luckyfilbert:

violsva:

kaynoxxcrafts:

necessary-silence:

necessary-silence:

haveialreadyreadthat:

Women’s Work: The First 20,000 years by Elizabeth Wayland Barber, 1996

This is a great book, all about the work of spinning and weaving, how it developed, and how and why it was women’s work. It makes the great point that women’s work is ephemeral – food, cloth, it’s all things that don’t survive archaeologically, so that it’s something that gets overlooked. The author also knows how to weave herself, and has tried out weaving some ancient cloths, pointing out that it’s only by doing something like that that you can work out practical issues. 

One of the things that was really great was the author pointing out that the most plausible reconstruction for the Venus de Milo is of her spinning:

Even better, is that since the book has been written, an artist who makes 3D printed sculpture has made a 3D model of what she would have looked like – and you can buy one for yourself:

I love this concept

OKAY Tumblr, I’m gonna try this one more time. The tags for this post haven’t been working properly and more people need to see this, darn it!

Let’s try linking some good people in and see if that makes it play along.

@weekendknitter @makinguselessthings @kaynoxxcrafts @youngyarns

Oh I love this! I would 100% want a spinning venus in my life…. 

Thanks for the tag! 

Also if you have access to an academic library they may have the same author’s Prehistoric Textiles, which is both broader and more in-depth and tells you about the domestication of sheep and terms for weaving in pre-Hellenic languages and is amazing.

@lightspun I think this is your jam