Part of Phase 1: First Month
Clothing & Textiles runs two separate pipelines that only meet at the finished garment: turning fiber into cloth, by spinning and then weaving or felting, and coloring that cloth by dyeing, with cutting and sewing as the final step either way. Textiles and Weaving is the overview that states the core sequence directly: spin short fiber into thread, then weave it at right angles, whatever the raw material — flax, wool, or cotton.
Animal Fiber, Fiber Preparation, and Flax Processing cover getting raw material ready to spin. Raw wool straight off a sheep yields 2-5 kg of fleece a year but stays greasy and tangled with lanolin and dung until it’s scoured and carded, which is why fiber preparation comes before a spindle ever touches it. Flax runs a less forgiving pipeline — five fixed stages through hackling, where getting the retting time wrong partway through ruins the entire batch.
Spinning, Drop Spindle Spinning, Spinning Wheel, and Spindle Making turn prepared fiber into thread. Spinning itself is a three-beat rhythm — pinch, draft, release — spun clockwise for a single strand and the opposite direction to ply two together. A drop spindle teaches the two halves of that separately through the park-and-draft method, using a stick weighted with a 40-50 gram whorl; a spinning wheel then produces 4-8 times more yarn in the same hour once the wood and mechanics are built right.
Textiles and Weaving, Weaving, Weave Patterns, Loom Types, and Heddle System turn thread into cloth. Weaving interlaces warp and weft at right angles, locking loose yarn into something that outlasts the thread it was made from by decades, and changing how those threads interlace, not the yarn itself, is what gives one cloth its strength, another its drape, and a third its water resistance. Every loom, from a backstrap rig to a floor-standing frame, is a variation on the same idea: a frame holding warp threads under tension. A heddle is what makes weaving practical at any scale — before heddles existed, every weft thread had to pass over and under each warp thread by hand, one at a time.
Felting, Wet Felting, and Needle Felting are a separate route to cloth that skips weaving entirely. Hot water above 40°C and plain agitation lock wool scales together permanently, shrinking a 90x90 cm layout down to 50-60 cm, so a wet-felting layout needs to start 30-50% larger than the finished piece is meant to be. Needle felting skips water and heat altogether, using barbed needles to tangle fiber directly, which makes it the fastest way to patch a worn garment.
Dyeing, Mordant Chemistry, Natural Dye Sources, and Plant Dyes cover coloring the finished cloth. Without a mordant, most plant dyes wash out within weeks; alum at 10-20% of fiber weight is the one that produces the clearest color, and the word itself comes from the Latin for “to bite” — exactly what a metal salt does to fiber before it can hold a dye permanently. Before synthetic aniline dyes appeared in 1856, every colored fabric on earth came from roots, bark, berries, minerals, or shellfish, and still can; Tyrian purple once cost more than gold, and indigo alone built colonial economies.
Garment Making, Pattern Cutting, Hand Sewing Stitches, and Needle Making cover turning finished cloth into something wearable. Cutting and hand-stitching clothing from flat fabric is a skill humans have practiced for at least 30,000 years, and straight cuts from rectangular cloth waste nothing — a Roman toga was a single rectangle, a Greek chiton two — which is why early patterns stayed geometric. A bone needle to sew it all with takes just 1-3 hours to make with flint tools alone: score a splinter from a leg bone, taper it, then drill the eye from both sides.
Preparing Fiber
Getting raw wool or flax clean and ready before a spindle ever touches it.
Spinning
Turning prepared fiber into thread, by hand or by wheel.
Weaving
Locking thread into cloth, and the loom and heddle that make it practical at any scale.
Felting
A second route to cloth that skips weaving, thread, and a loom entirely.
Dyeing
Making color stick to fiber permanently, and where that color comes from.
Cutting and Sewing
Turning finished cloth into a wearable garment, and the tool that sews it.