Many of the objects we use each day were made via the process of weaving, which is an ancient textile art. The clothes on our backs, the blankets we sleep under and the rugs on our floors are just a few of the woven products we use regularly without really stopping to think about how they were made. The truth is that if weaving had never been invented we would still be relying on animal skins to keep us warm.
Weaving started thousands of years ago and still now, the technique has kept much of its original form. Although there are now several tools and modern equipment that can make patterns faster and more evenly, you can still find hand-woven products made from different parts of the globe. You will find that the design will change depending on the source and the creator. Weaving is still very much the same as it was millennia ago.
In Colonial Long Island, a talented young weaver is married into a family that needs the income from her cloth. She resigns herself to their avarice, but cannot resign herself to her bridegroom's secret. Based on a true story.
Textiles were the Incas' most prized possessions. Their first gifts to European strangers were made not of gold and silver, but of camelid fibre and cotton. They believed that the highest form of weaving was created expressly for the sun, which they considered the greatest of the celestial powers. This book uses this image to symbolise Andean tradition as a whole and documents the collection of ancient and Colonial Andean textiles in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which is among the most comprehensive of its kind in the world. Described and illustrated here, in many cases for the first time are the finest examples from the collection: weavings of astonishing virtuosity with striking geometric designs, elaborate carpets and covers, mantles, tunics, featherwork, woven shoes with metal decoration and intriguing figural sculptures with tapestry faces - representing the major cultures of the pre-Columbian period as well as the achievements of Spanish Colonial times. A chronological overview and accompanying essays examine the weavings as primary sources of information about their makers. For archaeologists, ethnographers, textile designers and weavers and all those who appreciate the brilliant artistry of ancient civilizations, the achievement of the weaver as creative artist is both celebrated and explored.
Cloth was one of the most important commodities in the early modern world, and colonial North Americans had to develop creative strategies to acquire it. Although early European settlers came from societies in which hand textile production was central to the economy, local conditions in North America interacted with traditional craft structures to create new patterns of production and consumption. The Weaver's Craft examines the development of cloth manufacture in early Pennsylvania from its roots in seventeenth-century Europe to the beginning of industrialization.Adrienne D. Hood's focus on Pennsylvania and the long sweep of history yields a new understanding of the complexities of early American fabric production and the regional variations that led to distinct experiences of industrialization. Drawing on an extensive array of primary sources, combined with a quantitative approach, the author argues that in contrast to New England, rural Pennsylvania women spun the yarn that a small group of trained male artisans wove into cloth on a commercial basis throughout the eighteenth century. Their production was considerably augmented by consumers purchasing cheap cloth from Europe and Asia, making them active participants in a global marketplace. Hood's painstaking research and numerous illustrations of textile equipment, swatch books, and consumer goods will be of interest to both scholars and craftspeople.
Using objects that Americans have saved through the centuries and stories they have passed along, as well as histories teased from documents, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich chronicles the production of cloth--and of history--in early America. Under the singular and brilliant lens that Ulrich brings to this study, ordinary household goods--Indian baskets, spinning wheels, a chimneypiece, a cupboard, a niddy-noddy, bed coverings, silk embroidery, a pocketbook, a linen tablecloth, a coverlet and a rose blanket, and an unfinished stocking--provide the key to a transformed understanding of cultural encounter, frontier war, Revolutionary politics, international commerce, and early industrialization in America. We discover how ideas about cloth and clothing affected relations between English settlers and their Algonkian neighbors. We see how an English production system based on a clear division of labor—men doing the weaving and women the spinning--broke down in the colonial setting, becoming first marginalized, then feminized, then politicized, and how the new system both prepared the way for and was sustained by machine-powered spinning.Pulling these divergent threads together into a rich and revealing tapestry of --the age of homespun,--Ulrich demonstrates how ordinary objects reveal larger economic and social structures, and, in particular, how early Americans and their descendants made, used, sold, and saved textiles in order to assert identities, shape relationships, and create history.
Top Search
Last Search
