Portal:Textile Arts

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The Textile Arts Portal

Portrait illustrates the practical, decorative, and social aspects of the textile arts
The textile arts are those arts and crafts that use plant, animal, or synthetic fibers to construct practical or decorative objects. Textiles cover the human body to protect it from the elements and to send social cues to other people. Textiles are used to store, secure, and protect possessions, and to soften, insulate, and decorate living spaces and surfaces.

The word textile is from Latin texere which means "to weave", "to braid" or "to construct". The simplest textile art is felting, in which animal fibers are matted together using heat and moisture. Most textile arts begin with twisting or spinning and plying fibers to make yarn (called thread when it is very fine and rope when it is very heavy). Yarn can then be knotted, looped, braided, or woven to make flexible fabric or cloth, and cloth can be used to make clothing and soft furnishings. All of these items – felt, yarn, fabric, and finished objects – are referred to as textiles.

Textiles have been a fundamental part of human life since the beginning of civilization. The history of textile arts is also the history of international trade. Tyrian purple dye was an important trade good in the ancient Mediterranean. The Silk Road brought Chinese silk to India, Africa, and Europe. Tastes for imported luxury fabrics led to sumptuary laws during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The industrial revolution was a revolution of textiles technology: cotton gin, the spinning jenny, and the power loom mechanized production and led to the Luddite rebellion.

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Felbrigge Psalter
Credit: Unknown author, source: English Embroidered Bookbindings

The Felbrigge Psalter is an illuminated manuscript from mid-thirteenth century England that has an embroidered bookbinding which probably dates to the early fourteenth century. It is the oldest surviving book from England to have an embroidered binding.

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Bess of Hardwick, Countess of Shrewsbury by Rowland Lockley
Elizabeth Hardwick, or Hardwicke, Countess of Shrewsbury, known as Bess of Hardwick, (1527–1608) was the third surviving daughter of John Hardwick of Hardwicke in Derbyshire. She was married four times, firstly to Richard Barlow who died in his teens; secondly to the courtier Sir William Cavendish; thirdly to Sir William St. Loe; and to lastly to George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, sometime keeper to the captive Mary Queen of Scots. An accomplished needlewoman, Bess hosted Mary at Chatsworth House for extended periods in 1569, 1570, and 1571, during which time they worked together on the Oxburgh Hangings. In 1601, Bess ordered an inventory of the household furnishings including textiles at her three properties at Chatsworth and Hardwick, which survives, and in her will she bequeathed these items to her heirs to be preserved in perpetuity. The 400-year-old collection, now known as the Hardwick Hall textiles, is the largest collection of tapestry, embroidery, canvaswork, and other textiles to have been preserved by a single private family.
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Bead crochet

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Valois Tapestries
The Valois Tapestries are a series of eight tapestries depicting festivities or "magnificences" at the Court of France in the second half of the 16th century. The tapestries were worked in the Spanish Netherlands, probably in Brussels or Antwerp, shortly after 1580. Scholars have not firmly established who commissioned the tapestries or for whom they were intended. It is likely that they were once owned by Catherine de' Medici, but they are not included in the inventory of possessions drawn up after her death. She had probably presented them to her granddaughter Christina of Lorraine, for her marriage to Ferdinando I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, in 1589. The tapestries are now stored at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Tuscany, but are not on public display.
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Nikolai Gogol
"Yes, nowadays everything is being mortgaged, or is going to be." This said, Kostanzhoglo's temper rose still further. "Out upon your factories of hats and candles!" he cried. "Out upon procuring candle-makers from London, and then turning landowners into hucksters! To think of a Russian pomiestchik, a member of the noblest of callings, conducting workshops and cotton mills! Why, it is for the wenches of towns to handle looms for muslin and lace."
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Quality content

Featured articles: Cochineal

Good articles: History of silk • Knitta • Navajo rug • Palestinian costumes

Featured pictures:

Mohammed Alim Khan by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii

Felbrigge Psalter, Unknown author, English Embroidered Bookbindings, 1899

Photochrom print of an elderly Irish woman at a spinning wheel, by Detroit Publishing Co.

Mrs. Bill Stagg with state quilt, Pie Town, New Mexico, by Lee Russell

The Flying Carpet, by Viktor Vasnetsov

Family with Navajo rugs and loom, 1873

A weaver operates a beater and heddles. Woodcut by Yanagawa Shigenobu, 1825-1832

Pigments for sale in Goa, India

Palestinian Bedouin woman wearing historic Palestinian costume

A seventeenth century Tibetan thangka
 
 
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