Ancient Greece – Gloria Gutierrez

Spring 2021 – Week 10 Summary

Content Warning: brief mention of sexual assault

The last eight and a half months have lead to this moment: the moment I finished my project. I finished the last bit of sewing on Monday and immediately fulled it. Fulling a fabric after you’ve finished weaving it is quite important. At the very least, a handwoven textile should be finished by soaking it in hot soapy water; if you want the textile to be a bit sturdier, you full it. The simplest way to full (and the only way I have experience with) is to do the steps for creating felt without going so far as to actually create felt: you soak the textile in hot soapy water and agitate the heck out of it.

I made my life a bit harder at this step by not buying a bucket or large container in which I could do the fulling. I also didn’t want to fill up my bath tub because that would use more water than I needed. Luckily, my fiance and I had just bought the day before a new rubbish bin for the kitchen that we hadn’t used yet. So, I placed it in the bathtub and fulled my himation inside. It worked like a charm! And it was definitely a workout; I forget the wool can absorb nearly half its weight in water, so fulling became an arm workout. Once I finished fulling, I hung it up to dry above my bathtub using hangers to hold it up.

The next day the himation was fully dry and there was only one step left: to cut off the little tails of weft I left in while leaving. Now that the himation was fulled and definitely not going to fall apart anytime soon, it was safe to trim those tails. And then…I was finished. Three quarters of fiber work and this is the result:

I’m not great at admitting when I’ve done something cool or impressive, but even I have to admit: this is impressive. I also felt the need to model the himation to demonstrate how it would have been worn (and perhaps to show off, I will not lie).

All that was left after this was to present to the Terroir/Merroir program, write my Academic Statement and self-evaluation, and catch up on all of the weekly summaries I forgot to keep doing. Writing this post is one of the last things I’ll do as an undergraduate student.

This school year has been wild. I’ve spent a good time alone because of the pandemic. I made a garment by hand completely from scratch (well, nearly as I bought the warp yarn). Many tears were shed: from frustration, anxiety, pain. There was a good amount of pain. I bled several times from the combs, scalded myself a couple of times while dyeing, and used my body to the breaking point while spinning and weaving. I have a completely different perspective on clothing now. If I was paid minimum wage for every hour I spent on my himation, the dollar amount would be $3,264.31. The concept of Slow Fashion has never been clearer to me and I think I will visibly flinch when I walk by stores such as H&M and Forever 21, with their $5 shirts and $30 dresses. That cost is asinine and speaks volumes about the lives of the people who actually made those clothes. The story is there for anyone who cares enough to listen.

Something I wish I had done this quarter was read. I bought a great book for the quarter titled Spinning Fates and the Song of the Loom: The Use of Textiles, Clothing, and Cloth Production as Metaphor, Symbol, and Narrative Device in Greek and Latin Literature. I had wanted to incorporate this book into my learning after reading, “Women’s Work: Spinning and Weaving in the Greek Home”. I was struck by an idea the author brings up:

“…or is the production of textiles merely a literary topos, which serves mainly to remind us that Greek men conceived of women as spiders who trapped unlucky men in their webs? …The study of textiles in Classical Greece is a complex tangling of two realities: physical reality, where flesh and blood women transform wool and flax into tunics and blankets, and psychic reality, where metaphorical women spin out the lives of men, and the Fates (always women) cut the threads to kill men, and where Circe traps helpless men in her complicated webs.”

Part of why spinning and weaving were assigned to women in ancient Greece was to “keep an eye on them” – to control them. Women were seen as liminal and therefore dangerous. In essence, a bunch of patriarchal garbage. But anyone who takes a deep dive into Greek mythology (and I have, I’ve been obsessed since I was a child) will notice that spinning and weaving are used in clever and dangerous ways by various feminine entities. There is, of course, Arachne, whose weaving skills were so renowned that Athena herself challenged Arachne to a test of skill; Arachne’s dangerous defiance of the gods transformed her into a spider, so she may weave forevermore. Medea kills the new wife of Jason, who Jason set aside Medea for, with something she weaved. Herakles dies from a poisonous garment his wife, Deianara, gave him; she thought the poison was a love potion that would keep Herakles from straying. Even Penelope, the patient wife of Odysseus and seen as the perfect example of how a woman should be, kept her suitors away by undoing the shroud she was weaving for her father-in-law; Penelope declared she would choose a suitor once she was done with the shroud, but would undo most of her day’s work to deceive the suitors. And the feared Moirae, the Fates, who all – human and god – were at the mercy of, were depicted with a spindle. Clotho spun a person’s destiny, Lachesis measured the length, and Atropos cut the thread.

This motif seems to exist outside of ancient Greek mythology. I didn’t have much time to explore this, but off the top of my head I know that Valkyries, the battle maidens of Odin who carried off fallen warriors to Valhalla, have an association with weaving. Though, their example is gruesome: they weave with the entrails of dead men and their loom weights are severed heads. Spinning and weaving are not safe activities. There is power to be found in these crafts, in so-called “women’s” work.

Weaving is an act of defiance, which I feel is best illustrated by the ancient Greek story of Philomena. Philomena was the sister of Procne, who was married to Tereus, king of Thrace. Tereus lusted after Philomena and, not caring that she was his wife’s sister and taking full advantage of the power that he had and she didn’t, raped her. Tereus goes even further and cuts out Philomena’s tongue so she can’t tell anyone what happened. So what does Philomena do? She weaves her story, her trauma, and pain into a tapestry. She shows this to her sister, and Procne avenges her by killing her own son with Tereus and tricking him into eating their son .

Tereus tried to take away Philomena’s voice and power. But Philomena used that dangerous skill of weaving in order to reclaim her power. She remained defiant of the society that oppressed her and condoned her trauma. The consequences to Tereus are devastating. In a society that would not allow women a voice, the women of ancient Greece, at least in the myths, used the skills that they had to their advantage. They told their story through fiber arts.

And so is the case for me in my himation. Yes, it looks like a long blue, red, and yellow piece of fabric that will keep me warm when the winter months come upon us again, but it’s so much more than that. My himation tells the story of my final year at Evergreen; it is the culmination of 15 years of working towards my BA degree. Fibers of loneliness, isolation, and fear spun along with wool speak of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is soaked in the tears shed due to the physical and mental anguish I experienced while doing this work. It is dyed using knowledge I sought out to connect with my ancestors, so they, too, are in my himation. Intertwined among the warp and weft are all of my thoughts, feelings, and memories that came up while creating it. Finishing it is my expression of defiance – defiance in the face of those who did not believe in me and didn’t support me. My himation is the story of myself.

Spring 2021 – Week 8 Summary

I had good news and bad news this week. First, the good news: I finished the first two panels! The tension issues never really went away, but I persevered and made it through the second panel. It was terribly satisfying to unroll the panels off of the front beam and cut them off the loom. I bought new scissors specially for fabric so I wouldn’t make a mess when cutting them off.

I should have recorded cutting the warp threads in the first photo. So. Satisfying. It was also very satisfying to unwind all of the fabric off the loom.

The bad news: these are the only large panels I will weave. As I neared the end of the second panel, I quickly realized that I wasn’t going to have enough weft yarn to do another panel, let alone two. I’m somewhat perplexed on how this happened, but going forward whatever calculation I do to determine the amount of weft and warp, I’m going to double it to make sure I have enough. Looking at the panels, I can see that the sett I wove at is not the one I used in my calculations; I used a 12 wpi (wraps per inch) for calculating the weft, but in practice it was more like 15-17. But, if the panels actually had only 12 weft threads per inch, the fabric would have been like gauze and not a balanced weave at all. Like I said, I’m still technically a beginner. It’s a lesson learned.

Disaster or not, I still created a large amount of cloth. I’m somewhat amazed at myself.

So my chiton will now be a himation. A himation is a long rectangular piece of fabric that was worn in different ways, depending on the gender of the person. Men, starting in the 6th century, would wear a himation as their main garment and women would wear one whenever they wore a chiton. It would have been strange to wear a chiton without a himation. The himation was usually made of wool and there were proper and improper ways to wear it, especially for men. Women might wear a himation as a veil, use it as a baby carrier, and was even used by dancers .

I had some blue weft left, so I decided to warp the loom again and weave the rest of the blue yarn into a smaller panel to sew between the other two larger panels. I didn’t want to sew the two panels together as-is, since there would have been two sets of stripes in the middle with only one set on the ends; I felt it would look better stylistically to have a blue panel to break up the stripes. So I cleaned up the loom of scrap yarn and proceeded to warp it again. Sadly, the warping process was no faster even though it was my second time doing it. This time though, I took off a part of the front of the loom (the bottom part that holds the reed) so I could reach the heddles easier and not sit in a very awkward position. It was a piece that isn’t really meant to come off, but I was inspired by the memory of the terrible back-ache I had the first time I dressed the loom.

Once I finished dressing the loom, I wound up the rest of the blue yarn onto bobbins and began weaving. It was evident very quickly that I had made the right call – I didn’t finish the middle panel this week, but I could tell that I would have been upset had I attempted to weave the other two panels as originally planned.

Spring 2021 – Week 7 Summary

I still had tension issues this week. As I mentioned in the previous week’s post, the tension would work itself out whenever I advanced the warp. What I forgot to mention is that sometimes advancing the warp would bring back the tension issues. When this happened, there wasn’t much I could do to fix the problem until I wove enough to advance the warp again; as you may imagine, this slowed down my progress a bit.

It took a lot of work and effort, but the issues with the tension don’t really show up in the weaving. You can sort of see in a few places how the weft threads aren’t in a straight line, but only if you zoom and know to look for it.

Times like this makes me wish I was surrounded by more people who know how to weave. While I admit that I’m quite good at the craft, the fact of the matter is that I’m still a beginner. This is only the sixth time I’ve woven anything and the first time ever ever used a floor loom, and this project is by the largest thing I’ve woven by a long shot. When something goes wrong, I can consult books for very general advice, but I don’t have many people I can turn to for advice or suggestions on how I could do better next time. I have one good friend who has been weaving for much longer than me and luckily I was able to send her photos of what was going on with my weft. But, I like having multiple sources for information. I feel that it’s somewhat similar to writing a research paper; I wouldn’t use only one source for information and part of that is because multiple perspectives are helpful in understanding a topic. Having multiple perspectives on my tension problem may have helped me to figure out a better solution that just advancing the front beam.

The more I work on my chiton, the more I’m convinced that fiber crafts are truly a group activity. Earlier in the year, I read in the book Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years by E.J.W. Barber that part of the reason spinning and weaving were considered so-called “women’s” work is that you don’t need to be paying 100% of your attention on what you’re doing, and that it’s easy to suddenly stop if necessary. Both of these factors are useful if you were watching children or cooking family meals at the same time, which were also considered “women’s” work. In ancient Greece, all women in the household would have participated in fiber-related activities ; hence I think it’s safe to assume that spinning and weaving were in essence group activities, and I imagine this scenario can be found in many cultures. And I feel even safer assuming that women didn’t spin and weave in silence. They probably chatted, gossiped, vented – the things we do when we’re with a group of close friends today.

All of these months of spinning and weaving alone have been difficult. It’s hard to do a lot in one sitting when all you have for company is your own thoughts. Repetitive tasks are always go buy faster if you’re doing something else, especially if the other task is enjoyable. I’ve listened to various podcasts, trying to find one that I can lose my mind in while I work. I started with My Favorite Murder, which worked for a while but increasingly the first 30-45 minutes would be the two hosts doing small talk. I hate small talk. So I tried one I used to listen to, Welcome to Nightvale, but I found I kept losing track of the story whenever I need to focus more on the task at hand. I tried some academic podcasts about folklore and mythology, but it didn’t really engage my mind enough; if anything, it felt like time slowed down. The one that has worked the best was Random Number Generator Horror Podcast No. Nine, which is hosted by two friends: one who loves horror and one who is quite squeamish. They pick a horror movie each week and talk about it. I like horror, but I’m easily scared so I related to both hosts, and I find myself sometimes making comments about something they said. It’s like having two friends in the room with me to keep me company while I spin and weave. This is the main reason why I feel that fiber arts are best as a group activity.

I also started working on my Academic Statement this week. I’ve been dreading this, I have to admit. I’m supposed to discuss 15 years of college in 750 words or less. It feels impossible. I started off by taking one of the academic advisor’s advice and sorting all of my classes and credits into categories: social sciences, math and physical sciences, and arts and humanities. This…sort of helped. I have most of my credits in arts and humanities, but there’s a good amount of the other two categories on my transcript as well. I decided to freewrite about the Academic Statement (which I published as a post on here) and type whatever thoughts and feelings I had about my undergraduate career. It turns out I have a lot and the freewrite helped to make connections among my various experiences.

I wanted to share what the Area of Emphasis worksheet looked like after I filled it out. Some of my TESC credits were hard to categorize, but as you can see I’ve taken a LOT of classes in a variety of subjects.

Winter 2021 – Week 7 Summary

I started to catch up my weekly posts in week seven. My depression has not done me any favors in terms of school work, but I started getting treatment again for it this week (side note: it’s helping!). I realize it may be weird to discussion my mental health issues in my ePortfolio, but I believe it’s relevant to how I approach my work, and I also try to be very open about this subject in order to alleviate the stigma around mental health.

Anyways, I did some more spinning and reading. I got lost down a bit of a rabbit hole in Prehistoric Textiles about weaving patterns and textile motifs possibly being the inspiration for many of the patterns painted on pottery. It did hurt my head a little, but I love that people have actually studied such niche things (the author, Barber, was talking about how the patterns that were perhaps woven onto Minoan textiles were used for decorating the walls of ancient Egyptian tombs). I’m unsure if I’ll weave any patterns onto my chiton – it’s going to be a whole ordeal warping the floor loom, as I’ve never done that before.

This is part of the ceiling in a 12th Dynasty in Asyut, Egypt; it dates to the early 2nd millennium BCE. In the book that this is in, *Prehistoric Textiles*, the author discussed how the designs in this and other contemporary Egyptian tombs have similar motifs painted on the murals inside, and that these designs can be found in ancient Minoan frescoes. The designs were mostly likely used on textiles as well as murals and pottery.

I also read the majority of Greek and Roman Dress From A To Z. Though, saying I “read” the whole thing is slightly misleading: I skimmed it for any and all words dealing with color and dyeing and took notes on those parts. It was interesting and it led to me to look into the etymology for indikòn, the Greek word for indigo. I wanted to know in what period did indigo started being used in ancient Greece, and I figured that if I could find out the earliest usage of the word indikòn, that might give me a good idea (or at least allow me to make an educated guess). Spoiler: the earliest usage was the first century CE, so the earliest period was probably the Hellenistic period, which is a bit later than the periods I’ve been trying to limit myself to studying. I’m so grateful for having friends who have degrees in Classics – without them I wouldn’t have been able to figure this out on my own.

This is also the week where I started noticing how much by body ached from spinning so much. My legs are constantly treadling my spinning wheel. Even though the treadling isn’t as intensive as being on an exercise bike, over time the repeated use of the same muscles day in and day out takes a toll. Luckily, I can take a break for a few days but I wonder about people in the past who couldn’t take a break, who needed to spin every day otherwise there would be no clothes or linens. I wonder about how much they ached or if they became used to it after a while. Perhaps, as they probably started spinning in childhood, they never ached all that much. I do not know and I wish I had a time machine so I could ask the spinners of the past myself.

This is random, but I wanted to share my notes. Most of the time I take reading is writing these notes. I’ve filled half of my notebook with notes like these. I kind of have to – there’s just so much information.

Winter 2021 – Week 4 Summary

I’ve once again fallen behind on my weekly posts. I think living through a pandemic is finally catch up to me and my mental health is taking a hit. It’s hard to focus on school when the world is…well, what it is right now. Nevertheless, I will do my best to get things done in regards to school. It’s also difficult to complete these posts because what I have spent most of my time for the last two weeks doing is spinning. Looking back at my log, for week four I spent over twenty hours spinning and less than seven hours doing non-fiber related things. Of course, I can talk about what I did in those seven hours, but I’m unsure what else I can talk about when it comes to spinning (except for the random trains of thought I have when spinning. Spinning gives you time to think). Or perhaps I’m being very negative right now because of depression.

In week four, I caught up with updating this ePortfolio with my weekly summaries for weeks two and three. I hadn’t realized I had fallen behind; it’s hard for me to keep track of time these days. It was good to get that done. I was also finally able to pick up the library book I requested through Interlibrary Loan! That was exciting.

The book that I jumped through so many hoops to attain: Archéologie des textiles : des origines au Ve siècle : actes du colloque de Lattes, octobre 1999

Hilariously, the chapter I wanted to read wasn’t quite what I thought it was, but it was still utterly interesting to me. The chapter, “Women’s Work: Spinning and Weaving in the Greek Home,” by K. Carr talked about the logistics of how much cloth a family could produce in one year if only the women in the household were doing the work. It also discussed a bit on how women were viewed in Greek society; it was almost as if they were dangerous and liminal creatures who needed to be watched at all times and kept very busy. The ideal of femininity was a woman who was industrious and skilled in spinning and weaving…except that it could be argued that those activities were also “dangerous”. There are at least a couple of instances in Greek mythology and lore where a woven textile was a dangerous weapon, and spinning was associated with the Moirai – the Fates, which suggests that spinning, in some subconscious way, was not seen as just a harmless activity.

This is a painting by John Melhuish Strudwick titled *A Golden Thread* from 1885. It depicts the Morai – the Fates, a trio of goddesses that determine the length of each person’s life. The figure on the left is Clotho, “the Spinner”, who spins the thread of life; on the right is Lachesis, “the Alloter”, who measures the length of each life; and in the center is Atropos, “She Who Cannot Be Turned”, who cuts each thread, and therefore life, short. There doesn’t seem to be many ancient depictions of them, which makes sense to me. All beings – including the gods themselves – were subject to the Moirai, and that’s just a bit terrifying. Source of photo is Wikipedia

Also, in preparation of starting research into natural dyes that were used in Archaic and Classical Greece, I contacted the owner of a Facebook group who has spent twelve years researching and experimenting with the pigment found in Murex sea snails (though the main species of snails used for dye are no longer categorized in the genus Murex anymore, they are still in the Murex family). The glands of snails in the Murex family are the source of the famous Tyrian, or Phoenician, purple dye used in ancient times, but there is evidence that Murex has been used for purple dye in the Aegean since the time of the Minoans . Anyways, the person sells kits comprised of two or three shells, a dried gland, some small samples of fiber and fabric he’s dyed, and some of the pigment itself. The pigment is expensive – a company, Kremer, sells it for about $2,600 a gram. The person I talked to sells it for about half. I only bought the tiniest of amounts – 0.2 grams – mostly just to have it and share it here! I wasn’t planning to spend much time devoted to Murex purple – I’m more interested in dyes that the average person could obtain – but I also couldn’t pass up actually having samples of the stuff for my very own.

Winter 2021 – Week 3 Summary

This week I…did more spinning! I also finished an essay of sorts that I started last quarter about what, exactly, is a chiton. I keep mentioning it and that I’m making one, but I haven’t actually explained what it is. Better late than never, though, right? There was a lot of information to go through, though. Turns out, if you’re an archaeologist/scholar studying the clothing of an ancient people, it’s very very difficult to definitively say anything about the subject as all of their clothing decomposed centuries ago. All we have to go on is visual and literary evidence, and the problem with visual evidence is that we don’t know how closely sculpture and vase paintings resembled contemporary life. That isn’t to say we cant say anything definitively, just that it is complicated subject. Even the meaning of words become confusing. In one of my books, the author stated that the word amorgos probably meant silk. Another author says that a similar word, amorginon, means very fine linen. And, in another book it states it could mean both. I realized that if I pursued researching the words for fabrics I would quickly go down a rabbit hole and lose several hours, if not days, trying to make sense of it all.

Also, I have a rant. The British Museum states that the figure on the right is wearing a *chiton*. That, my friend, is *not* a *chiton*. A *chiton* does not have an overfold, the *apoptygma*. That is a feature of a *peplos*. Not all *peploi* have an overfold, but if a garment has an overfold, it’s a *peplos*. Do you know how many images the British Museum states have *chitones* portrayed in them and they’re actually *peploi*? Let me tell you: a lot.

I also got my Teeswater wool! I bought 28 ounces of roving and I am slightly overwhelmed with the amount I have to spin in the next few weeks, I must admit. I guess it’s a good thing I enjoy spinning. It was also nice timing that I was able to wind up my plied yarn onto the niddy noddy the night before my wool was delivered. Two skeins finished! They total almost 1,000 yards. Now just 3,200 to go. I…should probably go spin now.

This is a niddy noddy. By winding my yarn on it, I can create a skein and also estimate fairly well how much yardage I have by counting how many times I wrapped my yarn around it.

What is a chiton?

The end goal of my textile work and research this year is to create a chiton. Anyone who has looked at a number of ancient Greek vase paintings and sculptures has probably seen a chiton, though it can be easily confused with another ancient Greek garment, the peplos. In this post, I’ll talk a bit about what a chiton looks like, its origins, and many of its attributes.

A chiton (plural chitones) is a type of linen tunic that was usually floor length, diaphanous, and sleeved. It was made by taking either one or two pieces of fabric and sewing up the sides, creating a tube, which a person then could slip over their head. Sleeves were created by attaching buttons along the top edge of the garment or by sewing . Brooches may also have been used . A chiton was belted with a zone, which loosely means “belt”, but could also mean, “girdle”. A zone was more or less a narrow piece of cloth, leather, or cord . Chitones are classified as endumata, literally, “undergarments”; what this actually means is that endumata are garments worn next to the skin . A person would not have worn a chiton alone and would have donned some sort of over-garment – epiblemata – as well .

Red-figure *kylix* from 500-490 BCE showing a woman wearing a chiton and tying a zone around her waist. Note the small tight folds characteristic of linen .

The chiton was likely not a garment native to Greece but was adopted from the East during the Bronze Age . One of the pieces of evidence that support this is the word chiton itself. The word chiton is attested to in Linear B tablets, “ki-to“, which may linguistically be linked to the Akkadian word kitinnu-, “linen garment” . In his Histories, Herodotus labels the chiton as Ionian (from the central coast of western Anatolia) but was originally from Caria (also western Anatolia, but east of Ionia). Visually, the Greek god Dionysos, who is often framed as a foreign deity from the East (though he is not), is often shown on vase paintings wearing a chiton, further signifying the chiton’s associations outside of ancient Greece . Before the introduction of the chiton, women would have worn the peplos, or the Dorian chiton as Herodotus calls the garment. A peplos is a rectangular piece of cloth usually of made of wool that is draped around the body and fastened at the shoulders with pins and later buttons. It is girdled or belted like the chiton. The peplos typically doesn’t have sleeves but does have an over-fold of fabric that “cuts” the body in half visually called the apoptygma .

You can see the god Dionysos in the center of this amphora wearing the foreign *chiton*, which tips off the viewer to his own foreignness .

The chiton was worn by both men and women, though not consistently. It was worn exclusively by men in Homer’s time, but was rejected by the men of Athens for more “moderate clothes” by the 5th century BCE according to Thucydides’ Histories . This seems to be supported by visual evidence (vase paintings and sculpture) in that male figures before the middle of the 6th century BCE are often shown wearing a chiton, but later in the century only older men, priests, and mythological and historical figures (especially of Eastern origin) are depicted wearing the garment . Athenian women started to wear the chiton at the beginning of the Archaic period, usually with a himation, which is a large and rectangular piece of cloth wrapped around the body and draped across the shoulders . And, while chitones may have stopped being worn by most men by the Classical period, women seemed to have continued to wear them well into the Classical period; the pins that are necessary for wearing a peplos became nearly absent in the archaeological record when the chiton became popular among Athenian men, and continued to remain absent even after the men of Athens adopted other garments. This suggests that women must have continued to wear the chiton (.

As mentioned above, the chiton was typically made from linen. Linen is made from flax and tends to make a fabric that can easily be pleated. The fact that linen can hold small, tight folds is helpful in identifying chitones in visual evidence . A chiton wasn’t always necessarily made of linen, though. There are times in sculpture when a figure is wearing what appears to be a chiton, but the folds are broad and flat, suggesting a woolen fabric instead of linen; an example of this can be seen in the Phrasikleia kore (maiden) . Along with form, the preserved polychromy of ancient sculpture also suggests the use of something other than linen for the chiton. Linen is notoriously difficult to dye, and two sculptures – the Phrasikleia kore and the Chiot kore of the Acropolis – are shown to be wearing a red chiton and blue chiton, respectively .

There are several variations on the standard chiton. The chitoniskos was developed in the middle of the 6th century BCE during development of military attire. Its length extended only to the upper thigh and it had shorter sleeves. While it may have had a military origin, the chitoniskos was also associated with unmarried women. Female dancers and athletes wore chitoniskoi and parthenoi (young unmarried girls) wore them during initiatory rites. Artemis, the virgin goddess of the hunt and protector of girls, is usually portrayed wearing a chitoniskos . Another variant is the exomis, which is worn over only one shoulder, usually the left, and was often seen on craftsmen and warriors . The exomis can many times be seen worn by Hermes in art and is sometimes known as a chiton heteromaschalos . There are many terms to denote the many little variations one can find in a chiton: a chiton that is so long that it falls in folds over the feet – a true mark of luxury and elegance – is called a chiton poderes. If the chiton had a fringe decoration then it is a chiton termioeis. A chitonion specifically points to a women’s garment that would have been semi-transparent, costly, and alluring .

The chiton, as you can see, is a garment that is quite simple in structure and yet not simple at all in its significance. It is not originally of ancient Greece, but the chiton, along with the peplos, is what people think of when imagining the clothing people wore in that day and age. Worn by both men and women, the chiton was versatile with many variations, and yet very much associated with femininity and Eastern luxury .

Works Cited

Fall 2020 – Week 9 Summary

This week was a bit different, in that I didn’t do as much spinning. I read a great deal, instead. Or, it felt like it. The amount of pages wasn’t that much, but I was taking an extensive amount of notes. I like taking Cornell notes and writing down the page numbers while reading. It makes finding the information I want and creating citations much easier. I usually don’t have to flip through the book again once I have my notes. It does make getting through the book somewhat of a slow process, though.

I could write several deeply researched essays just on the dozen pages that I read in the “Garments” chapter. Before launching into discussions about specific garments, the author talks about the fibers used, decoration and color, and the value of garments. The author, Lee, discusses how silk was imported and worn in Greece, but that there was the possibility that silk clothing may have been purchased and then painstakingly unraveled and rewoven into fabric that was more in line with Greek preferences . Even more mind-blowing (for me) is that ancient Greece may have had its own native silk on the island of Cos.

There is also the discussion of colors and dyes, which is one of my favorite topics. There is a good amount of evidence that a range of colors were used in textiles. Textile fragments from Kerameikos, an area of Athens, Greece, included pieces with red stripes, embroidery with red thread, and a skein of red thread. Yellow produced from saffron dye has been known since the Bronze age. The color prized above all, it seems, was purple and the best dye source was the murex shellfish . I don’t know how many articles and book chapters I’ve seen that have focused on purple dye, even if it says it’s going to cover a range of ancient dyes. It’s kind of frustrating, to be honest. I think I may start resenting purple, ha! But seriously: you may have noticed I mentioned red thread earlier, but the author said nothing about the dye. It’s oddly difficult to find authors willing to discuss what made red, blue, and other colors. I realize it may be that nobody ever bothered to write the information down, which is definitely possible. It makes me want to study what native plants of Greece may have dye potential, obtain them, and do dye experiments with the plants. That, though, is way more work than I’m willing to do at the moment.

Fall 2020 – Thanksgiving Week Summary

During the Thanksgiving break, I did my best to try and catch up on work. I didn’t get nearly the amount that I wanted done; this was the week that the medication for my chronic headaches decided it didn’t want to do its job. I increased the dosage but it takes about a week to take effect, so there went my week. But, let’s focus on the positive. What did I get done?

Of course, I did more spinning. Spinning is one of the few things I can do when I have headaches. While I do tend to have a bright light on, which doesn’t help with the pain, I don’t need to focus my eyes intensely on what I’m doing when I spin. A lot of it is by feel and muscle memory. I’ve even spun in the moonlight during a power outage. Related to fiber work, I also bought myself a niddy noddy. A niddy noddy is a tool that allows you to create a skein of yarn by wrapping yarn around it; it also allows you to estimate how much yarn you have by counting how many times you went around the niddy noddy with the yarn.

I also did some reading and writing. It felt good to be visibly productive. I caught up on a couple of the week summaries and I started writing a post about combing wool. It’s a bit challenging trying to describe combing wool. I wanted to make a video showing what it looks like, but I realized that making a video was a bit more complicated than I thought it would be. I also continued reading Body, Dress, and Identity in Ancient Greece. Looking back at my notes, I’m remembering that I wanted to look into the textile tool, the epinetron. Epinetra are half cylinder pottery pieces that women placed over their thighs to protect them from combing wool . This doesn’t make any sense to me. When I comb wool, the combs aren’t anywhere near my legs; protection is not needed. If I was carding wool, perhaps I might want to protect my legs depending on how I was doing it. Perhaps this is one of those moments where researchers/archaeologists don’t realize that combing and carding are very different methods and are not interchangeable terms. This sort of thing happens often, it turns out. When people who know nothing about fiber arts study textile archaeology, they sometimes come to inaccurate conclusions because they don’t actually understand the craft. This is something that the author of Women’s Work, Elizabeth Wayland Barber, brings up that makes me wonder how textile archaeology would change if people were required to be proficient at various fiber arts.

Fall 2020 – Week 8 Summary

The eighth week of the quarter continued to be filled with more spinning. I figured out this week that I could connect my headphones to my phone and therefore free my hands during phone calls. I wrote previously that I felt somewhat lonely while spinning, and remembering that headphones exist has helped to assuage that loneliness. I also realized that I can easily spin and participate in roleplaying sessions with my Dungeons and Dragons group at the same time. It’s not quite the same as the old days when groups of women gathered to spin together, but it’s close enough.

It felt like it was taking forever to fill up the bobbin on my spinning wheel. I could see the progression, the yarn slowly winding up on itself layer by layer, but hours and hours of spinning have passed and the bobbin still had room on it. I’m used to the spindles I work with, which usually max out at around two or so ounces of wool, while the bobbins that my wheel uses hold a little more than four ounces.

I continued to read Ariadne‘s Threads, though I do think it is, again, another book that the most useful part for me is the bibliography. The clothing it focuses on doesn’t include the chiton nor do Minoan garments seem to be predecessors to Archaic and Classical Greek clothing; throughout the book, the author provides a strong argument that Minoan clothing was actually cut and sewn, even if it was a minimal amount. Ancient Greek clothing was not made up of cut and sewn garments, but usually composed of rectangular pieces of fabric nearly straight off the loom, arranged on the body and held together with belts, girdles, pins, etc.

I also started reading more in depth Body, Dress, and Identity in Ancient Greece by Mireille M. Lee. I’ve actually had this book checked out from the library for a while, even before the quarter started. I was interested in the subject in general, but I had only skimmed through the book until now. I jumped to the “Garments” chapter and the author made a very good point I hadn’t considered before: when studying the dress of a culture, it’s limiting to only look at garments. We disregard the overall appearance – what about accessories, cosmetics, how is the garment worn, who is wearing it, etc – and therefore we don’t take into account the relationship between the body and dress. Also, the study of dress becomes difficult when no garments survive, as is the case with ancient Greece. Researchers are left with vase paintings and sculptures, which can be problematic in that we do not know how representative of lived reality they are depicting .