I’m getting interested in fiber in my old age. No.
Not that kind of fiber. The other
kind of fiber. You know the one the
commercial talks about. “The Fabric of
our Lives” kind of fiber.
It all started when the Sergeant Major informed me that she was
going to go to a meeting of the nearby “Fiber Guild”. I volunteered to take her and drop her off
while I went to do something more enjoyable.
My “joy” lasted about an hour at Sam’s Club, and I spent another hour
sitting in the parking lot waiting for her.
Who knew that talking about fiber could last that long?
The upshot of this is that she decided we should harvest our
alpaca fleeces. They had to be sheared
for the summer anyway, to ensure their survival in the Oklahoma heat. Why not save and process the fleece into
alpaca yarn? So we began.
After assisting in the shearing process I decided that I
really needed to know more about this fiber stuff. After all, we now had several bags of “raw”
fleece and it didn’t appear that it was going to process itself any time
soon.
So I started reading and researching this whole fiber thing,
and even attended a meeting of the Guild.
I found myself being drawn in by the variety and mystery of fiber.
I remembered from reading history that the early colonists
made a lot of their clothing from “linsey woolsey”. I knew that wool and flax were involved, but
I didn’t really know how. I decided to
begin there.
First, I learned it combines two kinds of fibers—plant and
animal. The linen fibers are made from
flax, and in this combination they are the “warp”. They form the vertical fibers, while the wool—animal
fibers—are the “weft”, or horizontal fibers, on the loom. Force enough of these fibers together under
the tension created by a loom, and voila, you have fabric. Now it can be cut into shapes and sewn
together to make clothes. It is durable, warm, and inexpensive, even if coarse,
and not very chic.
It was starting to click for me. Now, everywhere I went I was discovering that
our world is awash in fabric. All of my
clothes of course. But also the carpet,
the seats in my car, the tarps in the barn, the sheets on the bed, the towels
in the bath, the curtains on the window.
Dang! Fabric is everywhere, and
for 64 years I hadn’t bothered to notice.
My first thought when the reality of fabric hit me was, “How
did people figure this out?” Is there
something in nature that would give them a clue, or was it just luck? Maybe somebody was fiddling around out of
boredom and suddenly happened on to the idea of weaving. Maybe aliens from another world taught us the
task. Maybe God taught Adam and Eve
after He kicked them out of the Garden. I
don’t know.
But I do know that the art goes a long way back. Not just weaving, but the art of dying the
yarns into a variety of colors prior to the weaving appears to be very old as
well. Recently, bits of fabric were
found in Israel which date back to around 1000 B.C. They had been dyed blue and red and had been
woven in an alternating color band pattern.
What caught my eye in the picture of this find is the people
at the dig site. They are wearing cotton
T-shirts, and cargo pants. Different
yarns, but still fabric. Machines do it
now, of course, but the fundamental approach has not changed in over 3000 years—find
some fibers, spin them into yarn, weave them together to form a fabric, then
cut to shape and sew.
Some things don’t change no matter how modern we think we
are. I’m looking forward to a fun,
fiber-filled journey. Pun intended.
