Gifts

 

Traditional blouse from Romania

Recently I have been gifted with some lovely textiles.  There is no better person to give textiles to than a textile maker!  

The blouse was purchased in Romania and is typical of the type of embroidery design found on traditional clothing there.  The blouse is also typical insofar as it is mostly made of rectangles, using gathering to give shaping to the garment.  This also makes them versatile in terms of sizing.  If you gained or lost weight you simply adjusted the gatherings.

The fabric is a very light gauzy 100% cotton.  The label says Algodon, which is the Arabic word for cotton, and which is still used in Spanish.  Given the generations of Arabic presence in the Iberian peninsula, it's not much wonder that Spanish uses an Arabic word for cotton.  Now it has come to mean a particular quality of very light cloth made from very fine fibres.  The fabric feels silky and cool.  While I won't 'save' the blouse, I will keep it for when I want to be a bit 'dressed up'.  Expect to see it on Zoom presentations.  :D

The cloth is very light weight and is a 'crinkle' cloth.  It says it can be ironed, but I expect that I won't - just hand wash and hang to dry.  (I'm a bit nervous of the very dark red and black and how fast the dyes will be, plus the fabric is 'delicate' - hand washing such a garment won't take but a minute.)

I did a bit of digging into traditional clothing from Ukraine as well as Scandinavia, and there are commonalities, such as the rectangles with gathering for shaping.

Dorothy Burnham has done a small booklet called Cut My Cote.  The garments in the booklet tend to use rectangles, squares or triangles and are very economical in terms of minimum 'waste'.  The simple geometric shapes also lend themselves to being adjusted.  If someone gained weight they could pick out the side seams and add a gusset to make the garment larger.  When it was handed 'down' the garment could be adjusted again, as necessary, to fit the new owner.  Garments could be made longer, as with the long linen 'shifts' by adding to the hem.  And so on.

The very light weight fabrics were also amenable to the gathering in a way thicker, heavier fabrics are not.

If a weaver truly wants to begin to understand clothing, a look at traditional dress from most ethnic groups will provide a master class in how to create appropriate fabric for the dress of the people they are studying.  And by extension, ourselves.  Everything old is new again.  And most traditional clothing has been around for centuries and can be just as appropriate in the 21st century as it was in the 11th - or whenever they became 'standard' dress for that population.