fibre fiction and non fiction

For those of you lucky people who have some time to read this summer, here are a couple of fibre-y reads for you....


On the fiction front....One of the best (ok, well there are not too many of them when it comes down to it) books about the creation of a fibre item is called The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracey Chevalier. She's a great writer who also did the wonderful Girl With a Pearl Earring later made into a movie with Colin Firth playing Vermeer. I leave it up to you whether that was a good casting call or not. Here is a quote from Amazon… ” She yokes her limpid, quietly enthralling storytelling to the six Lady and the Unicorn tapestries that hang in the Museum of the Middle Ages in Paris.” I have also seen this Tapestry at the Cloisters in New York City and it is breathtaking. There is tons of interesting stuff all about the production and spinning of the fibre and the competition that went on between people who produced the wool. And a mushy love story too...

On the non-fiction front ...I am reading the The Age of Homespun by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a Pulitzer prize winning history writer. It is one of those books where common household items are taken and analyzed and we learn more about the social history surrounding the items.

This book has many objects and interesting stories for us fibre addicted folks -- fascinating things like spinning wheels, niddy noddys and an unfinished sock for a civil war soldier. Some of the women who spin were also early feminists and the meetings organized by New England's "daughters of liberty" became front-page news, taking a place of honor in spaces typically reserved for more male news as the British Parliament's effort to tax the colonies provoked boycotts of British items and woolen goods. Highly recommended.