Haptic & Hue

If you were asked to stitch a picture of your brain what would it look like? A project that looks at the connection between our hands and our brains asked people to do just that. It was aiming to measure creativity and to find out what impact skill and experience has on our actions? These are difficult questions to answer, but this episode of Haptic & Hue looks at what happens to us when we learn activities like knitting, sewing and weaving, how do our hands and brains work together, and which guides the other?   About ten years ago a doctor in The Netherlands started what sounds like a simple and practical project. She sent off embroidery kits with a print of the human brain on them and asked participants to stitch a brain. The results, captured in recently published book, are glorious, with a variety of stitched, fringed, appliqued, woven, beaded, woollen, and embroidered brains.   Those who took part in the Stitch Your Brain project were being asked to do something complex: to use their handcraft skills to think about their brains and what happens to them when they make. It brought into sharp focus the incredible relationship between our hands and our brains and how we use them together to practice or learn a new textile skill and use it with ease and enjoyment.   For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-7/.   And if you would like to find out about Friends of Haptic & Hue with an extra podcast every month hosted by Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor – here’s the link: https://hapticandhue.com/join/  

If we need proof that textiles can rewrite human history, then it lies with the bog bodies of northern Europe. Textile archaeologists are revealing a whole new past about people who, in some cases, are older than Tutankhamen, but much less celebrated. Across northern Europe there are hundreds of bog bodies, who long ago were buried in marshlands and were preserved down the centuries by acidic conditions and lack of oxygen. We will never know all their secrets, but slowly we are discovering more about who they were, and how they lived. It is their textiles that bring us closer to them and tell us, not just about their skills, but also how they thought and designed cloth and clothing.    In Denmark more than a hundred marsh bodies have been found - some in extraordinary states of preservation. They date from the late Bronze and early Iron Ages, and are between 1,500 and 3,000 years old. But what some of them are wearing can take us back much further than that, into a time when humans first started to cover their bodies with clothing. For this episode, Jo travelled to the National Museum of Denmark, in Copenhagen, to explore the textiles of two of the world’s most famous bog bodies.   For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-7/.   And if you would like to find out about Friends of Haptic & Hue with an extra podcast every month hosted by Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor – here’s the link: https://hapticandhue.com/join/

A very special tartan has just started to roll off the weaving looms of the Prickly Thistle Mill in the north of Scotland. This brand-new design in black, pink, red, and grey is part of a powerful campaign to remember the thousands of overwhelmingly female lives lost to accusations of witchcraft between the 1500s and the mid 1700s. This was one of the bloodiest miscarriages of justice Scotland has ever seen. Records suggest that at the time Scotland accused and executed more people than any other country in the world.   The Witches of Scotland Tartan sold out long before it went into production after its registration was spotted by an eagle-eyed American, testament to the fact that the tragedy of the witchcraft trials spread to America with the colonists of the 1600s. It also speaks volumes for the power of textiles that the two determined women, who have been campaigning for a pardon for all those accused of witchcraft in Scotland, have chosen a fabric that can be worn by all as a living memorial to those who lost their lives, rather than a statue or a fixed monument.   Cloth has a great power to hold the memories of those we have loved, but this may be the first time it has been called in use as a national memorial, to commemorate injustices done to unknown thousands who are long dead. It brings new meaning to the campaigns to exonerate witches in a world where these accusations don’t seem to have died but merely changed shape.   For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-7/.   And if you would like to find out about Friends of Haptic & Hue with an extra podcast every month hosted by Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor – here’s the link: https://hapticandhue.com/join/

Early this year there was a catastrophic fire at the world’s biggest market for selling and upcycling second-hand clothes. Kantamanto market, in Ghana’s capital Accra, was accidently set alight, and most of the small stalls in the retail part of the huge market burnt to the ground. Two people died, many were injured, and the livelihoods of thousands of people were destroyed, driving many of them into debt and desperation. But the impact of the fire spread much further than that.    You may not have heard of Kantamanto market, but it plays a vital role in dealing with our textile excess. This is where many of the clothes we donate to charity shops, goodwill centres, or put in textile bins end up. The West African market takes bales of clothing from all over the world and does its best to recycle them. But what can’t be used is dumped at informal waste sites or burned, causing mounting environmental problems in Accra’s streets and on Ghana’s beautiful beaches.     This episode of Haptic and Hue’s Tales of Textiles looks at the tragedy and the ingenuity of Kantamanto and tracks the global cost of fast fashion and textile excess. Will the demand for cheap textiles and clothing stop increasing year on year and can they ever be properly recycled? And what can we as consumers do about it?    For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-7/.   To join  Friends of Haptic & Hue with an extra podcast every month hosted by Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor – here’s the link: https://hapticandhue.com/join/

Creativity and invention aren’t words often associated with hardship and suffering, but in the Second World War women in America and Britain faced with clothes rationing rose to the challenge in many different ways.   Those days are long past, but in an era of textile super-abundance, do clothes coupons have something new to teach us about how we buy and use our clothes? Can clothes rationing help cure us of an addiction to fast fashion? In this month’s episode, we hear from a well-known winner of the Great British Sewing Bee who has adopted the wartime system of coupons as a way of limiting her consumption of fabric and clothing.   Eighty years ago, Make Do and Mend became the watch-words of the day as people eked out their garments, repairing and re-making them over and over again. But clothes rationing in both countries also changed what people wore and hastened technological revolutions. In Britain many people had access to quality, well-styled clothing for the first time, and in America with luxury fibres scarce, man-made fibres entered the market much more quickly than they might otherwise have done.   For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-7/.   And if you would like to find out about Friends of Haptic & Hue with an extra podcast every month hosted by Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor – here’s the link: https://hapticandhue.com/join/  

There’s a fashion technique that’s been in continuous use for over five thousand years – proof, if proof is needed, that there is nothing new in fashion. We have tunics that survive from the time of the Pharaohs in Egypt that use it and you can see it still in the catwalk collections of today.     It’s incredible to think that the simple pleat has pleased the human eye for so long and in so many different ways. Pleating adds movement and life to garments and often signals wealth and abundance. Each culture has found its own way to use them, from the stitched smocks of early English farm workers to the glorious billowing dress Marilyn Munroe wore above the subway grating in the 1950s.   This episode tells the story of the pleats on the world’s oldest surviving garment, hears from an expert modern pleater in New York, and tries to unravel the mystery behind one of the world’s most famous pleated garments.   For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-7/. And if you would like to find out about Friends of Haptic & Hue with an extra podcast every month hosted by Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor – here’s the link: https://hapticandhue.com/join/

What happens when one of the most traditional museums in the world revolutionises the way it presents the story of the past?  The answer is not only a riot of craft and colour, but a reminder of the crucial role of textiles in framing our histories.   The Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford, in the UK, has just added 15 brand new, intensely colourful Hawaiian quilts to its collection of extraordinary artifacts. These skilfully stitched quilts were specially made for the Museum, which holds more than half a million precious objects from all over the world and from all periods of human existence.   Quilting is a craft that over two hundred years Hawaiians have made very much their own – although it was first brought to the islands by incomers. They have developed a unique style that embeds the deep beliefs and rituals of Hawaiian life and keeps them alive in the designing, making, and gifting of these beautiful quilts.   For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-7/.   And if you would like to find out about Friends of Haptic & Hue with an extra podcast every month hosted by Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor – here’s the link: https://hapticandhue.com/join/  

Tapestries for Troubled Times   The stitches of the Bayeux Tapestry fix the story of the Norman Conquest of England in our imaginations in an extraordinarily charismatic way. But nearly a thousand years later modern stitchers are picking up their needles to reframe their stories in just as powerful a fashion, showing that textiles can rewrite our histories.   The Bayeux Tapestry was created by women in an age of great violence and uncertainty. It became the defining narrative of the battle between Harold Godwinson and William, Duke of Normandy, for the throne of England that took place in 1066.   The Great Tapestry of Scotland - finished just over ten years ago is an incredible work that retells the story of an entire nation from its very beginnings. It shows that when women tell the story in stitches a very different kind of history emerges.     Neither work changes the facts – nothing does that - but both are demonstrations of the power of stitch to redefine how we see ourselves and give us different perspectives on events, which ones we find important and what we feel about them. This episode of Haptic & Hue is about the power of Tapestry, ancient and modern, to recreate and reframe our stories.   For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-7/.   And if you would like to find out about Friends of Haptic & Hue with an extra podcast every month, hosted by Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor – here’s the link: https://hapticandhue.com/join/

A coarse, plain cloth has a greater claim to being the most important textile in history than any sumptuous silk brocade or royal robe. Sailcloth is the fabric that has made it possible for humanity to explore the world, trade across seas, build great empires, and wage wars for millennia, and yet history pays very little attention to it. Textile archaeology has begun to fill in some of the gaps, but there is still a huge amount that we don’t know about how sails were made and how sail-making changed the communities that undertook this work.   Without sailcloth the Greeks could not have fought the Trojans, there would have been no Viking empire, William the Conqueror would not have invaded England, the Polynesians could not have settled the Pacific, Columbus certainly would not have sailed the ocean blue, Magellan would not have circumnavigated the world and there would have been no transatlantic slave trade.   Sails made so much possible. But even though these form the structure of our history and cultural heritage, there has been very little focus on the sails that made them possible, and almost none on the communities that made the sails. This episode of Haptic & Hue looks at the most ancient sails we know about and takes us right up to the modern sails used for the sort of yachts in the recent America’s Cup Race in Barcelona. We talk to a modern craft sailmaker and hear how a small village in Somerset was once at the heart of the global industry of sail-making. We also hear from a Danish textile archaeologist about why Viking sails were unique.   For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-6/  

There is a global flax revival underway. In the great linen belt of North Western Europe, the land under cultivation has more than doubled in a decade and linen production is steadily increasing worldwide. After years of being spurned for ‘easier’ man-made fibres, or cotton, once again linen is being valued. It may only be around half-a-percent of the world’s textile fibres at present, but this time it is being grown not just for fine fabrics, but also because it's gentler on the land. It needs less water, fewer pesticides and fertilizers, and new uses are being found for it too, from creating surfboards to skis, from acoustic insulation to car doors.    Flax looks back as well as forward. Like no other yarn, it is the ancient fibre of civilisation. Linen has walked the long centuries alongside mankind. In Europe and Western Asia, its cultivation reaches back thousands of years to the beginning of human settlement and farming. It clothed the pharaohs of Egypt in life and death, it powered the ships of ancient Greece and Troy, it is mentioned more than 80 times in the Old Testament. This is the fabric that wrapped the Dead Sea Scrolls to keep them safe down the centuries.    Join us this month as Haptic and Hue travels to Ireland, once the undisputed centre of the world’s linen processing industry to see what it is making of the great flax revival and how Irish linen is faring.   For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-6/

Exactly thirty years ago a book came out that changed the way we think about textiles and fibre and the role they’ve played in the human story. Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years by Elizabeth Wayland Barber became a best seller. What she said was revolutionary. Until then people thought that textiles were a by-product of civilisations and that processes like weaving were around five or six thousand years old. Wayland Barber was the first person to understand that they are central to the development of human society, and she said, spinning and weaving were far older than we realised and went back to the beginnings of human social development. She coined the phrase The String Revolution and suggested the Stone Age would have been better called the Age of String.   Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s book: Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years with its radical ideas, put textiles at the heart of the human story. It played a major role in creating a new generation of expert textile archaeologists and in getting the subject taken seriously. She helped make it possible for them to search for ancient fibre and textiles and, crucially, to understand that what they were seeing wasn’t detritus or trash but something precious that has a great deal to tell us about human beings and what they are capable of. She was also one of the first people to give us a way to value the work of women in pre-historic societies.   To celebrate the book’s 30th anniversary a new edition has been published with an updated afterword by Wayland Barber. This episode of Haptic & Hue is devoted to a rare interview with Elizabeth Wayland Barber in which she tells us how she came to write the book in the first place and the ideas that lay behind it.   For more information about this episode and details of the discount on the book please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-6/

  The American cotton feed sack is the stuff of legend. From the 1850s onwards it was skilfully repurposed by women across America into all kinds of garments and household goods. By the late 1930s when it became highly patterned, it's estimated that more than 3 million Americans were wearing feed sack clothing. Out of necessity, it was made into dresses and shirts, quilts and curtains, sheets, mattress covers, pyjamas, and even undergarments.    Today feed sacks are valued by collectors and makers in America, and there is a lively market in them. But these soft cotton sacks have a much wider story to tell us than that. They have played a role in creating one of the world’s legendary cricket teams, they have saved a nation from the brink of starvation and in this episode of Haptic & Hue, we tell the incredible story of how a flour sack re-united a family with the something created by the grandmother they lost in in the Holocaust.    For pictures of the feedsacks talked out in this episode and more information about the contributors please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-6/    

An extraordinary quilt handstitched by convict women on board ship as they were transported from Britain to Australia in 1841 has just gone on display in a new exhibition at Australia’s National Gallery. Many of those who made the quilt were illiterate and led tough and impoverished lives. And yet these social outcasts and exiles - working in desperate circumstances - created one of the most important cultural artifacts in the colonial history of Australia.   The Rajah Quilt – named after the ship the women were transported on - has nearly 3,000 individual pieces. It is one of the only items made by convicts that survives from this part of Australia’s past, which was buried in shame for so long. The quilt gives us a rare chance to re-assess what it meant to be transported and to see how it has become an important part of Australia’s history and a powerful symbol of how many people first came to this country.     For more information, a full transcript and further links: https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-6/ 

  From the grandest palace to the poorest cottage, so-called ‘stained’ cloths brought colour and joy to everyday life in England for hundreds of years. These specially painted and stamped fabrics formed the backdrop to funerals, ceremonies, processions, masques, and tournaments that required banners, flags, pennants or scenery from 1300 onwards.  But this world of dazzling medieval colour and pattern has been mostly lost to history because so much of the cloth has perished, and the craft of the stainers has been so little understood. Now Haptic & Hue re-discovers the secrets of making stained cloth and looks at how it was used. This episode uncovers the secrets of the 14th century fabric stainers which lie in a pocket-sized book, transcribed more than six hundred years ago, by monks at Gloucester Cathedral. It contains 30 recipes for preparing cloth and special water-based colours to permanently paint and block print wool and linen. Haptic & Hue took a trip to Gloucester Cathedral to explore the lost world of medieval textiles. For more information, a full transcript and further links, see  https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-6/

Great tapestries have been used to decorate and embellish homes and palaces for centuries, and yet the hands that created these works remain almost completely forgotten.  Art institutions treasure their ancient tapestries woven painstakingly over many months, and even years and know almost everything about them, except the names of those who created these extraordinary pieces. Modern artists, like Picasso, Henry Moore and Marc Chagall see their work rendered into a different and exciting form by tapestry weavers, but no-one remembers who the weaver was or is.   This episode of Haptic and Hue looks at tapestry weaving and the process of collaboration that goes on between an artist and a weaver to produce a new work. It asks if tapestry weavers are forever destined to be seen as anonymous helping hands, or if their skill, craft and artistry is now, finally, beginning to be recognised as an art in its own right.  We talk to a gifted tapestry weaver about what it is like to work on a piece for several months and how much of herself she pours into each new weaving.   For more information, a full transcript and further links, see  https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-6/

There’s a piece of clothing that has a good claim to being a universal garment. It is thousands of years old and yet it featured on the catwalks last year. It’s stylish and at the same time the humblest and simplest of garments. It has been worn and enjoyed by rich and poor alike. It has been repurposed and reshaped throughout human history and it has fulfilled many functions.   The cloak has kept us good company throughout the centuries, it has marched with armies across plains and deserts, it has been sanctified and worn by saints, and was just as beloved by sinners such as highwaymen. It became the emblem of witches on broomsticks and superheroes flying through the sky. It was worn by hobbits to make them invisible and it is still revered as the ultimate in stylish outerwear by Venetians.   This episode of Haptic & Hue looks at the cloak, cape, cope, mantle, and all its other many forms through history and tries to answer the question of why it has proved such a joyful, useful and versatile garment.   For more information, a full transcript and further links, see  https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-6/  

As the war in the Ukraine brutally shows, few people have had as hard a struggle down the centuries to maintain their identity as Ukrainians. For hundreds of years, they have been occupied and subjugated by one power after another, the Ottomans, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russia, Poland, the Nazis, and Russia again. Through it all Ukrainians have held onto their traditions: one of the strongest of these has been the beautifully and skilfully stitched motifs on plain linen or hemp shirts.   The embroidery of Ukraine is one of its secret weapons and an incredible defence against the cultural annihilation that has been practiced against it. What it means to be a Ukrainian is powerfully expressed in the complex and beautifully worked stitches that go into decorating their national dress. The knowledge of what each stitch means and the skill to make these shirts is thriving and continues to be passed down the generations. This episode of Haptic & Hue is about how the beautifully embroidered shirts and blouses of Ukraine have endured as a symbol of the country’s fight for existence and have become so entwined with the identity of Ukrainians that some refer to it as part of their genetic code.   For more information, a full transcript and further links, see https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-6     

The needle and thread have been humanity’s constant companions for tens of thousands of years: far longer than the dog, the sword, or the wheel, and much longer than reading and writing. Down the centuries the needle has rendered us incredible service and we have come to depend on it. And yet the activity of stitching has long been ignored in the record of human endeavour. Even the modern trend for embracing making and craft tends to leave out sewing. But a new book just out, comes to try to redress the balance.   Haptic & Hue’s Book of the Year for 2023 is Barbara Burman’s The Point of The Needle. In it, Barbara says ‘stitching and stitches are valued precisely because they embody human life and invention, and cloth itself is inseparable from them’. Barbara was the co-author of the well-received book called ‘The Pocket – A Secret History of Women’s Lives’, but in this new book, Barbara has a much bigger canvas: to rescue sewing from the twilight and to celebrate it as a fundamental human activity.   For more information, a full transcript, and further links, https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-5/

There is a quiet revolution happening on Savile Row in London, home to some of the world’s finest men’s outfitters, as the makers of bespoke suits embrace textile recycling in a unique new scheme. A number of houses on The Row have been collecting woollen offcuts as they cut and tailor handmade men’s clothing – just as they did in times gone by– and sending them off to be recycled into new yarn, which is then woven into fresh cloth. The radical difference is that this time the recycled cloth is being bought back by these high-end workshops to be tailored and sold to the Row’s own bespoke customers.    Savile Row, in the heart of London, has been at the centre of high-quality men’s tailoring for 200 years. It has supplied handmade suits, from the finest woven cloth, to film stars and royalty, to statesmen and sportsmen. It has a reputation for quality and excellence second to none. Now it is embracing recycling, and it seems, its top-end clients are happy to pay for it.   It’s incredibly rare to find a recycling loop like this one – especially in textiles - where the waste is turned into quality new material to be used by the same workshops that created it in the first place. This episode tells the story of how this is happening and follows the journey that turns tiny bits of fabric that would previously have been binned, into new bespoke garments, ones that come with great credentials and an interesting story behind them.   Along the way Haptic & Hue gets a privileged glimpse into the world of Savile Row tailoring – the training and the standards that need to be maintained from start to finish to produce a garment that may well last a century or more.   If you would like to see a full script of this episode, see photos or discover links to further information about the topics discussed you can find all this information at www.hapticandhue.com/listen. You can follow Haptic & Hue on www.instagram.com/hapticandhue/    

Have you ever wanted a Picasso on your walls – or maybe a Joan Miro, a Chagall, or perhaps a Raoul Dufy? For a time in the mid-50s in America you could buy work by these artists for just a few dollars: that's a few dollars a yard, because these were fabrics and not original paintings – but they were beautifully designed, sophisticated, and elegant.  As peace crept back after World War Two there was an intense hunger for new design. After five long years of uniforms, and sacrifice, people wanted something interesting to wear, and colourful fabrics to decorate their homes with. In America manufacturers were quick to turn their machines from military production to domestic demand.  This episode of Haptic & Hue is about how fresh and fashionable textiles were amongst the first items people were able to enjoy in the post-war period.  It focuses on a short period when manufacturers turned to established artists, like Picasso, Raoul Dufy, Marc Chagall and Miro, to help them create brilliant new textiles. It looks in particular at Daniel B Fuller’s attempt to build what he called “A Museum Without Walls’ with his Modern Masters series of textiles in the 1950s. It is also about what grew out of that, and tells the story of a young artist, unknown at the time, who worked for these same textile producers as a pattern designer, using his experience and skills to change the face of twentieth century art. For more information, a full transcript, and further links, https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-5/