Undervalued labor in media
Feb. 12th, 2026 09:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickI have been enjoying the hell out of Dr. Stone (anime), which I first watched during Covid lockdowns and am re/new watching with my anime group. As well, I enjoy "dude/dudette goes back in time, brings modern-ish tech to speedrun folks out of the middle ages" fiction. It's fun escapism and I really enjoy seeing the takes that different authors have on what they would introduce and how they would try to change history. I've talked about this before but there's one thing that these fictions keep doing wrong and today I'm going to talk about that.
The thing that these fictions do wrong is gloss over the production of clothing... leather or buckskin or fabric.
I have never made leather. However, I have made buckskin, starting with a bloodied, hair-covered hide off of a just-killed deer. I did not kill the deer nor did I skin the deer. I bought the deer hides for six dollars a pop from my local deer-processing emporium, but they came... fresh off the deer and the local deer-processing emporium was VERY CLEAR about that because I guess I didn't look like the sort of person who would want fresh-off-the-deer hides.
Making buckskin is a goodly amount of very physical labor and I say this as a relatively fit person who goes outside a lot and does physical labor for work and completed this project back in like 2005 or something when I was younger and more capable of the labor.
I have also made fabric from the wool of a sheep. I did not raise the sheep or shear the sheep. I bought the unwashed sheep fleece (off the sheep) via eBay or etsy or whatever. I cleaned it up, carded it, spun it, and plied it into yarn. Then, I knit the yarn I had made into a sweater for me. (Here's an in-progress picture but I totally did finish the sweater and wear it still.) While knit fabric is not woven fabric, it's still effing fabric, so yeah. I have made fabric.
I am also in the process of currently making more fabric (the afghan project is using up pre-spun yarn that someone other than me made but it will also use yarn that I am, myself, making out of fleece that I acquired... somewhere along life's highway) from sheep wool so this whole "production of fabric" thing is on my mind a bit. (Watch this space for pictures of freshly-made yarn which I just wound into balls last night.)
In case you're not up to speed on fleece-to-yarn, here's one way that this can happen...
1. card lock (cards)
2. spin lock into single (spinning wheel, bobbins)
3. ply singles into yarn (spinning wheel, bobbins, lazy kate)
4. wind yarn into hank (bobbin of yarn, niddy-noddy)
5. tie hank at quarter marks
6. wash hank, hang to dry
7. make hank into center-pull ball (ball winder)
8. knit (knitting needles)
At this point I'm using a fair amount of tech to facilitate my process of making sheep wool into fabric.
I use hand cards with modern steel teeth. Without them, teasing and aligning the fibers would take way more time. Cards with iron teeth were a thing in the time of the Romans, though, so this is not new tech.
Spinning wheel and bobbins are fairly advanced tech for hand-production of yarn or thread. The tech before spinning wheels was drop spindles, which were used from Neolithic times onward. (Spinning wheels as a class of machine were an AD invention, around 500 to 1000 AD in China. They didn't reach western Europe until about the 12th century.)
A lazy kate holds bobbins for neater plying... very nice. You can do balls of yarn and ply that way but it can be messy. A lazy kate is useful and fairly easy to make once you understand bobbins as a class of yarn-management item but they probably wouldn't have existed before bobbins were A Thing.
A niddy-noddy (mine is made from PVC) is a no-moving-parts piece of low tech machinery that makes handling lengths of yarn a lot easier. You can easily make one yourself, so not a complicated bit of kit, but a useful one. I'm not sure when they were invented but certainly before the 1600's. (They are in paintings from the 1600's.)
A ball winder toy is super fun and I totally suggest getting one because man, it's just a damn delight. I have liked it since I first got it and I still like it. If you're on the fence about buying a ball winder, get off that fence and buy yourself a damn ball winder. It's a smile machine besides being useful. You can totally wind your own center-pull balls OR regular balls of yarn from hanks but man, it is way more fun to do with a ball winder.
And knitting needles are tech as is... knitting itself. Knitting was probably invented before the 11th century. Fabric doesn't preserve very well and for a while archaeology people DID NOT GIVE A SHIT ABOUT FABRIC PRODUCTION OR TEXTILES because, lol, who the fuck cared about that when there were SWORDS? So, the archaeological record is pretty sparse but the 11th century two-needle knitting sample we have uses colorwork and short rows -- not the style of thing you would see in Civilization's First Knitting Project, y'know? (I have found a picture here if you scroll down to the second picture. It's the blue and white patterned remnant-sock underneath the red footies (the first picture). That blue and white sock fragment is definitely not Civilization's First Knitting Project. That sock is an exemplar of a well-established craft executed by someone who knows for real how to knit. So I feel like knitting had been A Thing for a while before the blue and white sock fragment.
Anyway. In all this fiction that I am consuming, they do not discuss the significant amount of effort required to clothe humans. Clothing just appears as and when needed, regardless of the veritable MOUNTAIN of industry and specialized machinery and labor required to make it happen in a pre-industrial sort of way.
It bothers me that my entertainment media glosses over this shit. Like, do better.
The thing that these fictions do wrong is gloss over the production of clothing... leather or buckskin or fabric.
I have never made leather. However, I have made buckskin, starting with a bloodied, hair-covered hide off of a just-killed deer. I did not kill the deer nor did I skin the deer. I bought the deer hides for six dollars a pop from my local deer-processing emporium, but they came... fresh off the deer and the local deer-processing emporium was VERY CLEAR about that because I guess I didn't look like the sort of person who would want fresh-off-the-deer hides.
Making buckskin is a goodly amount of very physical labor and I say this as a relatively fit person who goes outside a lot and does physical labor for work and completed this project back in like 2005 or something when I was younger and more capable of the labor.
I have also made fabric from the wool of a sheep. I did not raise the sheep or shear the sheep. I bought the unwashed sheep fleece (off the sheep) via eBay or etsy or whatever. I cleaned it up, carded it, spun it, and plied it into yarn. Then, I knit the yarn I had made into a sweater for me. (Here's an in-progress picture but I totally did finish the sweater and wear it still.) While knit fabric is not woven fabric, it's still effing fabric, so yeah. I have made fabric.
I am also in the process of currently making more fabric (the afghan project is using up pre-spun yarn that someone other than me made but it will also use yarn that I am, myself, making out of fleece that I acquired... somewhere along life's highway) from sheep wool so this whole "production of fabric" thing is on my mind a bit. (Watch this space for pictures of freshly-made yarn which I just wound into balls last night.)
In case you're not up to speed on fleece-to-yarn, here's one way that this can happen...
1. card lock (cards)
2. spin lock into single (spinning wheel, bobbins)
3. ply singles into yarn (spinning wheel, bobbins, lazy kate)
4. wind yarn into hank (bobbin of yarn, niddy-noddy)
5. tie hank at quarter marks
6. wash hank, hang to dry
7. make hank into center-pull ball (ball winder)
8. knit (knitting needles)
At this point I'm using a fair amount of tech to facilitate my process of making sheep wool into fabric.
I use hand cards with modern steel teeth. Without them, teasing and aligning the fibers would take way more time. Cards with iron teeth were a thing in the time of the Romans, though, so this is not new tech.
Spinning wheel and bobbins are fairly advanced tech for hand-production of yarn or thread. The tech before spinning wheels was drop spindles, which were used from Neolithic times onward. (Spinning wheels as a class of machine were an AD invention, around 500 to 1000 AD in China. They didn't reach western Europe until about the 12th century.)
A lazy kate holds bobbins for neater plying... very nice. You can do balls of yarn and ply that way but it can be messy. A lazy kate is useful and fairly easy to make once you understand bobbins as a class of yarn-management item but they probably wouldn't have existed before bobbins were A Thing.
A niddy-noddy (mine is made from PVC) is a no-moving-parts piece of low tech machinery that makes handling lengths of yarn a lot easier. You can easily make one yourself, so not a complicated bit of kit, but a useful one. I'm not sure when they were invented but certainly before the 1600's. (They are in paintings from the 1600's.)
A ball winder toy is super fun and I totally suggest getting one because man, it's just a damn delight. I have liked it since I first got it and I still like it. If you're on the fence about buying a ball winder, get off that fence and buy yourself a damn ball winder. It's a smile machine besides being useful. You can totally wind your own center-pull balls OR regular balls of yarn from hanks but man, it is way more fun to do with a ball winder.
And knitting needles are tech as is... knitting itself. Knitting was probably invented before the 11th century. Fabric doesn't preserve very well and for a while archaeology people DID NOT GIVE A SHIT ABOUT FABRIC PRODUCTION OR TEXTILES because, lol, who the fuck cared about that when there were SWORDS? So, the archaeological record is pretty sparse but the 11th century two-needle knitting sample we have uses colorwork and short rows -- not the style of thing you would see in Civilization's First Knitting Project, y'know? (I have found a picture here if you scroll down to the second picture. It's the blue and white patterned remnant-sock underneath the red footies (the first picture). That blue and white sock fragment is definitely not Civilization's First Knitting Project. That sock is an exemplar of a well-established craft executed by someone who knows for real how to knit. So I feel like knitting had been A Thing for a while before the blue and white sock fragment.
Anyway. In all this fiction that I am consuming, they do not discuss the significant amount of effort required to clothe humans. Clothing just appears as and when needed, regardless of the veritable MOUNTAIN of industry and specialized machinery and labor required to make it happen in a pre-industrial sort of way.
It bothers me that my entertainment media glosses over this shit. Like, do better.
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Date: 2026-02-13 02:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-14 03:43 am (UTC)