Haptic & Hue

Mar 05 2025 58 ep. 36 mins 367
Haptic & Hue Podcast artwork

Haptic & Hue's Tales of Textiles explores the way in which cloth speaks to us and the impact it has on our lives. It looks at the different light textiles cast on the story of humanity. It thinks about the skills that go into constructing it and what it means to the people who use it.

  Society & Culture  Leisure
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Pleats Please: the Story of the World's Oldest Fashion Technique

Mar 05 2025 41 mins  
There’s a fashion technique that’s been in continuous use for over five thousand years – proof, if proof is needed, that there is nothing new in fashion. We have tunics that survive from the time of the Pharaohs in Egypt that use it and you can see it still in the catwalk collections of today. It’s incredible to think that the simple pleat has pleased the human eye for

The Quilts That Hold The Heart of Hawaii

Feb 05 2025 42 mins  
What happens when one of the most traditional museums in the world revolutionises the way it presents the story of the past? The answer is not only a riot of craft and colour, but a reminder of the crucial role of textiles in framing our histories. The Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford, in the UK, has just added 15 brand new, intensely colourful Hawaiian quilts to its collection of ex

Tapestries For Troubled Times

Jan 01 2025 39 mins  
Tapestries for Troubled Times The stitches of the Bayeux Tapestry fix the story of the Norman Conquest of England in our imaginations in an extraordinarily charismatic way. But nearly a thousand years later modern stitchers are picking up their needles to reframe their stories in just as powerful a fashion, showing that textiles can rewrite our histories. The Bayeux Tapestry wa

Plain Sailing: The Cloth That Turned The Tide of History

Nov 06 2024 41 mins  
A coarse, plain cloth has a greater claim to being the most important textile in history than any sumptuous silk brocade or royal robe. Sailcloth is the fabric that has made it possible for humanity to explore the world, trade across seas, build great empires, and wage wars for millennia, and yet history pays very little attention to it. Textile archaeology has begun to fill in so

Flax is Back! The Great Linen Revival

Oct 02 2024 41 mins  
There is a global flax revival underway. In the great linen belt of North Western Europe, the land under cultivation has more than doubled in a decade and linen production is steadily increasing worldwide. After years of being spurned for ‘easier’ man-made fibres, or cotton, once again linen is being valued. It may only be around half-a-percent of the world’s textile fibres

Elizabeth Wayland Barber & The Age of String

Sep 04 2024 35 mins  
Exactly thirty years ago a book came out that changed the way we think about textiles and fibre and the role they’ve played in the human story. Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years by Elizabeth Wayland Barber became a best seller. What she said was revolutionary. Until then people thought that textiles were a by-product of civilisations and that processes like weaving were aro

America’s Cotton Feed Sacks: And How They Changed The World

Jun 05 2024 42 mins  
The American cotton feed sack is the stuff of legend. From the 1850s onwards it was skilfully repurposed by women across America into all kinds of garments and household goods. By the late 1930s when it became highly patterned, it's estimated that more than 3 million Americans were wearing feed sack clothing. Out of necessity, it was made into dresses and shirts, quilts and curt

Australia’s Convict Quilt: Something to be Proud Of

May 01 2024 41 mins  
An extraordinary quilt handstitched by convict women on board ship as they were transported from Britain to Australia in 1841 has just gone on display in a new exhibition at Australia’s National Gallery. Many of those who made the quilt were illiterate and led tough and impoverished lives. And yet these social outcasts and exiles - working in desperate circumstances - created on

The Forgotten Medieval Craft of Cloth Staining

Apr 03 2024 38 mins  
From the grandest palace to the poorest cottage, so-called ‘stained’ cloths brought colour and joy to everyday life in England for hundreds of years. These specially painted and stamped fabrics formed the backdrop to funerals, ceremonies, processions, masques, and tournaments that required banners, flags, pennants or scenery from 1300 onwards. But this world of dazzling me

Invisible Hands: Tapestry Weavers and Artists

Mar 06 2024 38 mins  
Great tapestries have been used to decorate and embellish homes and palaces for centuries, and yet the hands that created these works remain almost completely forgotten. Art institutions treasure their ancient tapestries woven painstakingly over many months, and even years and know almost everything about them, except the names of those who created these extraordinary pieces. Mode