Stitch by Stitch…

The art of the needle: A superb tapestry by Carol Abel

Some 40-50,000 years ago, someone invented the sewing needle. It was made of bone, threaded with tendons or hairs, and used to join pieces of animal skins together to make clothes.

Today, textile art amazes us with its seemingly unlimited creative possibilities in the hands of dedicated artists and home crafters alike. Yet these brilliant works, these fantasies of coloured silk and wool, all began when someone turned a splinter of bone into a needle.

It is common in Paleontology to picture men as the inventors and creators. In artistic representations, they sit stooped over their pieces of flint, chipping away to make the perfect tool or arrow head, while the women patiently gather nuts and berries in the background, filling baskets that men were have presumed to have invented.

But I think this picture is wrong. Tools are invented by those who have need of them. Imagine her, pondering the question of how to make several small pieces of skin into one large and useful one. The leap from a slender, pointed piece of bone to a needle with a hole in the wider end and a thread of some kind going through it is quite a large one, if you think about it. How did she tie it all together?

Perhaps she dreamed the answer to her problem. This would not be unusual, creative people often do dream solutions while they sleep. Ancient societies took great stock in dreams, and discussed them over the morning campfire. Perhaps our Paleontological ancestors did the same.

Perhaps something she saw in nature triggered the creative process. A weaving spider, perhaps, or the clever use of a claw by an animal that hasn’t been seen for 50,000 years. That is not unusual, either – as creative people know, nature is a great source of inspiration.

Or perhaps she just thought about it until the creative process itself unravelled the answer. I imagine she had to experiment quite a bit, to find the right kind of bone, using different materials for thread. Perhaps one night she just reached over and grabbed a few strands of her mate’s hair. These people had laughter, and the sense of fun that goes with it.

Her invention, once mastered, would quickly have caught on. Then perhaps, she, or someone else, invented the button. Bone buttons have also been found at Paleolithic sites. the leap between bone and something used to fasten two pieces of skin together seems even greater – but perhaps it came from the making of jewelery from shells, bone and teeth, already in use. certainly they were busy, these quiet inventors, creating something from the discarded bits of flotsam around the campsite, things their men probably dismissed as too small to be useful.

Their patience, and their experiments, led to the Bayeaux tapestry, and centuries of increasingly skilled and creative needlework. If you ply a needle today to create art, you are part of that line of women who saw creative fire burning in the simplest of things. We should honor them, for the Goddess moved in them.

They are our sisters in stitchery. Our mothers of invention.

You can see a collection of bone needles at the Texas Rock Shop.