Tailors smashed the first sewing machines
A NEEDLE with an eye is one of humanity's oldest tools; bone needles tens of thousands of years old have been found in caves, and they made fitted clothing possible in cold climates. For all the time since, sewing was done by hand, a STITCH at a time.
In 1830 a French TAILOR, Barthélemy Thimonnier, patented a working sewing MACHINE and set up a workshop making army uniforms in Paris. Other tailors, afraid for their jobs, broke in and wrecked the machines. Later designs put the eye of the needle near the point instead of the top, which is what makes a machine possible, and in the 1850s Isaac Singer began selling machines on a hire-purchase plan, paid off in small monthly amounts. That brought a sewing machine within reach of ordinary households.
Two threads meet in the middle
A machine does not copy hand sewing. It uses two threads: one from the SPOOL on top, fed down through the needle, and one wound onto a small BOBBIN hidden underneath. Each time the needle goes down, a hook catches the top THREAD and loops it around the bobbin thread, so the two lock together inside the FABRIC. This lockstitch is why a machine SEAM looks neat on both sides.
A pattern of stitches tells you what a seam is for. A straight stitch joins; a zigzag stops a raw edge fraying; a blind stitch holds a HEM up without showing on the front. A paper PATTERN, laid out with PIN and cut with sharp SCISSORS, gives the shapes of the pieces, and a TAPE measure makes sure they fit.
The Bayeux Tapestry is not a tapestry
The famous long picture of the Norman conquest of 1066 is about 70 metres long, and it is embroidery, not tapestry. A tapestry has its picture woven into the CLOTH on a loom; the Bayeux work is linen with coloured wool stitched on top. It was probably made in England, within a few years of the battle, and it has survived more than 900 years.
To EMBROIDER is to decorate cloth with stitches, and many samplers made by girls in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries survive, with the alphabet, numbers and a name stitched in as practice. A QUILT is made by sewing layers together — often a top pieced from scraps of COTTON — with padding in the middle; quilting bees, where neighbours gathered to finish one together, were a social event in nineteenth-century America.
Buttons came before buttonholes
Buttons existed for thousands of years as ornaments sewn onto clothing before anyone used them as fasteners. The BUTTON with a matching buttonhole appeared in Europe in the thirteenth century, and quickly became a way to show off, with rich people wearing dozens.
The ZIPPER took much longer. An early version for boots was shown in the 1890s but jammed constantly; a Swedish-American engineer, Gideon Sundback, designed the interlocking teeth still used today in 1913. The name came from a company that sold rubber boots with zip fasteners in the 1920s. Our fashion designers page covers what gets made with all this — from a CUSHION cover to a coat.