Threads

Over on Making Light, they have an open thread which starts One of my long-running disgruntlements with survivalists and Galters is their collective ignorance of one key aspect of self-sufficiency: cloth. I can’t count how many people I’ve watched loading their own ammunition and slaughtering their own deer. But all the while, they’re wearing flannel shirts and jeans made of fabric that was woven on an industrial scale, from mechanically-spun fibers, before being shipped across the world either made up or on bolts. Even when they sew the garments themselves, their participation in our shared culture lies across their shoulders and hangs from their belts.

Making cloth is hard work, and especially by hand it's time consuming. Back in Ye Olde Dayes, women would spend every spare waking moment making cloth, and still only end up with enough for two or three outfits. I learned from the comments to this post that there was a crime called "child-striping" or ambushing a child to steal their clothes and resell them.

It is hard to understand how, in historical eras, most people lived on the knife-edge of survival. In modern Third-World countries, they still do.