The thing was, certain things they’d had to figure out right away. Food, potable water – even in places near a grocery store, the store only had so much stock on hand, and no more was coming in.
Shelter was relatively easy – there were a lot more houses and other buildings than there were people, now, even if you did take into consideration those buildings ruined by the war, of which there were many. But protection from the threats of the world – monsters sentient and not, cold and rain and snow, storms and fire and bears and lions – that took work. And when that was all managed, people worked hard on forming community, on rebuilding society, and stocking up enough food to survive lean times and enough weapons to keep the food.
Clothes were not remotely a priority. Most people in 2011 in the developed world had far more clothes than they needed. If durable clothes were an issue, well, there were stores to raid and, if you weren’t squeamish, or if you were desperate, which was similar, there were the homes of people who were dead or gone.
Eventually the clothes they had wore out, the clothing left in old buildings had rotted away or been eaten by the rodents. And by then, those that had survived had houses and food, security and society. Now… they needed cloth.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/914196.html. You can comment here or there.
And hopefully someone’s held onto that knowledge. But oh my are you probably going to have people in uncomfortable clothing for a while while they work out how to do the whole raw materials to clothing process.
Various fiber arts are fairly popular hobbies. But in the fae apoc verse? Even ignoring magic, they’ve got people old enough to’ve done these things by hand back when that was necessary.
Yesss. But if you’ve been scrabbling for food for a decade, how fresh are those memories going to be? The knowledge will be there. But it may be a struggle.
Depends how complicated you’re aiming for. You knit; how’s your muscle memory for it if you haven’t picked it up for a while? And the tools are easy. Crochet, too — I’d be hard pressed to forget how to do the basics, and I’ve whittled my own hooks. As far as I can tell, spinning with a drop-spindle is no more complicated, someone with decent dexterity can level up pretty quickly with practice, and the required tool isn’t much harder to make. A serious mechanical loom takes a lot more skill to build, but improvising something without heddles and weaving more slowly without a shed isn’t hard if you’re familiar with the concept. (That said, I am occasionally surprised when I start blithering at people about fiber arts how few of them have looked at or thought about the construction of their clothes.) Raw fiber I’m less familiar with. Acquiring, raising, and shearing sheep (or other wool-bearing animals), and acquiring cotton seed and growing cotton, I don’t know how hard those are (and throw in securing space for them, for your ‘verse). If you can do those, the fibers need to be cleaned and straightened (and the short bits pulled out) to be spun. IIRC, most other plant fibers come from stems or long leaves and aren’t as accessible as cotton. For linen I think one essentially rots the plant stems under controlled conditions until the sturdy fibers can be readily separated from what’s left of the succulent parts, but I couldn’t fill in any details on “controlled conditions”. Here’s a short writeup on processing yucca leaves into fiber by hand — it’s mostly mechanical, hard labor by hand.
Okay, fair points all. And I don’t think I’d forget how to sew, either, although sewing sans machine would be really annoying.
So … can you get a breeding population of sheep (or other useful fiber animals), and/or initial seed supply for cotton or flax or whatever fiber(s) you know or can figure out how to process, and do you have the space, climate, manpower, and security to raise them? Oh, or silkworms! And mulberry trees. 🙂 Yeah, hand-sewing is slow, but it works. Making good needles might be the hard part, but people made them with bone and wood before we had sufficient metal working skills. And scissors. Scissors are nice. 🙂
Sheeeep Around here, it would be easy, because people still raise sheep. (though for people like me, sad indeed).
Wool=sheep and not necessarily the ones you’d use for meat. linen=flax and someone who knows how to process it, cotton=cotton+lots of labour. I can actually see a resurgence of nettle cloth happening.
Leather at least comes from food cows. *does some googling* Hunh. I’ve never encountered that plant but that does seem like a good idea.
I believe they use stinging nettles for it. The sister whose brothers were turned into swans makes them shirts out of nettle cloth to break the spell on them and I used to think it was just a fairy tale thing…
I did, too! googling says that yes, stinging nettles have a bast fibre like linen or hemp. https://www.etsy.com/listing/150797342/machine-spun-organic-nettle-yarn?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=shopping_us_supplies-yarn-organic-low&utm_custom1=3ebae477-5f38-ace8-b3b7-000031ebbd85&kpid=150797342&gclid=CPDXxqCsyMQCFSNk7Aodpx8AYw Now I want to buy some and try it.