The Chatter of Cloth

On a quiet morning, the mist clings to the old trees and drifts up from the wet grass. It’s dank and semi-dark, maybe the sun will burn it off later. I raise the roller door on an old studio and pad across the concrete floor to light the little wood stove. Once we have heat and light I pick up a bobbin and load it with plied colour, using a hand-cranked winder. Slip the bobbin into the shuttle, take off my shoes so that through thick socks I can walk the wooden pedals of the loom. I smooth my hand over the weaving that has been made and the taut yarn of the warp threads yet to be caught by the weft.

There is a magic that happens when you push the treadles, lift the warp threads and create the shed or gap for the weft to pass through. Repeat, in the right order, and suddenly you no longer have separate, disobedient threads, instead you have cloth – pliable, warm, draping, shiny, silky, woolly, thick, thin, useful, glorious cloth.

When anyone watches me sit at a handloom and weave, they ask the same questions: “How long does it take to do that?” and “Why do you do it?” I guess everyone who works with their hands at something that a machine can do faster or ‘better’ gets asked the same thing, and the answer isn’t simple: I am a handweaver because it shapes a flow in my life, thread by thread, I bring order out of the chaos of yarn and, if it is a successful piece of work, it delivers something useful that pleases the hand to touch and the eye to see.

Weaving is a way to understand the world. It connects me with humanity and a shared history which is a joyful thing. It was an instinctive feeling at first, a knowledge only that I was part of a craft that had been learned, refined and broadcast over thousands of years, but with time I understood that creating fabric is part of what it means to be human, it helps us fashion our own stories and tells a tale about who we are, where we live, whether we are rich or poor, male or female, and sometimes what we do and think.

I weave often in wool, for its warmth and flexibility, and for the wonderful haptic feel of it under my fingers. I use it too because it allows me to tell part of my own story of a heritage surrounded by sheep, in the heathery uplands of northern Britain. These cloudy islands have produced an astonishing variety of sheep, from Shetlands in the far north to Cumbria’s Herdwicks in the west, from Norfolk Horn in the east, to Greyface Dartmoor in the southwest. You can make the toughest carpets, a jacket that will last generations, a waterproof pullover or the softest filigree shawl from the wool of these sheep. To be able to put these yarns on a loom and weave with them is to have history at your back.

This northern soul has soaked into the vocabulary of weaving – at least in English – reminding us of cobbles and clogs in mill yards on cold mornings. Weavers talk of reeds and shuttles, of heddles and raddles, they discuss sleying, sheds and thrums. It is a dialect of its own and a reminder that weaving demands another way of thinking.

When you learn to weave your brain hurts as you stare at a loom that is a jumble of threads, lumps of wood that make no sense, a terrifying assortment of hooks that look like small instruments of torture and unruly yarn that has to be tamed. Weaving asks you to think in a different way, in forms and three dimensions: it is blindingly simple and horribly complex – both at the same time. It scrambles your thoughts until step by step, piece by piece you learn the new language.

The basic alphabet of weaving is the intersection or interlacement of threads, it’s a simple way to communicate. The subtlety lies in the variation of combinations. The complexity of intersection is endless and, unsurprisingly to weavers, is the precursor of coding and the systems that underlie the sophistication of artificial intelligence. Binary code begins with weaving, up or down, yes or no, black or white.

Take ten threads, lay them flat, alongside each other, take another thread and decide how you are going to lace that over and under the ten threads you have aligned. Focus on the point of interlacement – where the threads connect and see how the simplest of patterns emerge.

At its most basic, over one thread and under the next, gives us plain weave – the oldest and the strongest weave, one that has a particular feel, as your fingers move over the rises and dips of the thread. This is a tea towel after a good meal, a fretful baby’s muslin square in the deep of night, a crisp linen shirt on a hot day.

It’s called tabby weave. The word itself comes from a densely packed slum in Baghdad – Attabiy – named after Prince Attab, who left us some time in the 7th century CE. He could not have known how far his name would travel. This suburb was known for its textile production, and in particular for a rich watered silk, known in middle French as Attabiy, and then in English as taffeta. It has been shortened again with the shimmer of the plain weave silk attaching itself to tabby cats.

If instead you interlace the threads in twos and weave over two and under two, this gives you twill weave, with a sloping line running across it and a softer handle than tabby. This is the look of a farmer’s tweed jacket on a sharp winter’s day, your indigo jeans fading in the sun, or the kick of nicely pleated kilt at a ceilidh. Who knows where this came from? Really there is nothing new in weaving, there is nothing you can invent, no path that you can travel that others haven’t been down before.

But we know how it began: it began with string. There is something elegant about a well-made ball of string. Roll it between your fingers and you are touching one of the most beautiful pieces of technology crafted by the human mind. Hold it taut and you will hear the murmuring of history along its length. Over twenty thousand years ago, give or take a few centuries, someone found that the long fibres of wild plants, like hemp or linen, when they looked dry and dead, could be twisted together between the fingers, or on a thigh, to produce a strong, pliable yarn. It was a revolutionary discovery that changed human existence just as much, if not more than the development of the wheel, or metal smelting, and yet, in comparison, it remains unremarked and uncelebrated.

Everything derives from that moment when an intelligent man or woman, rolled fibres into string. It’s how the dense and elaborate human conversation carried on through clothing begins. Without that moment fishermen would lack their nets, the hunters their traps, the archer his bow and the poacher his bag. Think of the implements that have been invented to fashion string, the greatest and most immediate of which are scissors, without string, there is no need for scissors.

It took another step to understand that interlacing string gives us the magic of cloth, and from there it was a hop skip and jump of history to enable the Romans to covet their imperial purple togas, the geishas of Japan their kimonos, the Tudor kings and queens their majestic embroidered and studded gowns, the nun her habit, and the Pope his robes. Everything I am wearing today, thousands of years later, stems from that discovery, except for the soles of my shoes, which are moulded.

We lose sight of how much humanity depends on cloth. We are born into cloth and we leave this life wrapped in our shrouds. How would we know what side we were on without our uniforms: the blue-grey of the Confederate Army in the American Civil War or the dark blue of the Union? The puritan dress of the English Roundheads and the elaborate silks and feathers of the Royalists? When we receive home our dead we drape them in a flag. It is nothing more than a piece of coloured woven cloth, and yet it wraps up our deepest hopes and fears, our sense of honour and pride, our loyalty, and we are willing to give our lives for it.

Would we recognise the princess of the old fairy tales without her gown, the widow without her weeds, or the bride without her dress? Remember the Emperor without his clothes – a man subjected to the ultimate ridicule.

Cloth is the world’s great identifier, coveted in different forms for millennia. It is also one of the great migrants of the universe. Cloth, and the mysterious means of producing and colouring it, has thundered down the great super-highway of humanity. They called the most famous of these old roads the Silk Road, but really, it, and the many others like it were cloth roads. All kinds of stuff, wool, cotton, linen, hemp, fashioned into socks, ganseys, country-smocks, gowns, lace and ruffles made their way down these roads crisscrossing the globe. Every area developed its own materials, designs, and methods producing calicos, muslins, jacquards, crepes, satins, damasks, batiks, Kente cloth, and any one of thousands of other fabrics which tell the story of the community that made them.

The oldest commercial letters we have are over 4,000 years old, from Lamassi - a literate woman in modern-day Iraq, not far from Mosul, writing to her husband Pusu-ken, in Anatolia. In the cuneiform clay tablets travelling back and forth across 900 miles they were discussing the textiles Lamassi was sending Pusu-ken to sell and the price he was able to get for them. (The Fabric of Civilisation, Virginia Postrel, 2020, Hachette)

In those days every scrap was hard-won: picked or shorn, spun, dyed and woven by hand. Each piece was precious, used, and re-used, etching a resilient beauty of its own as it was remade into patchwork, holes darned, Boro garments stitched in Japan, and Kantha cloth in India.

Today we live in an age of cloth abundance – which brings its own problems. I’m one of the very few recent generations that doesn’t have to weave to clothe myself, my family, or my community. And yet here I am at my loom on a cold autumn morning doing something that would lead my ancestors to question my sanity: I’m weaving for joy.

What keeps me here is using a skill that has been honed, a handcraft that is little known these days but once learnt cannot be forgotten. Like music, once you understand the staves on the sheet, there is a pattern there to be translated – not into sound but into fabric. Throw by throw, thread by thread you make the loom sing the tune you want. Or you become the composer yourself and arrange the threads and colours in a notation that describes your own symphony, fits your own purpose.

In music, they say practice, practice, in weaving we say, sample, sample. Work it through on the loom over and over again until you are sure it is just so and can be replicated time after time by different people, using different looms and speaking no common language except the tongue of the weaver.

There is a moment in weaving when the irritation of warping a loom, flushing out the finicky errors, solving the problems of the weft catching, when all this is over. Then your hands know what they need to do almost without conscious thought. The shuttle races backwards and forwards from hand to hand in coordination with your feet changing the treadles. The brain is engaged in the immediate task but repetitively, and then, as the cloth grows, thoughts and inspirations rise up from deeper down in the mind. You are able to lock off the interfering part of the thinking process, clear it out of the way, and let the old instinctive parts solve the problem. They know the answer and rather than sleeping on it, or getting into Archimedes’ hot bath, an hour’s weaving will often produce a solution to a problem, it will mend a sadness or stop anxiety wearing a hole in your life. There is a power in the thread that can carry away difficulties: spinners, sewers and darners know this magic too.

And then there is the end of a piece of work, the knots of the warp heave over the back beam and come into view, moving closer and closer to the heddles, your hands and feet stop their dance and you cut the completed piece from the loom and lay it on the ground to look down at it. This cloth will be cut into coats, or fashioned into other garments, maybe its fringes will be tasselled for blankets, or a rug to keep out the cold rising from the floor, or perhaps it is destined to be hemmed and used in the kitchen. The fabric I weave always has a purpose, for me that is part of the pleasure of weaving: what I finish adds to the great service that fabric has performed for humanity, and there is something more too, when I give someone something I have woven, I give them my time and my skill, I give them something that has a purpose, but most of all I give them something that under their fingers reminds them of my care and love for them.

That’s why I do it. How long does it take? Well it can take the whole of human history or it can take a day. Your choice.