History of Fibre Arts and Textiles

When making textiles, how would early people card them?

There is such a thing as craft historical re-enactment – it’s not all Vikings and Romans. Craft historical re-enactment can happen on its own, often in living history museums, but also in conjunction with the sword and sandals kind of re-enactment*. There are also many knitters who are interested in historically-accurate crafting – there’s large and active communities of Historic Knitters and Spinners on Ravelry, for example, and another dedicated group of crafters who are preserving old, out-of-copyright patterns and crafting books online.

So, how would people have carded fleece to make yarn in the pre-industrial era?

Image showing modern and historical carders.

I’m sorry this is such a poor-quality image – I took it with my phone at my first-ever wool festival, and, while camera quality is my main criterion for buying a phone, that phone was high quality for 2009. These are carders: the pair at the front are relatively modern, but at the back, on the cross-shaped handle, is a typical pre-industrial carder. Those fuzzy blobs you can see are the seed heads of one of the Teasel species of plant:

Dipsacus fullonum plant in sunlight, with a goldfinch perched on it pecking the seeds from the seed head. — *Dipsacus fullonum*, the Fuller’s Teasel. Fulling is the term for a type of felting.

Historically, Fuller’s Teasel seeds were used for both carding wool for spinning, and for finishing woven cloth by brushing and softening the surface.

* – In my LH characters of Jodis (formidable matron) and Finnbogi (beardless and somewhat inept young warrior), my craft skill was naalbinding, a kind of Viking knitting but with a sewing needle.

Quora linky.

How did early people discover or develop the complex process of making clothes from wool, and did this knowledge precede the domestication of sheep?

I’ll direct you to my previous answer: Do we know the first people to figure out how to make wool from sheep, and how did they do it? and specifically this part:

… We now have the technology (sewing needles), but how do we get thread from wool?

Boredom.

I believe the next stage is a quantum leap from puffs of shed wool to thread, by means of boredom. Tending sheep is a dull business, even with plenty of Neolithic predators about. It’s hours, days, weeks of sitting around watching the woolly buggers eat, baa, and occasionally boink. I think some bored shepherd boy, or probably many bored shepherd boys and girls of all ages, in different places over thousands of years, got in the habit of picking up a piece of shed wool and twiddling with it. In the course of twiddling, they accidentally pulled some strands of wool together and twisted it – and, as wool tends to do, those strands stayed together, and just kept on coming, until the bundle of shed wool disappeared. I’ve done this with a ball of cotton wool while sitting bored in an A&E, waiting for an X-ray. It can be done with little to no attention or intention.

So now we have wool thread. It gets used for sewing. Then, someone has the bright idea of weaving with wool thread. And this happened between 6,000 and 3,500 years ago…

Did this knowledge precede the domestication of sheep?

In my previous answer, I assumed that this happened after sheep were domesticated. I based this on three facts:

sewing seems to have been invented 50,000 years ago (and therefore thread),
sheep were domesticated between 9,000 and 11,000 years ago – probably for meat, milk and skins, and
weaving is at least 6,000 years old.

(Knitting is a comparative late-comer, appearing only 1,000 years ago, give or take a few centuries – using cotton rather than wool).

However, there’s no reason why nomadic hunter-gatherers could not have picked up bits of shed winter undercoat (wool) and twiddled with them as they followed flocks of sheep across the mountains. But I doubt it went any further than that before domestication.

So, I think domestication came first, followed by breeding sheep to produce more of this rather useful winter undercoat – initially for felting, and then for thread, weaving, and finally knitting.

Quora linky.

Are there any straight men, except Tommy Hilfiger of course, that knit?

Millions, probably.

Knitting used to be a men-only profession, protected by guilds.
In many countries, knitting is (or used to be) taught to all children; and historically, all children were involved in wool preparation, including carding and spinning.
Many men involved in fishing or sheep farming were knitters, as often, were soldiers.
My father (below) taught me to knit, and his lacework was something to behold.