Fabrics, Part 1

The very earliest "fabrics" were skins and furs. I'll write more on those later, as the methods of their preparation is vastly different from other fabrics.

The fabrics of first handmade manufacture are the woolens and linens, so ancient that they are mentioned in the Bible. Cotton cultivation came later, along with silk, which, due to the difficulty of obtaining it during the Middle Ages, became very popular among the royal, noble and wealthy merchant classes of Europe.

Wool is sheared from living animals, especially sheep, goats (cashmere), camelids (camel, alpaca, llama, etc.), and musk oxen (quiviut). Primarily, however, the term "wool" refers to fibers sheared from sheep. (See below for a discussion of the "other" wools.) Sheep's wool is easily dyed, another plus. One of the earliest methods of forming fabric from wool is felting, where the wool is washed in hot water with some sort of soap and then rubbed by hand until the fibers mat together. Modern methods achieve this with machines, but you can still make your own felt today, either by using wool fabric or natural wool fibers.

Linen is made by gathering the stems of the flax plant, then soaking them until they swell. The process is called retting. Once the fibers are free of the outer stalk, they can be dried and woven. No good modern method of creating linen has been successfully developed, which is one reason why linen is so expensive.

Cotton is another ancient fabric, which, unlike linen, was made both in the Old World and the New. Harvesting used to be a time-consuming process, as did removing the seeds from the fluffy fibers of the pod. Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin, to remove the seeds by machine, greatly simplified the process, reducing the cost in the 19th Century.

Silk, according to legend, was discovered when a silkworm cocoon dropped into the teacup of a Chinese princess. If true, she must have been amazed at the long, lustrous, single thread she was able to unwind from cocoon. History records that the Empress Si-Ling-Chi was raising silkworms by 2640 BC. The only insect-produced fiber has many different variations in the weaves, one of the most popular of which is silk satin.

Ramie is another natural fiber, sometimes called China grass. It behaves somewhat like linen. Nowadays, it's often blended with other fibers, notably cotton and silk.

The "other" wools come from a variety of fur- or wool-bearing animals. Goats give us mohair and cashmere. Camel hair comes from (of course) camels. Other members of the camel family provide alpaca, llama, guanaco, huarizo and misti (crosses between alpaca and llama, the camelid versions of a mule and a hinny), and vicuña. Angora comes from angora rabbits, which are clipped just like sheep, only much more frequently. (No harm comes to the angora rabbits!) Quiviut is taken from the soft underwool of musk oxen.

Depending on your costume time period, you may choose one or more of the fabrics made from these fibers. In a future post, I'll also discuss historic fabric blends (such as linsey-woolsey). In the meantime, while you're doing your research, I recommend the following books:
Claire Shaeffer's Fabric Sewing Guide
Fabric Science, Fifth Edition
A History of Costume