Shengliver’s Note: A trip back to my home village in the summer made me keenly aware that the village now is not the village then. Most folk I met about the ancestral grounds were either kids whose grandparents I know, or aunts and uncles and great aunts and great uncles, who were in their sixties, seventies or eighties. Ways of life there are far removed from what I remember of the early 1970s, my salad days. In this blog series, Extinct Trade, the blogger will share with his readers about nine trades which have died out where his roots are.

I often wore clothes stitched from homemade fabric in the early 1970s. Lots of peasant women spun cotton into thread, which was later woven into cloth on a loom. My neighbour, a great aunt, sat every night at her loom, and the sound of her weaving, teeda, teeda, teeda, lasted throughout many winter nights. There were nights when I was woken up by the noise. I opened my eyes and saw pitch darkness around. Then I drifted back into dreams.

White cotton material was never adopted for clothing except at funerals, where it was the custom for mourners to wear white kerchiefs and robes. A practical reason why white cotton cloth was not employed for everyday wear was that it stained easily. Farmers found their close companions soil and dirt in their daily existence. The handcrafted fabric, therefore, had to be further treated before being used for tailoring. One step was to have it dyed. In a neighbouring village there was a dyer. I did not venture into his workshop. For two terms, my schoolroom happened to be their village barn, so I got opportunities to see the dyers airing and drying long strips of cloth on wooden racks as tall as a four-storey house. Black and blue were dominant colours. Only occasionally did I see red and green on the rack.

One critical thing I am not sure of was whether the dyes they used were natural. Were they plant based or mineral based? Or industrial chemicals?

At the time I thought my black cotton-cloth wear stupid-looking, for Mother sewed it out of the handmade fabric. Luckily almost all my peers were clothed in the same material, in the same colour and style. Looking back on those years, in winter the cotton-padded coat and trousers were very warm indeed though they made me look like a bear. Usually for the first couple of weeks after putting them on, I would feel very clumsy, all fingers and thumbs.