Fabric by Victoria Finlay

Fabric – The Hidden History of the Material World by Victoria Finlay.

Finlay spins us around the globe, weaving stories of our relationship with cloth and asking how and why people through the ages have made it, worn it, invented it and made symbols out of it. And sometimes why they have fought for it.

She beats the inner bark of trees into cloth in Papua New Guinea, fails to hand-spin cotton in Guatemala, visits tweed weavers in their homes in Harris, and has lessons in patchwork-making in Gee’s Bend, Alabama – where in the 1930’s, deprived of almost everything they owned, a community of women turned quilting into an art form.

In a story that follows the journey of grief and recovery from losing both parents shortly before the beginning of her research, Finlay found her own personal threads entwined in Fabric. It is her own patchwork.