Fabric : the hidden history of the material world /
Hidden history of the material world.
Victoria Finlay.
- First Pegasus Books cloth edition.
- New York : Pegasus Books, 2022.
- 512 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color), maps ; 24 cm.
Includes bibliographical references (pages [455]-494) and index.
Some words before we start -- Barkcloth -- Tapa -- Cotton -- Wool -- Tweed -- Pashmina -- Sackcloth -- Linen -- Silk -- Imagined fabrics -- Patchwork.
"In Fabric...author Victoria Finlay spins us round the globe, weaving stories of our relationship with cloth and asking how and why people through the ages have made it, worn it, invented it, and made symbols out of it. And sometimes why they have fought for it. She beats the inner bark of trees into cloth in Papua New Guinea, fails to handspin cotton in Guatemala, visits tweed weavers at their homes in Harris, and has lessons in patchwork-making in Gee's Bend, Alabama - where in the 1930s, deprived of almost everything they owned, a community of women turned quilting into an art form. She began her research just after the deaths of both her parents -and entwined in the threads she found her personal story too. Fabric is not just a material history of our world, but Finlay's own journey through grief and recovery."--publisher's website.