Prehistoric textiles: bone awl, daylily string, fingerweaving

I am taking Sally Pointer’s Prehistoric Textiles course through Plants & Colour and BOY is it just what I needed, creatively speaking. I’m in a season of mending, weaving, and sending postcards. Have some sewing ideas but the midwinter sleepiness is still very on me. The only issue with the timing of this course is weather - I’d love to go searching for flint fragments by the river or some back alley nettle, but uhh… they are blanketed in snow and it’s -40.

Week one hit on the Paleolithic.

The project I have been most eager to try is making a bone needle. I’m not there yet, but I do have a (needs sharpening) small awl made. Bone fragments came from my friend Taran (Tanit-Isis sews) and I have an antler that I’ve started working on from my dad. Below, I have a picture roughly showing progress from an unshaped bone fragment, to the needle blank I cut out using the groove and splinter technique, then a shaped awl. I am using my swiss army knife and its awl for this, but decided to buy a couple of flint flakes from a backpacking supplier as I suspect this is quite hard on my knife and that’s def. more paleolithic. In the summer I’ll keep an eye on rocks too.

To sharpen, the suggested tool is a nice rough rock that fits well in the hand, but again, snow, and I threw all the kids’ errant rocks outside about a month ago. An emory board or sandpaper will have to do.

Sally also has us try our hands at fingerweaving, demonstrating that this can be done without tools and pointing to evidence that some kinds of apparently woven straps can be observed on Venus figurines from the paleolithic. My first attempt at this started with poor tensioning but sorted itself pretty quickly. I did this in wool tapestry yarn and cotton knitting yarn, and the wool is definitely floppier and trickier than the plant-based thread. My second attempt was various cotton twines and went smoothly.

Finally, some finer cordage than I’ve made previously. I stored some daylily leaves in the fall, so these were my most accessible fibre plant for cordage. This time, I split the leaves to get finer pieces for making something closer to a thread. I’ve made about an armspan’s worth of 2-3mm string so far, but it’s quite brittle this thin (I haven't had breakage issues with my previous rope attempt which was much thicker). Very pretty tho.