice that there's no visible hem on the outside at all. The bottom is folded up into the inside, where one or two other layers of fabric are located in order to stitch it together. There's a row of single-needle lock stitching close to the bottom of the garment, with another single-needle row and a line of overlocked stitching just to top it all off. The only way this could be more secure is if it attended therapy and achieved self-actualization. This hem isn't going anywhere.
So where does this leave us? Well, it personally leaves me very upset about the state of the clothing industry. Yes, these tops all came at various price points, and have different levels of quality accordingly, but consumers should be able to buy clothes that won't immediately fall apart on them should a stiff breeze happed to blow past. If I had the time or the machinery, I would fix the hem myself, but I don't, and I am genuinely upset to have put hours upon hours of work onto a project with such a shitty canvas. And frankly, a little insulted.
Moral of the story: Check your seams people. You'll thank me when tugging on a single thread doesn't get you arrested for public indecency.