Fabric Quotes

“I’ve come to understand that under some circumstances a mourning period is liberating. You don’t have to act in normal ways while your heart is grieving. You can wear black and later grey or mauve and people will understand that you are in a liminal place, and can’t be fully counted on. There’s freedom in mourning time too.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“Winter’s when people make things, she said. The dark months are the fabric months.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“Everything is about balance. A faster loom, a faster spinning wheel to feed the faster loom, an even faster loom to use up all the spun cotton, the need for more clothes to use up all the woven cotton, a faster wheel, a faster loom, new markets of people able to buy all the new clothes, a need for more cotton, a need for a new kind of cotton that fights its own pests, a faster loom, a faster wheel and here we are spinning and spinning our cosmos around, and the more we make the more we destroy and here we are. The maize god is speeding up time.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“Weaving’s not symbolic. Weaving’s work.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“Stop concentrating,’ Dominga says. ‘You have to understand the thread, but not by thinking… you’ll know, you’ll feel when it’s going wrong.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“The warp threads need to be the strongest: if they break, the whole cloth is lost.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“But now I understood mourning clothes for the first time. I needed an armband, a ribbon, any kind of sign that would be understood by strangers and friends to say I couldn’t be relied on, that I was to be treated carefully, that I was not, for a while, in this world.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“After that, I began to notice how fabrics can give a glimpse of something truthful, a clue to what is underneath the surface of things. I learned that the word ‘clue’ itself comes from an Old English term for a ball of yarn that can be unwound to show the right path. And, almost in passing, I saw how the stories of fabrics, their histories, are about endeavour and work and secrets and feuds and inventions and abuse and beauty and ugliness, and sometimes they are about tenderness.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“But I always play a game at exhibitions. I scan each room from the doorway. I ask myself which piece I’d like to take home, which one I’d like to know more about, and which one I like least. And I make sure that when I enter I give all three equal attention.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“For a long time this chapter existed as a series of folders labelled ‘Nylon’, then later ‘Artificial’ then ‘Human-made’. And whatever the name, it felt like something heavy at the end of a book that otherwise felt full of lightness. Of course I had to include the nylons and the rayons and things beginning with poly-or ending with-tex. I knew that. But these fibres weren’t formed on a creature or grown in a field or cultivated with digging sticks in a Pacific garden. Pliny didn’t write about them, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to either. I didn’t think I even liked them.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“And remembering that these relatively new, often problematic and sometimes difficult to love fabrics can also, at their best, be beautiful.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“Because at the Qing Imperial Court, as in many places and times (though not our own), clothing was not just about fashion or display or prestige or practicality or even rank. It was, sometimes, about achieving an actual connection, through material, to a world beyond the material.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“One day soon I’ll pull the bag out from under the eaves, and sort it properly and give some of it away and find uses for the rest and in that way cut some of the threads of obligation to some half-imagined past in which inheriting it has tangled me. It can be so hard to get rid of stuff.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“His dementia is like a visitor who will stay for ages kicking its heels around his brain but will occasionally go out for five minutes or for a whole hour, leaving him lucid and conversational.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“I’ll think about how while weaving on a loom is all about ninety-degree angles, with bobbin lace you’re not the person on a police search going from one side to another, tracking every inch of the land. You’re the spider, starting from a point, going to another, curling your thread around itself to hold another piece in place. You can cross and turn and come back on yourself and wind around and go back in at a different angle. You can make anything you like in this crazy, wonderful kind of plaiting with pins and bobbin weights. You just have to keep your wits about you.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“There’s a kind of music to the notation. ‘You have to get used to the rhythm of your hands first,’ Gwynedd says. ‘And then you can do it without thinking.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“Euonymus europaeus, also known as the spindle tree. Later I found out that it is native to Britain and, more importantly, native to the northern regions of Europe where many of the stories in the Grimm Brothers’ collection originated. It is sometimes called skewerwood, or prickwood, because as well as spindles (which are not sharp) it was used for goads and skewers and knitting needles (which are). Also, every bit of the tree is poisonous.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“They calculated that with each person spinning forty grammes of yarn a day, they could begin to solve the clothes problem–once they’d put rice fields to cotton after the first harvest.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“But when you spin by hand you’re close to the thread, you can sense what it needs, you can loosen it and twist it; it’s like a dialogue.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“Plus vegetable oil to make it soft.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“For wool it means that the dye is applied before spinning and weaving, so the colour is less likely to fade.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“There was one type of sheep I was expecting to find in the British Wool book, but it wasn’t there. Which surprised me. Even as I write I have checked again, in case I missed it.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“I wrote to British Wool, the association of sheep farmers that auctions and markets almost all the wool in Britain today. By return I received a wonderful colour guide to the seventy-four breeds of sheep in the UK (more than any other country in the world),”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“This little spindle attached to its big spinning wheel was like a creature waiting to be fed: hungry, demanding, wanting more of me than I could give it.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“The books mostly call it the triangular trade, but that comfortingly regular shape doesn’t hold within in it a sense of the spiralling despair created by the Transatlantic cotton trade after the sixteenth century.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“Cotton has this lightness, this quality of being drawn into fine threads, that is like its magic. Yet it was once picked by slaves. It started the Industrial Revolution. It employed vast numbers of young children. The way most of it is made today spews huge quantities of chemicals into the earth and into the water table. I bounce the cotton on my palm and see that it’s not even formed. It’s difficult to think that in the history of this cloudy, soft, light material there can have been so much suffering.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“In which the author learns how the trick to spinning is keeping everything in balance; and comes to understand that the history of cotton is also a history of speed, mythology and disappointment.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“Then she places it on the cushion and picks up two sticks, painted blue. Then she bashes the flatness out of it, folding it over and hitting it again, as if she was making a cotton version of puff pastry.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“And the glyph, or symbol, they used for setting the cosmos in motion was a whorl, the circle with a hole that is at the base of just about every hand-held spindle in the world.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“There were stories, I thought, and I wanted to know them.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World