That @&%# Fabric

You ever have something that haunts you?

No, I really mean it – something that follows you, every single stinking place you go, you see it out of the corner of your eye, flickers of it in the subway, every building you pass?

I hope it's a good haunting, I really do.

Me? Well, let's just say The Supreme Deity was laughing as They scraped the bottom of the barrel to give me mine.

That. &$%@. Fabric!!!

Oh, come on! I can't be the only one haunted by a fabric pattern, can I?

Can I?

...

Sigh.

How, you ask? (No, no, you didn't, but you're still reading, aren't you? So pretend you did, it'll make the transition easier. Gotta work with me, folx, and besides, aren't you just the teensy bit curious how a fabric pattern of all things turned into a real-life specter?)

Back when I was a wee little lass-

Wait, too far back, speed up a little.

I'm in a research-heavy local group of a medieval re-enactment society. And I got to thinking, which is almost certainly your cue to RUN. If I'm thinking, run far away! When I'm thinking, strange and odd and downright twisted ideas bubble to the surface of my mind, like demented tendrils following bright synapses to their end neurons, where they can be trapped...

Oh, you've read some of my stories? You know what I'm referring to? Then I'll move on.

So I got this idea to write a book about the history of all the different shapes, sizes, and configurations of crosses. This was before Wikipedia was even a concept, long before museums started putting their content online, and I was into broad but funky research topics, and it sounded like fun! (Keep in mind whose story you're reading – my idea of “fun” was shutting down a crossbow training range to go hunting for fossils in the shale backstop. For an hour. And the instructors joined us! All those years, and they never looked at the rocks beyond their targets!)

Lots of research books are naturally located in a research-heavy environment, so I asked to check out everyone's personal libraries. When I'd exhausted that avenue, I turned to museums that had medieval collections. Paintings, religious objects, icons, carvings, quite the target-rich environment for research, right?

Off we go to my first target – er, juicy mining zone - er, research area. Of course I've been to museums before, but not with a shiny new notepad already plump with the spoils of hours of tome-perusing. I am ready for a full day of learning All The Things! Let's go!

We get to the medieval wing, and I immediately turn left and start documenting all instances of crosses I see. And there are plenty! Most every painting had something going on, whether in the banner or the heraldic shield or the jewelry. Plenty to document. I got busy with sketches of the type and location and date. Even then, instead of just having a page about where each design originated, I was going to do an evolution of what may have morphed into another thing. For instance, did a Dragonfly Cross really develop from the Cross of Lorraine? Why is the Virgin Mary always associated with a cross that looks like a tiny Cross Pommelly stuck on the end of a Latinate form Cross Flory? Heralds, making distinctions between types to be precisely precise, gotta love 'em.

By the time I got to the sixth or seventh painting in the first room (twelve rooms!), I see a pattern emerging. A very distinctive pattern, quite literally. In every. single. painting, there's a gold and black design, very specific, very foliate, somewhere. Anywhere. Everywhere. A canopy, a bedspread, a gown, an undersleeve. An overdress, a banner, an underdress, even freaking shoes. Cuffs. Belts.

It got old fast.

I went from “Hunh, that fabric pattern's showing up a lot” to “Geez, what is it with that stupid pattern?” to “Oh, come on, this is getting ridiculous!” to “What the bleep?” as we progressed through the rooms. Those comments were swiftly followed by “Are the pieces getting bigger?” and “Are they following me?” and “What the bleeping bleep?” and “Seriously what is up with this bleeping bleep fabric?!?”

It didn't get any better. Twelve rooms...

By the third room, my swear words per sentence had risen to maximum capacity, and I was reduced to muttering under my breath so the one minor in our group wouldn't be scarred for life. (Her mother assured me it wasn't anything she hadn't heard before, but my philosophy has always been “That may be true, but I don't want her learning them from me. What you teach her on your time, or what she picks up elsewhere, isn't on me.”) If I scrub my words with Literary Sanitizer (TM), what dribbled out and pooled on the floor behind me (and ate through the marble flooring like the caustic acid it was) narrowed down to “that gosh-darn freaking fabric.”

And the haunting was born, and and yea verily it breathed, and pursued me with a thready frondy spectre.

Lucky freaking me.

Now, when I'm in museums, I tend to be followed. I make interesting comments, out loud, connecting things I've seen in books or other museums. My husband has threatened to write She Asks Interesting Questions on my tombstone. I've been shadowed by docents, curators, snarled at by tour guides, and trailed by curious guards.

Keep that last one in mind.

By the sixth room, I realized I was being followed. Last I'd seen that particular security guard, he'd been stationed in a quiet corner in the third room. When I first saw him turn a corner, I assumed in the back of my mind that he was on a rest break and taking the quick way to the break room, or perhaps the shortest route to the rest rooms. But by the fifth room, I kept catching glimpses of him entering the room as soon as I started documenting / swearing... More than a tad suspicious. He wasn't in any hurry to get anywhere, except within line of sight of li'l ol' me.

Yep. Suspicious.

And the more I muttered, the closer he got.

I finally let out a quite creative and ingenious string of curse words that I certainly can't repeat, and the guard guffawed. I turned to look at him, and as I did, I heard an echo of laughter. Of many people, laughing. Coming from near his ear. The penny dropped.

“You're following me, aren't you?”

“Yep!”

“And you have an open mike to the security team in the camera room, don't you?”

“Yep!”

“And you're not gonna go away if I ask you to, because you're technically doing your job, right?”

“Noooope!”

“fffffffffff... Fine. Buckle up, it's gonna be a bumpy ride!”

He guffawed again – I'll give him that, he was a champion guffawer – and true to his word, he followed me everywhere. And though I kept my voice down knowing there was a theoretical minor somewhere a room or two ahead of me, perhaps public ones behind me, I didn't police my volume as much. And the guard stayed a step behind my left shoulder to get the best audio for his pickup.

They were entertained. I could hear the laughter.

See, the guard knew what was coming. I didn't.

I scribbled notes, I snarled, and I created invectives. Guard laughed, husband snickered, security laughter echoed, and the group of people I came with hustled to put at least three rooms of antiquities between myself and them. Even after asking him at least once a room, “Don't you have a break to take or something? A lunch to eat? Somewhere else to go??”

“Noooope!”

“fffffffff... Fine.”

Guffaw!

“I'm glad I'm so... entertaining....”

Laughter though his earpiece.

And I kept making comments about “the gosh darn freaking fabric” through the eleventh room, muttering dire imprecations, listening to the laughter, turned to go into the last room-

Stopped in the doorway. The guard almost ran into me, and he knew.

“Aaaaaaaannnnnnndddddd.... there's the freaking fabric.....”

It was. Actual fabric. The exact same pattern, in straw and charcoal colors. A faded rug from the medieval period, encased in plastic. Lurking on the wall like a floral panther, ready to bite me.

The guard was doubled over in laughter, and I could hear his chorus in the guard room.

I pouted. “Can I burn it?”

“Noooope!”

“fffffffff.... Fine. I'm outta here!” And I flipped my hair, and flounced into the next room, which was medieval Spanish architecture. Funnily enough, the guard didn't follow.

So why am I still on this GDF fabric kick? Why all the waily angst?

Because. It. Is. Still. EVERYWHERE.

I learned, to my pain, why that particular pattern is sooooo ubiquitous: it was one of the very first Jacquard loom patterns.

Jacquard loom?

The book has now been published, so if you're curious, there are references I didn't have when the haunting started. Mister Jacquard used punch cards to create a freaking complicated loom that did the shed's threads moving for you. And with metal loops to hold individual threads, those designs were amazingly complex.

Add to this, silk dyed in gorgeous colors, and one thread per loop, and you have some mind-screamingly expensive fabric. This loom made silk-on-silk velvet, and silk shimmers in light in a way that nothing else does, even our modern fabrics. Cloth of gold and cloth of silver were actually eclipsed by this new, rare, bleeping costly, luxurious fabric.

It was easier to paint wealth into a portrait, because you could show the pattern with mere paint. Sure, painting with gold was fun, but you could show luxe that perhaps you couldn't afford but could pretend to own with pigment and egg yolk and perhaps some linseed oil. Cheaper and much easier to work with. And those Flemish painters with their realistic painting skills were sooo much better than the other European painters, and we won't even mention those English painters (gah, those portraits of Queen Elizabeth I!), and the fabric and the implications that came with it.

If you were lucky to have snippets, the extra bits were used EVERYWHERE.

Oh, people are tired of that pattern? Reverse colors! Gold on black is as awesome as black on gold! Red and gold! Gold and red! Green and gold, and gold and green!! Gah!

Oh, you want something “subtle?” How about green on green? Red on red? Blue on blue? White on white?

It is STILL, to this very day, the most popular fabric pattern. You will see it EVERYWHERE. Pillows, curtains, upholstery, and wallpaper. Dear sweet deities, THE WALLPAPER.

The blue on blue is one of the patterns approved for Colonial Williamsburg restoration.

I recently stumbled into a turn-of-the-century mansion turned museum that had THREE ROOMS – THREE!!! - wallpapered in the GDF fabric. Three different colors, of course. Original black on gold, blue on blue, and red on red. I may have disturbed some docents by snarling “Oh, come the heck on!” upon entering the first room, and “Hah, I've escaped – YOU'VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME” upon leaving said room and realizing I was trapped in the second. And then the third. Yes, I took pictures. Bleeping freaking fabric...

A friend bought a house, re-wallpapered her dining room, and threw many rolls of the old wallpaper at me. White on white.

And the pic above, of course. A different museum, because Flemish paintings are the majority of what you will see in the medieval wing. Quite detailed, those talented weasels.

Why, yes, I do have a collection of pictures from the internet. Because IT WILL FOLLOW YOU EVERYWHERE.

You will also see the variations of the foliate patterns, because humans trying to make a buck.

EVERYWHERE.

Every haunted house that has that particular scare room, where they take your pic...

EVERYWHERE.

You cannot escape it.

YOU CANNOT UNSEE IT. IT WILL FOLLOW YOU EVERYWHERE.

You're welcome.

If I have to suffer, SO DO YOU.