Lowell National Historic Park-Part 2

 Hi everyone. Happy Friday. It's almost the weekend too, so for many people, it is almost time for a little down time. 😏

And FYI-today's post is a bit on the long side. 

    This past Wednesday I shared some photos and info from a trip last month to Lowell National Historic Park in Lowell, Massachusetts. My daughter and I  visited this park back in early February when she had some vacation time before starting a new job. Here's my Wednesday post if you're interested in reading it: Lowell National Historic Park-Part 1.

    Since it is time for Nicole's Friday Face Off and also for Gillena's Friday Lunch Break , I have some face photos today, as well as some photos from the museum at the Historic Park.  The museum is on the floor above where the park has a large number of actual still working looms.

   This historic park had me thinking about Fabric/Textiles, and how it is one those "things" that most of us probably take for granted.  Textiles are all over the place; in clothing, linens, towels, curtains, rugs and other items too. I'll use clothes as an example. 

    We go to a store or go online and buy clothes. Or perhaps we get second hand clothes from someone. Or maybe you even sew and just get the fabric to make your clothes.  Obviously we couldn't have clothes without the fabrics that make them. (Unless we shot all the animals and ran around in fur, but that would definitely decimate the animal population. 😒) I don't know about you, but other than the type of fabric something is, I don't usually think about what it takes to make  the fabric. 

  I can see why weaving fabric by hand would take up so much of a household's time before mechanization came into play. Clothes were needed for warmth, privacy and protection. Yes fabrics could be bought, especially specialty materials like silk, but it was often out of the budgets of many people. It also explains why clothes closets were small or weren't even put into many older homes.  People didn't need them because they didn't have all that many outfits. Unless of course they were wealthy.

   Mechanization was good for fabric production, even though there were a lot of negatives too. Not only were the early workers subject to long days, no safety constraints, and relatively poor working conditions, there were also nasty environmental effects like  dyes and other discharges.  I could probably write a whole post about the pros and cons of mechanization, but I think you get the point without me doing that. 

       The mills in Lowell were historically  about making cotton fabric. I liked this glass tube they had in the museum that showed the results of the entire process, starting with  the actual cotton. To keep this short, I'm not writing about each step but you can see in the photos how the original cotton changes to become, eventually, fabric.

The cotton must be cleaned and then spun to be  turned into thread.

The thread is woven into  cloth, which might need to be whitened before it is finished.

 And it might then need to be dyed to create colorful threads, or perhaps the entire sheet of fabric is dyed.

And then you get bolts of fabric.

 (Sorry for the lousy clarity on this next photo. I think I smushed my finger over the lens on my phone before I took this photo.)

After production,  the bolts of fabric have to be shipped to their destinations.

      I really like this (above) photo because of the perspective of the museum display with  my daughter. She loves fabric, as you can see from  all the various types in her outfit. She also is a clothes horse extraordinaire. And she is a pretty decent quilter too.

     Historically, the importance of making textiles was right up there with getting food. The oldest garment found to date (based on my internet search as I am not a fabric expert) was from somewhere between 3482-3012 BCE/BC in Egypt. You can see it and read about it here if you are interested: Tarkhan Dress. Sadly, fabric doesn't often survive the millennia things like pottery, sculpture, tools and buildings do, and a lot of early archaeologists didn't  bring the importance of fabric front and center in the research, mainly because even they found it, it wasn't showy and usually very decayed. 

      I was also reading about natural versus synthetic fabrics. Although natural fabrics (cotton, wool, linen and silk) come from non-man made sources, man manipulated those sources in order to have the fibers to make fabric. One example  is how sheep have been bred for millennia to have more wool, and wool that does not shed. The ancestors to today's sheep shed their woolly "fur" or had people pull it off. (Rather like having a shedding dog and pulling off clumps of hair.) Sheep are most likely the second oldest domesticated animal right behind dogs because wool makes fantastic yarn then used to make fabric.

     There are books written about textile production, types of textiles, uses of textiles, etc. I've read quite a few, but this is a blog post (and it's already pretty long) and not a book about fabric.

OK, this is enough for one post. I'll end this post on the lighter side with a selfie my daughter took of herself and me on our day out.

If you're interested my final Lowell Park post will be scheduled next Wednesday.

I hope my look at fabric wasn't too boring.  I will be missing the next couple of weeks of Friday Face Offs and Friday Lunch Breaks as I'm heading out on a long planned and twice postponed girls trip. 

Have a super weekend.