A fascination with thread.

 What has color, delicacy combined with strength, texture, beauty AND function?

 THREAD.

I love thread in all it's forms. I love thread for all the reasons I mentioned above and more. Thread is to the needle-worker what paint is to the artist and, like paint, thread has utilitarian use as well as aesthetically  pleasing uses.

 To me, this box of old twist looks as lovely as a box of watercolors.

 I gather it all: floss, twist, yarn, thread, purl, cord, worsted. I am a collector of old twisted fibers.

Sewing thread has been around for eons. Ancient thread was made of catgut, plant fiber, and sinew but thread as we know it today, is thankfully, much different.For most of history, thread was handwoven, it must have been a laborious task.

The Chinese created the process of spinning thread from silk...courtesy of the wonderful little silkworm. With hanks of silk being imported to Britain, mills sprang up everywhere. No longer was thread hand-spun, the machines had taken on the spinning job, with the assistance of workers. Men, women and even children as young as 4 worked in these mills 9 hours a day and 6 days a week.

Threads were spun of
 silk and linen

That is, until, in 1812, when Napoleons blockade made it impossible to get the imported  Chinese silk and a replacement was needed to produce sewing thread.

Enter Cotton Thread
  Cotton became the fiber of necessity and newly imported American cotton made it's way to Scotland, where  Clark (of Coats and Clark) became the 
first producer of cotton thread. 

In the beginning, these threads were on skeins..

 

but that was before the invention of the 
sewing machine. 
I still find skeins of twist to be the most pleasing to the touch and the eye.

 Welcome the Wooden Spool

The earliest wooden spools were actually quite tiny.

In the 1820's, wooden cotton reels were invented.
At first, the wooden spools, made of Birch, had no marking upon them as they were produced in a limited amount, chiefly for the home stitcher.
 You could put a half-penny deposit on the wooden spool of thread, and when the twist was used up, you could have the spool re-loaded with more thread;
 
But with the invention of the sewing machine, the demand for the wooden spooled thread became enormous and mills began producing it in abundance . Mills began placing  paper labels on their brand or stamping and embossing the spools with trademarks. 

 No longer was it necessary to re-fill a spool, you simply bought another, and another, and another. Imperfect or flawed wooden spools were sold by the bucket-full as firewood.

 

 Wooden spools were used up until the 1960's. I've found some threads in my stash that date from 1855. 

You can often date your thread by checking the trademark or the purpose for which the thread was made.

 

such as darning thread. When was the last time you darned a sock?  
 or a glove or your UNDERWEAR?!!! I know I have never done any  of the above.
These clever little boxes of linen tatting twist were made in 1917. See how the thread comes out of the hand?

  So the next time you reach for your thread...

  to stitch a sampler, sew on a button or raise a hem, think about the history of that slender length of twisted fiber.

You will appreciate it all the more. 
Maybe we will discuss the history of needles at some point?

 and buttons too....
 P.S. All the painted illustrations in this post are from my book, "Mamsey Bear and Mopkin".
If you are a lover of thread, or a needle-worker of any sort, you would thoroughly enjoy this story.