A question for you ...
Where do you get your quilting fabric from?
You might answer this with:
my local quilt shop
Or
online
Or even
‘my stash’
Would you have answered the Sudan or Peru or the Indus Valley?
Maybe not, but THIS is where your quilting fabric comes from. Maybe not directly at this point in history, but almost certainly at one point in the past.
Let’s embark on a Creative Odyssey through the origins of cotton, in this week’s I, Quilt.
Where are we?
I’m standing here, holding a quilt I made, and thinking about everything that went into it.
Love, time, maybe some choice swear words.
Definitely fabric - cotton mostly.
Thread - polyester for the piecing (from Gutermann Germany), cotton for the quilting on top (Aurifil from Italy), wool from sheep raised in the valleys of the Alto Adige - I even met the woman who raises them.
Batting - I’m using a wool/cotton blend these days. But I’m (so far) ignorant of where these materials come from, other than what the package says - “made by Hobbs Bonded Fibers, WACO, Texas - crafted with pride in U.S.A”.
And these are just superficial starting points.
Who designed the patterns on the fabric?
Where was it printed?
What dyes were used?
Who made the machinery that applies the dyes?
Going further down the rabbit hole…
Who wove the fabric?
Who spun the threads that make the warp and weft?
Who made the loom it was woven on?
Who cut and packaged and shipped it?
Who was the captain of the ship that brought it back and forth across the world, once, twice, three or more times?
What's this all about?
As I mentioned last week, I'm on a creative odyssey called I, Quilt.
Which all started with a little essay called, I, Pencil.
Thank you for your responses last week - several of you let me know you searched this out to read it.
(I’ll link to the source at the bottom of this post as well)
I, Pencil details the genealogy of a seemingly simple item - a pencil. Yet, what goes into this pencil is the work of thousands of interconnected people.
My goal is to do something similar and trace the elements that go into the quilts we make.
This Week:
Starting to research for I, Quilt, I have already encountered a few interesting types:
Tariq ibn Ziyad - the commander of the army that sprang from north Africa to conquer the Iberian peninsula in 800AD.
Dorian Q Fuller, archaeologist and researcher at University College London who opened my eyes to an entire niche on the archaeology of plants
Otzi - the 5000 year old hailing from the valleys north of Bolzano, Italy, whose discovery in the early 1990s helped to inform us about the use of tools, plants and materials of the copper age in Europe.
I’ll admit, and I’ll keep admitting, that this is a work in progress.
By sharing it with you each week, I’m not only keeping myself accountable, I’m also giving you a glimpse behind the scenes of what it might look like to develop and research the information and detail that goes into ‘content creation’.
Those 10min videos edited for rapid consumption youtube, or those 30 sec reels that distil down 6 months of work?
They start somewhere like this.
I, Quilt is a deliberately slow project.
I hope you’ll stick with me as it unfolds.
Where do we start?
This week, I started looking into the etymology of the word cotton.
Once upon a time, at university I studied some linguistics. And part of that was to research the etymology of a series of words for homework. A 5min task.
I spent HOURS in the library on that tiny assignment, because once I dove into those huge dusty tomes - etymological dictionaries on the 3rd level of the UNSW library - I couldn't put them down.
The mapping of words, where they come from, how they have been diffused across countries, peoples, and time is continually fascinating to me.
As an English and Italian speaker, in a household where we routinely have conversations in multiple languages (my kids are bilingual), words and where they come from is something we talk about almost daily.
Understandably then, for I, Quilt, I started with something I was curious about:
Where does the word ‘cotton’ come from?
algodon
cottone
cotton
baumwolle
I can tell you the name of this material in at least 4 other languages, not because I am a language buff, but because it is so ubiquitous as part of our clothes, I’ve read it hundreds of times on labels.
But where did this word come from?
Instead of a dusty tome in a dim lit library, I started with google and Wikipedia - (how times have changed - sigh).
Straight away, a fork in the road: Cotton (disambiguation).
Disambiguation???
Who knew cotton needed to be disambiguated?
Little did I know…
The word cotton is said to come from the Arabic qutn, but thinking of all the desert Arabic-speaking countries we know, how is this irrigation-heavy plant named first in Arabic?
Plus…
The use of the word ‘coton’ (Old French) appeared only around the 12th century in Europe, while archaeological digs have found remnants of cotton in South America 6000 BC, from 5000 BC in Sudan near the middle Nile and approximately the same time frame in the Indus Valley region in modern day Pakistan.
So, why did the word ‘cotton’ only appear in Europe as late as the 12 century?
👉 Enter our friend Tariq ibn Ziyad. Conqueror of the Iberian peninsula in 800 AD.
The Moors and their influence on the Iberian Peninsular and beyond brought many novelties to Europe, not just Islam.
The Middle Ages saw the diffusion of crops spread to Europe through Al Andalus, the Muslim-ruled area of the Iberian peninsula, which likely explains why the word coton from the Arabic qutn only started to appear in Europe from the 12th century.
But where did the cotton come from?
It’s likely these Northern African soldiers and their subsequent generations brought seeds for cotton that originated even further east on the African continent, in the Sudan, along the banks of the Middle Nile.
Here, cotton plant varieties can be traced through archaeological research by folks such as Dorian Q Fuller, whose essay on "Cotton and Post-Neolithic investment agriculture in Tropical Asia and Africa, with two routes to West Africa” - while a mouthful to say - was a fascinating read.
How do seeds of a plant grown on the Nile in east Africa make it to northern Africa, what is now the country of Algeria, where Tariq and co hailed from?
Those seeds needed to travel across the Sahara, via the trans Saharan trade routes - think oases, camels and Berber caravans. These journeys were part of the pathway that brought cotton to Europe, and how the word ‘cotton’ came into the language we use today.
Phew!
The word ‘cotton’ opened up just a crack of the door that peers into the history of cotton and it’s origins.
The fascinating fact that this plant was cultivated simultaneously by people in such diverse locations as south America, the Indian subcontinent and eastern Africa who at the time had no means to communicate with each other, let alone know about each other.
This synchronicity of human ingenuity, the progress of human civilization, graduating from subsidence farming where the only crops raised were for food production, to forming organised societies where there was excess land, and labour to be able to raise cash crops - ie crops raised for the purpose of creating commodities to trade - speak volumes about the literal civilizations that are behind this small square of cotton fabric I hold in my hand.
A world in a patch on a quilt.
We haven't even mentioned the development of the tools, technology and skills needed to weave fabric, to dye it, to transport it, to bring it to your local quilt shop, where you can browse at your leisure the rows upon rows of this precious good.
I hope you enjoyed this week’s installment of I, Quilt.
I share the references and sources I have found useful over in my journal, where you can see all the posts in this series.
YOUR TURN: Hit reply and let me know...
what did you find most curious this week?
what would you like to know more about?
If you found I, Quilt interesting, consider sharing it with someone you think would find it interesting too.
Thanks for reading and I’ll be back with another instalment next week.
stay curious, keep creating
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