text post from 5 days ago

it is human nature to weave strings of yarn, threads, or fibers together to make cloth and textiles

humans will see a soft cellulose plant material or downy animal coat and say is anyone going to twist that staple fibre in order to make a cohesive thread and then not wait for an answer

Seriously, spinning as a craft is ancient. Archaeologists recently discovered three-ply fiber that’s around 46,000 years old, blowing the previous “oldest fingers” out of the water by thousands of years.

But get this: It’s made from fucking TREE BARK. Can you imagine the dedication, foresight, and experimentation involved in figuring out how to harvest and spin that? On top of everything, it’s also lace weight. What the fuck, Neanderthals?

Article: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/neanderthals-made-the-worlds-oldest-thread/



Also, big ole slow clap for the article writer.


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it’s very cool that neanderthals managed to get yarn out of bark fiber, but i think you might be under the impression that all tree bark is like, oak, or sycamore, or something, and only exists in ‘thick chunk of wood’ or ‘flake of wood’ form. but there’s lots of bark like elm and cedar that peels away from the tree in long, tough strips, like so:

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like, look at it. it’s string. it’s obviously string. you don’t actually have to be a genius to look at this and think ‘ah! string time :)’

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i’ve picked up shed pieces of elm bark on a golf course, stripped and combed out the fiber with just my fingernails, and started hand-twisting good strong cordage right then and there as i walked. you don’t even have to soak it first, though i think if you want finer/softer cordage it helps to soak, beat, and comb the fibers.

the people of the pacific northwest, where there’s so many cedars, developed really wonderful textiles out of cedar bark fiber, pounding and soaking and combing it a bit like linen. i’ve never gotten to touch any, though i’d really like to.

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here’s a whole page on all the different stems and barks that can be used for cordage! how cool is that?

so, not to denigrate the skill and intelligence of ancient people, but if you already know how to hand-spin grass and hair, then spinning bark is an extremely obvious and easy thing to do as soon as you encounter the right kind of bark.

Not terribly relevant to the question of spinning bark from cordage but @roach-works mentioned PNW weaving so I have to add this because it’s too cool not to share: some of the Native nations of the Pacific Northwest also kept wool dogs! As in dogs who were bred specifically for their coats, and they mixed the dog fur with cedar fiber to weave blankets and other textiles.

As with so many things related to indigenous knowledge, many tribes had oral histories of the wool dogs but because it was barely mentioned in European accounts (and the wool dog breed is extinct) it was “unconfirmed” until relatively recently, when microscopic analysis of extant blankets in museum collections showed that many of the blankets were woven from a mix of fibers that included dog fur!

The Dogs That Grew Wool

and the People Who Love Them

| Hakai Magazine

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.


text post from 2 weeks ago

this summer i will learn italian and french and russian and run a marathon everyday and work for three months and get fifty new ear piercings and read every work of high literature ever created and watch every movie. but most importantly just chill and relax


text post from 2 weeks ago

After Elisabeth, which tells the story of a woman who emancipates herself and finds herself, I found it appealing to tell a "coming of age" story about a young man who doesn't know at all what the world demands of him. And in an exaggerated form that starts from a parable; namely that the world we live in is a world of bloodscukers. The world of adults appears to the young person as cruel and dangerous. Now he can, as he does at the beginning, take the position: It's none of my business, I don't want to go there. But he is drawn into it, through his first love. Eventually, he is completely immersed in the world of adults and becomes one of them himself. That has been the concept for my development of the story. Which is, of course, to be understood as a critique of the adult world. Why is this a world where one sucks on the other? I've taken this vampire world for what it is: a mythical image for a world that is evil.

Michael Kunze about Tanz der Vampire (Blickpunkt Musical TdV 1)


text post from 2 weeks ago

Cretaceous Characters - Quetzalcoatlus meets a sub-adult triceratops. Just a silly paleoart cartoon thing of mine.