Fall 2020 – Gloria Gutierrez

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 .

Fall 2020 – Week 7 Summary

Week seven continued to be filled with mostly spinning and some combing of wool. I didn’t have much energy to do more than that this week (or the week before, or the following week) to be honest. There’s nothing like having health problems interfering with your ability to function, no?

But spinning is a low energy activity that doesn’t involve too much thought in the actual physicality of it. Though, I suppose that isn’t 100% true; it’s just that I’ve been spinning long enough that it’s mostly second nature to me. The only part that is difficult is drafting the wool: drawing out an amount of fiber for twist to enter into, which transforms the fiber from roving to yarn. Drafting on a spinning wheel is a little different than drafting on a spindle, and I have a lot of little neps (little balls of wool made of very short fibers that have squished together). They’re quite small and if I was spinning a thicker yarn they wouldn’t be an issue, but I’m spinning a quite fine yarn, so when they get drafted in, they become rather obvious. I either have to carefully pull them out if they make it into my yarn, or catch them in the roving and pull the out before they’re drafted in. It’s annoying and it’s shown me that I should have combed my wool more. I usually did about four passes with the combs and I know I was careful, so the neps aren’t from me tearing the fiber. I just didn’t comb enough. At least I know this for the rest of the fleece that I still have to comb.

The little white spot between my fingers is a nep. It’s a small nep to be sure, but it’s still the bane of my existence.

I checked out another book from the library: Ariadne’s Threads: The Construction and Significance of Clothes in the Aegean Bronze Age by Bernice R. Jones. While the garment I’m creating isn’t covered in this book – the chiton was probably a foreign garment adopted in the Bronze Age but started being worn by Athenian women in the Archaic period (about 8th to 5th centuries BCE) – the author is doing something similar to what I’m doing, just on a much larger scale and with much more research. The author is also using modern materials, though they do not state if they’re using modern methods. At least, I couldn’t find any place in the book where they discussed their methods for creating their garments. I want to assume they did it by hand because that makes the most sense to me, but it’s never a good idea to assume. It seems odd to engage in experimental archaeology and use a sewing machine. All of this has really gotten me thinking; I sort of wish I had time to construct my own warp-weighted loom, the kind that would have been used in ancient Greece, and taught myself how to use it. I love the idea of recreating textiles to the best of our abilities in order to understand ancient garments, but I feel making the fabric for those garments is half of the story.

Ariadne’s Threads goes over the garments of the Minoan civilization of Bronze Age Crete. I have to admit, if this book was more specific on patterns I would have become more inclined to teach myself how to sew. Minoan clothing has always looked so comfy yet elegant to me.

Fall 2020 – Week 6 Summary

I have to admit now that my weeks involve mostly spinning, they sort of bleed into each other. I’m having a hard time differentiating them; I should have written this back in week seven. I’ll do my best to remember what I did, though my log does indicate I mostly spun.

I did start reading another book: Greek and Roman Dress From A to Z. It’s written in an encyclopedia format, though I’m reading it like any other book – starting at page one and going until I get to the last page. This is how I tend to read encyclopedias and I’ve done this since I was a child; I’m a bit odd, I know. It works for me, especially in this case, because I’m picking up terms I never knew about. This is very helpful when it comes to colors and dyes, which I’ll focus more on next quarter when I dye the yarn I’m currently spinning.

But mostly, I spun. It’s a nice escape from the rest of the world; I put on a podcast and spin for hours, taking breaks to eat and stretch my legs. It can be a little lonely, though. I can see how spinning was an activity that was done in groups, women grabbing their spindles, or later on in history their wheels, and socializing while doing a very necessary activity. Though, before the pandemic, I did have opportunities to spin with other people (of all genders these days!) but I never took advantage of those opportunities. In the end, I’m an introvert.

There’s a different feeling to spinning when I’m spinning for pleasure versus spinning for necessity. I’ve always spun because I enjoy it. Whatever I made was created on my own timeline and was technically something I could find somewhere else. This is not the case now. I am on a timeline and what I am creating is unique. Sure, I could buy fabric and with a sewing machine (and even then that’s not a necessary tool) easily make something resembling a chiton. But it wouldn’t be anywhere near the same. All of this somehow changes the way I feel when I spin. I sort of feel like my spinning wheel is a time machine.

This is where I spend a good chunk of my time

It’s been a fun challenge trying to keep a consistent thickness with my yarn. I’ve only had my wheel for about 6 months and it’s a bit different from spinning with a spindle.

Fall 2020 – Week 5 Summary

I spent most of this week spinning and reading the book Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years – Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times. I found the book interesting in how it focused on how fiber arts shaped gender roles and culture. It didn’t focus on any specific place in the world, it mostly covered all over Europe. The author also has the hypothesis that weaving is such an intricate and complex idea that it may have only been invented once and was spread throughout the globe, which I find very limiting and something from a western mindset. But, I could be wrong. The author is held in high regard in the textile archeology community it seems. But it never hurts to question, no?

An interesting book, but I feel that the author went on some odd tangents.

I should have read more. I have a book from the library, Greek and Roman Dress From A To Z, that would go well with the other book I have about ancient Greek clothing: Body, Dress and Identity in Ancient Greece. Week 5 and 6 have been some of the hardest weeks this year in my personal life. I ended up escaping from my anxiety and stress by spinning, which at least is still a school activity.

Fall 2020 – Week 4 Summary

This week was all over the place. I did a little bit of everything. This was the week that I started spinning. I had a good amount of wool prepared to spin and I needed a change of pace; combing wool is a bit, well, boring. I imagine it’s a much more enjoyable activity when in the company of other people. I decided to clean my spinning wheel a bit before I started. Spinning wheels need to be regularly oiled before use, but that oil can accumulate and become messy, which was happening with mine.

My spinning wheel, a Kromski Fantasia. I assembled and finished her myself and painted the wheel to look starry.

I love spinning. One could argue that spinning yarn is not that much more exciting than combing wool, and I suppose they could be right. For me, though, it’s very meditative, and I love seeing the transformation of raw fiber under my fingers. Until recently I have only had drop spindles, which are one of humanity’s oldest tools. I treated myself to a spinning wheel in the spring, though, and I’m glad because if I tried to do this project with only a drop spindle….well, I would spend the entire school year only spinning. The first thing I did before spinning in earnest was spin a small sample of yarn. I want the yarn I weave with for this project to be a fineness of 24 wraps per inch (wpi), meaning that the yarn would wrap around an inch of a ruler twenty-four times. I spun up some of the wool, plied it, and washed it to see if I had put enough twist into it, if I needed to spin finer or thicker, etc. Once I did that, I could officially start spinning my yarn.

If you look closely, you can see that my sample yarn wraps around about 21 times in an inch of space, which makes it 21 wpi. Ideally, the yarn for my project will be 24 wpi. Now I know to spin finer.

I also spent a good chunk of time looking for books this week. I found myself becoming interested in what fiber work looked like inside the home in ancient Greece. There’s a good amount of information about cloth production in the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations, but that’s too early and too industrial for what I’m curious about. There is also information about fiber production on a small and large scale in ancient Rome, but while ancient Greece and Rome are often grouped together they are distinctly different. Finding information about “women’s work” in archaic and classical Greece (c. 1000-300 BCE) is oddly difficult. Looking through the bibliographies of the books I currently have has helped, but either the books are in another language or unavailable to me. It’s quite frustrating. Granted, I’m also distracting myself once again from researching ancient Greek clothing. My attention span seems to go everywhere these days.

Fall 2020 – Week 3 Summary

*Note: I wanted to add more photos to this post, but not only can I not embed Instagram posts, I’m now having issues uploading files to the Media Gallery on WordPress. This is already quite late so I’m posting it as is. I was able to place one picture in this post before I started having problems, so at least there is that.

**Another note 11/2: I can’t get Instagram to work still, but I can upload images to WordPress again, so I added in a picture.

I’m writing this quite late this week. My insomnia has been been keeping me up till at least 4 in the morning and there were at least three days I fell asleep after 6:00am. I guess it’s a good thing I don’t have a fixed schedule.
I received a book in the mail last week that I find fascinating called Ancient Textiles: Production, Craft, and Society. It’s one of the titles Professor Krotscheck recommended to me but it isn’t available at the library. I found the table of contents online and I found it interesting enough that I decided to buy it. Reading through it, while I found most of it personally fascinating, the chapters involving Greece are discussing textiles of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations, which is a bit earlier than what I’m studying (but time periods that I would like to study more in-depth one day).

With chapters such as, “Textile Industry and Minoan Palaces”, “Cloth Production in Late Bronze Age Greece”, and “Spinning in the Roman World: from Everyday Craft to Metaphor of Destiny,” this book will not be stored on the bookshelf for a while. I admit I’m a huge nerd.

The book is still filled with interesting things and it’s a treasure trove of sources with the bibliographies. And while the Minoan civilization was considered ancient to the ancient Greeks, with the Bronze Age ending around 1200 BCE , it’s not a stretch to believe that something of the Minoans survived in the culture of the ancient Greeks. So if the Minoans used alum as a probable mordant in their textiles (and many places in the world do), the ancient Greeks probably did as well . Actually, I found an interesting description of something called “Phrygian stone” that details a process that has alum repeatedly roasted and then quenched in sweet wine. When one wishes to dye with it, they crumble the Phrygian stone into pieces and boil it in water. They submerge wool into the solution and let it cool, then mix in algae and wash in sea water. This process should give the ever-precious color purple . I am honestly quite tempted to try this. I just need a blow torch.

Like I said, I find the book fascinating. It doesn’t tell me much about clothing, though. It also focus more on cloth production on a grander scale, while I’m hoping to find more information on cloth production that takes place in the home. I found some more titles on ancient Greek clothing this week and I think the books are at the library waiting for me as I write this. Once I grab those books and pour over them, I’ll actually write more about the chiton, the garment my project revolves around.

Besides reading, I combed more fleece. I’ve gone through nearly half of the fleece by now, which is not where I had hoped I would be. I started spinning this week and I’ll take turns going between spinning and combing. My arms will thank me, I’m sure.

The wool I’ve combed into roving so far. There’s a lot, but I’ve only gone through maybe half the fleece

Fall 2020 – Technical difficulties

I have a week 3 post written but the images are not working. I also have Instagram posts embedded in the Image Gallery but they, too, are not working. I’ve sent in a support ticket and hopefully I’ll hear back soon. I’ll put up the week 3 post on Monday night if I don’t hear back or fix it all myself.

Fall 2020 – Week 2 Summary

My life is wool. Not literally, but only barely. I’ve spent most of my time combing wool again last week. This part of the process is taking longer than I had hoped. I might see how much of the fleece I get through this week and start spinning next week even if I’m not done. I don’t actually need all four pounds of the fleece, so spinning and combing at the same time instead of combing all of the wool before spinning may work better.

I started reading Overdressed: The Shockingly High Price of Fast Fashion by Elizabeth L. Cline. I haven’t gotten far into the book, but I’m shocked at some of the statistics I’ve read. It was written in 2010 and it stated that a person in the US will purchase on average 64 pieces of clothing a year. It’s an average and I’d be curious to see the actual data, but still. I thought about how many pieces of clothing I’ve bought this year, including underwear, and it’s maybe 20. Maybe. Half of that number are the tights I wear every day. Granted, my clothing is probably part of fast fashion, though on the pricier side of it as I wear plus sizes. I wonder if Cline will touch upon the plus size fashion industry in regards to fast fashion. If not, I think I’d like to look into it.

I also picked up the loom I will be using from the Fiber Arts Studio that’s part of the Indigenous Arts campus at Evergreen on Friday. My sister-in-law drove down from Tacoma so I could use her minivan to bring it home and my fiance came with me to help move it. The loom is over 100 pounds and moving it wiped me out for not just the rest of the day but the entire weekend as well. I decided for Saturday and Sunday to separate locks from the fleece but not comb them to give my arms some rest; I have chronic pain in my arms and shoulders that I’m currently going to physical therapy for. It sort of makes you wonder why I decided to do such physically intensive activities for my studies this quarter, to which I can only respond: I have a passion. I don’t always think clearly when it comes to my passions. And while combing wool is tedious, I’m enjoying it. Though I’m going to force myself to read more this week; I have several books waiting for me to go through.