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The first group of people in the world to be called refugees were deeply tied up with the production of luxury cloth. In the 17th and 18th century a small corner of east London became a byword for some of the best woven silk in the world.   Spitalfields silk was worn by some of history's most famous people. George Washington, despite fighting a war against the British, had a waistcoat made from it, and his wife, Martha, had an entire dress made from the silk designed in London and woven by hand on the draw looms of Spitalfields. Queen Victoria wore it on her wedding day, and Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, wore it deliberately, to champion British industry.   There are estimated to be over 40 million refugees in the world today and they are often seen as a drain on the societies that shelter them and are subjected to hatred and harassment. But this episode looks at what the first group of people to be known as refugees – the Huguenots of France – contributed to the country that gave them shelter and how they made British silk textiles famous.   For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-8/   And if you would like to find out more about Friends of Haptic & Hue with an extra podcast every month hosted by Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor – here's the link: https://hapticandhue.com/join/

In a few day's time the Bayeux Tapestry goes on show at the British Museum in London. The famous embroidery that depicts the Norman conquest of England has returned to the country where it was stitched for the first since it was made almost a thousand years ago.  It was created by defeated Anglo-Saxon women, commissioned by their Norman conquerors, and they stitched it to serve a very particular political purpose. We will never know their names but they made one of the most extraordinary works of art to survive from early medieval Europe. Down the centuries it has exerted a powerful hold over many imaginations: it was taken to Paris by Napoleon to rally his troops as he planned to invade Britain, and later eyed by Hitler for the same reason. But the Tapestry is much more than a beautiful object. It is a brilliant piece of communication and in this episode, with the help of Michael Lewis, Curator of the Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum, we look at the labour behind it and the story it was designed to tell. For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-8/  And if you would like to find out about Friends of Haptic & Hue with an extra podcast every month hosted by Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor – here's the link: https://hapticandhue.com/join/

A number of very special quilts have been arriving in North America over the past few weeks. A collection of more than 40 are being returned to Canada, 85 years after they were made in communities all over the country.   Most of them are tattered and deeply worn but they have an extraordinary story to tell. They are the last evidence we have of an astonishing operation that saw Canadian women and children make over 400,000 quilts during the Second World War. These were sent, largely, to Britain to comfort children orphaned in the conflict, families bombed out of their houses, soldiers convalescing, land girls in hostels far from home and a myriad of other uses.   In Britain, the Canadian wartime quilts were often loved and cherished. But gradually, as the years passed they faded from memory. A few hundred have survived and many museums in the UK hold them. In Canada they were completely forgotten.  Now it is hoped that with the return of this major collection a new generation will come to understand the work of their grandmothers and great grandmothers. The aim is that there will be a permanent exhibit of the entire collection to stand as a memorial, not just to the women of Canada, but to all those around the world who use their textile skills in times of conflict to bring comfort, compassion and care.   If you would liket o see pictures of the quilts of read a transcript of this podcast then please follow the link to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-8/

This month's episode is a little different: as many of you know we run a second podcast for Friends of Haptic & Hue called Travels with Textiles, in which we explore all kinds of textile topics that crop up in the news or that we come across in our travels and that we don't get the chance to talk about in the main podcast. Once a year we give you a special taste of what Friends of Haptic & Hue sounds like and invite you to join us.   This time we are giving you a listen to an episode of Friends that went out earlier this year. We know that knitting is one of the most popular textile crafts today, it's estimated that there are well over a hundred million active knitters globally. But where does it come from? When did knitting first appear and what do we know about how it spread around the world?   This episode of is devoted to knitting and its history. We explore the origins of knitting and what we know about some of the earliest surviving knitted pieces we have from North Africa. We travel to a small island in the North Atlantic that is home to some of the world's most iconic knitting and we hear about knitting traditions that grew up in America's Appalachia region with waves of different migrants arriving in the area.   For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-8/   And if you would like to find out about Friends of Haptic & Hue with an extra podcast every month hosted by Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor – here's the link: https://hapticandhue.com/join/

This summer marks the 250th anniversary of America's founding as nation, born in a successful rebellion from the British crown. Events and politics tell us one tale, but textiles always give us another view. Much of the textile history of America is deeply painful – a story of enslavement and hardship in Victorian mills and garment sweatshops. But there is another side to this, because creating textiles for the home has always involved community, and throughout the two and half centuries America has been in existence, quilting, knitting, sewing and mending have been deeply social activities.   This episode of Haptic & Hue is about one group of people who designed and made craft textiles at a particular moment in America's history. The Folly Cove Designers came from a little-known area of Massachusetts. They had no professional qualifications and they were taught around a kitchen table by one woman. For nearly thirty years in the mid-twentieth century they formed a close creative and supportive network making work of the highest quality. Even today, over seventy years later their story has a lot to tell us about how communities help individuals shine.   For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-8/   And if you would like to find out about Friends of Haptic & Hue with an extra podcast every month hosted by Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor – here's the link: https://hapticandhue.com/join/

There is a little mannequin which has played a hidden role in history. We admire the portraits of the great men and women of the past dressed in the height of fashion. But how, in an age without cameras or magazines, did they know what was in style?    Step forward the Pandora doll, who may be as much as 3,500 years old. These miniature mannequins have played a role in communicating fashion down the centuries from the time of the Egyptian pharaohs, through the Second World War, right up into the era of COVID.   We know that the fashion dolls were owned by Mary Queen of Scots, and Jane Seymour, wife of Henry the Eighth of England. Elizabeth the First of England was sent a set by the Queen of France. They played an important role in diplomacy amongst the royal houses of Europe and above all they worked hard to cement the role of Paris, and French dress-making, as the world's style-makers.   For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-8/   And if you would like to find out about Friends of Haptic & Hue with an extra podcast every month hosted by Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor – here's the link: https://hapticandhue.com/join/

In a small corner of London lies one of the most evocative collection of textiles anywhere in the world. The fabrics – which are quite ordinary - are in the so-called billet books which recorded the identity and clothing of every baby accepted at the Foundling Hospital from the mid 1700s onwards.   What makes these books so moving is that often the birth mother left a scrap of cloth or ribbon when she gave up her baby. She held onto the other half so that if her circumstances changed, she could return to the Foundling Hospital, match the two pieces of cloth and reclaim her child. The result, two hundred and fifty years later, is one of the best collections of textiles samples worn by ordinary people in Europe the seventeen and eighteen hundreds.   It is hard to imagine today how we would feel if we had to place our own child in a foundling hospital, if this was part of our family history. One woman recently discovered that this is exactly what happened to her ancestor. She arrived at the Foundling Hospital in 1758 at just a few weeks old. But she lived to be 87 – an incredible age for that time – and became a mother and grandmother herself. Find out more in this episode.   For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-8/   And if you would like to find out more about Friends of Haptic & Hue with an extra podcast every month hosted by Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor – here's the link: https://hapticandhue.com/join/

An extraordinary new exhibition has just opened in the small Alabama township of Gees Bend, and it gives us some clues as to why this community of world-famous quilters became home to one of America's greatest creative legacies.   The quilts of Gees Bend were first exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, nearly 25 years ago and today their quilts hang in many global art galleries. Since then the critics have repeatedly asked how an isolated community of Black American women could have prefigured many of the traditions of modern art without any formal training. These quilts were born of need, but they were fresh, and utterly original.     Since then not only has their legacy and reputation grown, but other African American quilters have also come to the fore. These include communities in Mississippi, as well as those who carried their southern quilt making traditions to California during World War Two.   Now the exhibition in Gees Bend tells the story of the first named quilter in the township – a woman who almost certainly arrived in America from West Africa as a child on the last known slave ship to enter US waters in 1860, over 50 years after the trade in human beings had allegedly been outlawed.   For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-8/   And if you would like to find out about Friends of Haptic & Hue with an extra podcast every month hosted by Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor – here's the link: https://hapticandhue.com/join/

It's nearly five years since the Anglo Trinidadian textile designer, Althea McNish, died in near obscurity in London. In that time her reputation and her standing has grown dramatically and she is now recognized around the world as the one of the first black designers of international standing.  There has been a retrospective exhibition of her work, the Victoria & Albert Museum highlights her work, and there is a biography of this remarkable woman in progress.   Althea McNish as a designer was a magician of colour, a woman who brought the light and the hues of the Caribbean to a drab post-war London. Queen Elizabeth wore her dress fabrics, cruise liners sailed with her murals on their walls and she changed the lives of millions with her textile designs. This episode takes another look at the life of Althea McNish.    For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-8/   And if you would like to find out about Friends of Haptic & Hue with an extra podcast every month hosted by Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor – here's the link: https://hapticandhue.com/join/

Textiles have a tremendous power to hold our culture and identity, more so than most understand. For thousands of years the Coast Salish people of the Pacific North West, which straddles the border between Canada and the United States, made unique ceremonial blankets and robes from dog hair. Their woolly dogs long pre-dated contact with European colonisers and were specially bred for their lustrous coats. The coverings, which were woven or twined on looms, hold great meaning for the Coast Salish people and are at the centre of their sense of identity, and even lthough the dog hair is no longer available, blankets are still an important part of ceremonies.   When colonial administrations on both sides of the border tried to stamp out the culture of the First Nations people, the blankets and robes were burnt, and the dogs that had survived for millennia disappeared, to become just a memory. The very few blankets that do survive are held in museums and no longer belong to the community.   But new methods of analysing fibre and textiles are adding to the important oral histories of the Coast Salish families themselves and beginning to tell us more about the woolly dogs, where they came from, what they looked like, how old their lineage is, and how they were bred.   This episode is about what happened to the Coast Salish people and how important textiles are to our sense of identity. It is also about valuing both oral accounts and science in a 'two eyed seeing' approach to research.   For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-7/.   And if you would like to find out about Friends of Haptic & Hue with an extra podcast every month hosted by Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor – here's the link: https://hapticandhue.com/join/

Hooked rugs are humble things made of recycled cloth and worn out textiles, originally born of need and lack: and yet they have come to mean much more to the communities that produced and enjoyed them. In America they have become an emblem of homespun pioneer thrift and self-reliance and an important element in the definition of a certain kind of national values.   Handmade hooked rugs are the stuff of everyday life, but in Canada they became a vital form of income for impoverished seafaring families in Labrador and Newfoundland. And in northern England and southern Scotland they brightened up the hearth of many rural and urban working-class homes.   But in the far north of the British Isles a very different tradition developed where sewn pile rugs came to play a role as vital protection for sleeping bodies against night time trolls and witches.   Join us as we explore the many forms of hooky, proggy, proddy, clooty, clippy, stobby, and bodgy rugs that have spread around the world.   For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-7/.   And if you would like to find out about Friends of Haptic & Hue with an extra podcast every month hosted by Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor – here's the link: https://hapticandhue.com/join/

If you were asked to stitch a picture of your brain what would it look like? A project that looks at the connection between our hands and our brains asked people to do just that. It was aiming to measure creativity and to find out what impact skill and experience has on our actions? These are difficult questions to answer, but this episode of Haptic & Hue looks at what happens to us when we learn activities like knitting, sewing and weaving, how do our hands and brains work together, and which guides the other?   About ten years ago a doctor in The Netherlands started what sounds like a simple and practical project. She sent off embroidery kits with a print of the human brain on them and asked participants to stitch a brain. The results, captured in recently published book, are glorious, with a variety of stitched, fringed, appliqued, woven, beaded, woollen, and embroidered brains.   Those who took part in the Stitch Your Brain project were being asked to do something complex: to use their handcraft skills to think about their brains and what happens to them when they make. It brought into sharp focus the incredible relationship between our hands and our brains and how we use them together to practice or learn a new textile skill and use it with ease and enjoyment.   For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-7/.   And if you would like to find out about Friends of Haptic & Hue with an extra podcast every month hosted by Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor – here's the link: https://hapticandhue.com/join/

If we need proof that textiles can rewrite human history, then it lies with the bog bodies of northern Europe. Textile archaeologists are revealing a whole new past about people who, in some cases, are older than Tutankhamen, but much less celebrated. Across northern Europe there are hundreds of bog bodies, who long ago were buried in marshlands and were preserved down the centuries by acidic conditions and lack of oxygen. We will never know all their secrets, but slowly we are discovering more about who they were, and how they lived. It is their textiles that bring us closer to them and tell us, not just about their skills, but also how they thought and designed cloth and clothing.    In Denmark more than a hundred marsh bodies have been found - some in extraordinary states of preservation. They date from the late Bronze and early Iron Ages, and are between 1,500 and 3,000 years old. But what some of them are wearing can take us back much further than that, into a time when humans first started to cover their bodies with clothing. For this episode, Jo travelled to the National Museum of Denmark, in Copenhagen, to explore the textiles of two of the world's most famous bog bodies.   For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-7/.   And if you would like to find out about Friends of Haptic & Hue with an extra podcast every month hosted by Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor – here's the link: https://hapticandhue.com/join/

Here's a surprise! An extra episode of Haptic & Hue. We said we were taking a break for July and August and yes, we are. But we thought we would give you a taste of what Friends of Haptic & Hue sounds like and invite you to join the other podcast that we make every month.   So here is the episode of Travels with Textiles that was uploaded for Friends in May this year, just as UNESCO announced that it was adding an old quilting practice to the list of crafts that have intangible cultural heritage status.   Quilting in a flat frame with a rocking stitch has a history that stretches back certainly to the 16th century and maybe much further. This is one of the original forms of quilting on cloth, creating beautiful and complex patterns as it is done. This technique often produces a style of quilting known as whole cloth quilts.   Hand quilting in a frame is being placed on the Red List of Endangered Crafts by the Heritage Crafts Council as the number of elderly practitioners of this skill, mainly in Wales, Northern England and the Scottish Borders continues to dwindle and quilting frames disappear.    But here we talk to two quilters who are seeking to reverse that by recognising, protecting, and reviving whole cloth quilting, and the tools needed to carry it out.   For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-7/.   And if you would like to find out about Friends of Haptic & Hue with an extra podcast every month hosted by Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor – here's the link: https://hapticandhue.com/join/

A very special tartan has just started to roll off the weaving looms of the Prickly Thistle Mill in the north of Scotland. This brand-new design in black, pink, red, and grey is part of a powerful campaign to remember the thousands of overwhelmingly female lives lost to accusations of witchcraft between the 1500s and the mid 1700s. This was one of the bloodiest miscarriages of justice Scotland has ever seen. Records suggest that at the time Scotland accused and executed more people than any other country in the world.   The Witches of Scotland Tartan sold out long before it went into production after its registration was spotted by an eagle-eyed American, testament to the fact that the tragedy of the witchcraft trials spread to America with the colonists of the 1600s. It also speaks volumes for the power of textiles that the two determined women, who have been campaigning for a pardon for all those accused of witchcraft in Scotland, have chosen a fabric that can be worn by all as a living memorial to those who lost their lives, rather than a statue or a fixed monument.   Cloth has a great power to hold the memories of those we have loved, but this may be the first time it has been called in use as a national memorial, to commemorate injustices done to unknown thousands who are long dead. It brings new meaning to the campaigns to exonerate witches in a world where these accusations don't seem to have died but merely changed shape.   For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-7/.   And if you would like to find out about Friends of Haptic & Hue with an extra podcast every month hosted by Jo Andrews and Bill Taylor – here's the link: https://hapticandhue.com/join/