The Sewing Place
The Emporia => Fun with Fabric => Topic started by: sewingj on January 10, 2019, 20:43:17 PM
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I always used to buy dress material, then I had a break from sewing. When I returned to it about 5 years ago I discovered material had turned into "fabric". When did it happen?
Knitting wool seems to be turning into yarn now!
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About the same time they started selling it in 1/4 and 1/2 meters and cutting it out with rotary cutters.
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Material and fabric are, I suppose, synonyms but wool and yarn are not. 'Material' or 'fabric' is just a small part of how the English language is continually changing.
Wool comes from the back of a sheep and can be spun into yarn, but then so can so many other fibres; cotton, acrylic, nylon, silk....... To label a ball of acrylic as 'wool' would be incorrect and would be against trade descriptions.
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And a tailor calls it 'cloth'.
Annoyed that people on ebay call everything 'wool'. How can I search for yarn that is made of wool when they do that? Exasperating.
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Wool= Hoover
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It's still 'material' for me, though I'm starting to use 'fabric' more. Also I still talk (think) about 'cotton', not 'thread'.
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It's still 'material' for me, though I'm starting to use 'fabric' more. Also I still talk (think) about 'cotton', not 'thread'.
Me too - I recently went into a shop and asked for navy blue cotton and the assistant walked over to the quilting fabric(/material)
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As a lacemaker I use linen thread, silk thread, etc as well as cotton thread, so being specific is automatic, and maybe that's part of the reason why I always say yarn when referring to the stuff I knit with.
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Annoyed that people on ebay call everything 'wool'. How can I search for yarn that is made of wool when they do that? Exasperating.
As a recall, all the wool shops in the 1960s, and there were many, called & labelled their product "knitting wool". I have my own personal hair styling rant about the use of "product" that I'll save for another time.
Knitting wool is what I remember my mum using in conversation rather than just "wool". The change of usage in the interim to wool alone was an evolution too but then adding yet further confusion between types of material be it yarn or fabric.
Sadly that won't help you in your search though @toileandtrouble.
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Until well into the 1950s just about everything one knitted with was wool, and it's taken a long time for some people to get used to the idea that there are now lots of other fibres around.
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Wool= Hoover
And I just bought a real Hoover to Hoover with. Cracks me up every time I vacuum. :devil:
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I need to change saying 'dressmaking' to 'clothes making'