Better in blue jeans

After reading Kristin Nicholas' most recent post on her "Getting Stitched on the Farm" blog about being outside last weekend (http://getting-stitched-on-the-farm.blogspot.com/2010/10/colorful-walk-on-our-road.html) I started thinking again about how much I also enjoyed my time outside last weekend.  She included some gorgeous photos that really bring you right along with her as she talks about the walk she took.  I wish I had done the same.  In fact, I actually wished I had the camera with me while on my walk on Sunday but by the time I thought of it I was so far into the woods that I was not going back to get it.  What a shame!  I would have loved to share some of the beauty of it with you.  It would have also been fun to share photos of Saturday's hay bale moving excursion (three pick-up truck loads).  I think I am going to try to remember to carry the camera with me more often.  I also need to remember to use it when I am home!  After all, what good is it to tell you that I have knitted a pair of socks (or am in the middle of it) and not also SHOW you what they look like?!  Sigh... don't know why I haven't done this before now.

So, what does all this have to do with textiles?  Interestingly, a good bit.  As I mentioned above, I helped move three truck pickup truck loads of hay on Saturday.  Now, I haven't done any haying since I was a teenager, but I remembered how hay can make you itch so I wore a long sleeved cotton turtleneck, jeans, socks, and sneakers.  Oh, yeah, and gloves... but those were leather.  I topped it off with a fleece vest, because it was a little chilly.  So, big deal, right?  Well, I found out in no time that fleece was a poor choice ~ the hay loves to stick to it.  A better choice would have been a sweatshirt ~ pretty sure the hay wouldn't have stuck quite as much.  Jeans, on the other hand, were the best thing I could've worn.  Sturdy, smooth (no hay sticking here!) and comfortable.  I wore jeans again when I went for my walk in the woods on Sunday afternoon.  Same benefits:  sturdy, comfortable, and brambles, branches, and briars didn't stick.  In addition to the jeans, I wore a long sleeved t-shirt, a cowl that I had knit last year (chilly again), gloves, and a fleece jacket.  I'm sure at this point you are saying "big deal" again and wondering what the point of all this is...

It got me thinking about jeans.  They've become the ubiquitous (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ubiquitous) garment of our time.  Do you think Levi Strauss ever imagined that they would become so popular?  I doubt it.  Originally, they were work clothes.  In fact, Levi Strauss originally marketed them as "waist overalls" (ie:  overalls without a bib).  I did a little digging out of curiosity, and found that they didn't come into regular use for everyday wear until after James Dean popularized them in Rebel Without A Cause.  After that, they became the garment for rebellious teenagers and there was no stopping their creep into modern-day mainstream life.  The fabric that jeans are made of has been around for much longer, though.  In fact, I wove denim twill as a sample in one of the 18th century weave structures classes I have taken at the John C. Campbell Folk School (www.folkschool.org).  Ahhh... so, what's twill, you say?  Ok, at least you non-weavers may be saying that... Twill is a fabric that is woven so that the weft threads (the "back and forth" threads) pass over one or more warp threads (the "straight" threads that are attached to the loom) and then under two or more warp threads.  In what is referred to as a 'straight twill' this creates a "step" pattern that is characteristic of twill fabric.
This is an example of a 2/2 twill fabric, where the weft threads go over, then under, two warp threads at a time.  Denim is a warp-faced twill (meaning that the warp threads are dominant on the face) that is sturdy and hard- wearing.  The word 'denim' is thought to come from an abbreviation of "de Nimes", which is a reference to Nimes, France where a sturdy serge fabric (a 2/2 twill) called serge de Nimes was originally woven (and dyed with indigo for the characteristic blue color) during the Middle Ages.  The word "serge" comes to us from the ancient Roman sarge, the twill fabric woven for Roman soldiers over 2,000 years ago, which just goes to show that everything old is, indeed, new again.