Month: October 2019

Categories
Hand spinning Ruskin/Langdale Linen

“Sleeping Quietly Beneath the White Stars”

I wanted to search beyond the men who get all the credit and find the women who became spinners and teachers of spinning, weavers and embroiderers; reviving and refining craft skills from 1883 onwards.   So whilst my talk won’t focus for too long on Fleming (a London solicitor, who lived at Neaum Crag, Langdale), I thought I’d share his words from an 1888 piece for an American magazine, here where they can find an appreciative audience.

Categories
Dales Yorkshire

Thomas Anson – the Story of a Slave in the Dales

Via WIKI COMMONS. Public Domain. Official badge of the British Anti-Slavery Movement, c. 1795, Josiah Wedgewood Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795) and either William Hackwood or Henry Webber; "Josiah Wedgewood…produced the emblem as a jasper-ware cameo at his pottery factory".

“…I researched and wrote in the spirit of honouring lives that historians have often ignored and also in an attempt to understand something, however infinitessimal, about what ordinary people wore, or how their lives related to textiles; what their textiles could say about them and society…”