(The Railway Station, 1866, a hand-colored engraving by Francis Holl after William Powell Frith. The Victorian railway network connected ports, mills, merchants, and customers, carrying the materials that eventually reached the sewing basket. Public domain.)

How conflicts changed the threads, fabrics, and colors available to stitchers.

Imagine choosing the colors for a sampler, only to discover that the thread you need can no longer reach the shop. Perhaps the silk has stopped arriving, the linen mill has military orders to fill, or the dyer cannot obtain the ingredients needed to make a familiar shade. Somewhere between the field, the factory, the merchant, and the sewing basket, war has interrupted the journey.

We usually see war through battles, borders, and politics. Its effects also entered ordinary homes through the materials people used every day. A stitcher might never see the distant port where a ship was delayed or the new border that stood between a thread mill and its customers. She would simply know that a material had become scarce, expensive, different, or impossible to find.

This part of needlework history did not begin with the World Wars. Throughout the nineteenth century, one conflict after another disturbed the movement of silk, cotton, linen, wool, dyes, and even needles. The effects varied from war to war, but each left its mark on what eventually reached the sewing basket.

When silk became difficult to find

Our story begins during the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815). This shortage was caused by Napoleon's Continental System (1806) and Britain’s counter-blockades, which effectively choked off the trade routes that moved fine silk from major continental production hubs like Lyon, France, and Italy across the English Channel and beyond.

Britain’s naval blockade and Napoleon’s Continental System sharply restricted commerce between Britain and continental Europe, making silk more difficult and expensive to obtain.  Tailoring and stitching had heavily relied on strong silk threads to sew durable seams for high-end clothing. The blockade forced textile manufacturers and domestic sewers to hoard what little silk they had strictly for sewing high-end silk garments, leaving linen or rougher fibers for everyday wool and linen clothes. Smuggling through neutral ports kept raw silk flowing initially, but Napoleon's 1810–1811 annexation of Italian territories choked off these routes, causing a peak in the silk shortage around 1812.

In Paisley, Scotland, the Clark family felt the shortage directly. They made strong, smooth silk thread for heddles. Heddles are the small loops or eyes on a loom through which the lengthwise warp threads pass. By raising and lowering them, the weaver separates the warp threads and creates the opening through which the shuttle carries the crosswise thread.

Clark’s Anchor Thread Works, Paisley

Patrick Clark began experimenting with cotton. He found a way to twist cotton yarns into a smooth, durable substitute, and the family soon realized that the new thread could be useful for domestic sewing as well as weaving. In 1812 they established their cotton thread mill.

For those of us with cotton thread tucked into every corner of our sewing baskets, it is a fascinating connection. A wartime shortage helped encourage a practical substitute and opened a new direction for a family business. Silk embroidery certainly did not disappear, but cotton sewing thread was beginning to claim a much larger place in the home.

Before the linen came the seed

Bessbrook Spinning Mill

During the Crimean War, from 1853 to 1856, trouble reached the linen industry before the flax was even planted. Ireland depended upon imported Russian flax seed (specifically high-quality seeds sourced from Riga), and in 1855 that supply became difficult to obtain. Irish farmers harvested their flax while the plants were still green to produce the softest, finest fibers possible for weaving high-quality Irish linen. Because the plants were pulled before they could fully mature, the seeds were unusable for the next season's planting. As a result, Ireland had to import roughly two-thirds to three-fourths of its sowing seed annually from Russia's Baltic regions, where the plant was allowed to fully ripen.

Historian Paul Huddie records that Irish flax acreage fell from about 151,000 acres in 1854 to about 97,000 acres the following year.

Shipping made matters worse. Merchant vessels were taken into military transport service, leaving less room for commercial cargo and raising freight costs. Finished linen also became harder to export. Mills in Ulster closed or reduced their work, leaving families without their usual income.

We often picture linen beginning in a peaceful field of blue flowers. Yet even that field depended upon merchants obtaining seed, ships carrying cargo, and farmers being able to plant. Before a stitcher could choose a piece of linen, many hands had already taken part in its journey. War could interrupt that journey at its very beginning.

A war across the ocean stopped European mills

The Cotton Famine, Mill Operatives at Manchester UK

The American Civil War, from 1861 to 1865, created another kind of textile crisis. British cotton manufacturing relied heavily upon cotton grown by enslaved people in the American South. When the war and the Union blockade cut off much of that trade, Lancashire mills were left without enough raw cotton. Some closed and others shortened their working hours. Families far from the fighting suddenly lost their livelihoods.

Workers waiting for breakfast in Mr Chapman's Courtyard

British merchants turned increasingly to India and Egypt for cotton. These sources could not immediately replace the missing American supply, but the change shows how war could redraw the path a fiber took across the world.

The shortage of American cotton forced a massive global quality shift in sewing threads. American "Sea Island" cotton was famous for having long, silky fibers that made incredibly smooth embroidery and sewing threads. The cotton imported from India during the famine had much shorter fibers, making the resulting thread coarser, rougher, and more prone to snapping. 

A mill might have skilled workers, machinery, and customers waiting, yet be unable to operate because the bales of cotton never arrived. We cannot always know which embroidery cotton disappeared from a particular shop, but we can see how vulnerable the entire chain had become.

During the Lancashire Cotton Famine, unemployed workers at Mr. Birley’s mill received money or relief tickets that could be exchanged at this mill shop for bread, flour, bacon, tea, coffee, rice, soap, and other necessities. Illustrated London News, 1862.

Mr. Birley kept a provision shop inside the closed mill for his unemployed workers during the Cotton Famine. Workers received relief either in money or in tickets, which they could exchange at the shop for necessities such as:

• Bread baked on the premises
• Tea and coffee
• Bacon
• Rice
• Flour and meal
• Soap
• Pepper

The mill was supporting about 1,000 former employees. Some women, girls, and boys also attended reading, sewing, and knitting classes there, and approximately 200 of them received a prepared dinner each day, similar to a soup kitchen.

When a new border stood between DMC and its customers

DMC factory at Mulhouse, in Alsace

The Franco Prussian War of 1870 to 1871 brings us to a name almost every stitcher recognizes. DMC stands for Dollfus-Mieg et Cie. The French words et Cie are short for et Compagnie, meaning and Company.

DMC produced thread in Mulhouse, in Alsace. After the war, Alsace became part of the new German Empire. A customs barrier now stood between the Mulhouse factory and DMC’s French customers. The fighting had ended, but a skein of thread could no longer follow the same route it had taken before.

DMC answered the problem by establishing a factory at Belfort, which had remained French. Construction began in 1879, and the factory entered service in 1880. It produced sewing and embroidery threads in cotton, linen, and silk.

Belfort did not replace the original factory at Mulhouse. The two works operated on opposite sides of the new border, with Belfort providing DMC with a base inside France while Mulhouse remained its much larger manufacturing center. The Mulhouse works continued to expand, adding new buildings for spinning, weaving, dyeing, bleaching, and finishing. By 1909, DMC employed about 6,600 people at Mulhouse and around 1,000 at Belfort. In 1959, textile production was concentrated once again at Mulhouse, and the Belfort factory closed the following year.

This is a wonderful example of war continuing to shape needlework years after the fighting had ended. The border moved, and the thread company changed with it so that its products could still reach French sewing baskets.

When war reached the dyer’s colors

Wool threads and textile samples from a Bayer dye book published around 1913. The samples demonstrate the extraordinary range of synthetic colors produced by the German dye industry immediately before the First World War. Courtesy of the Science History Institute. Public domain.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Germany had become the center of the synthetic dye industry. BASF was one of its most important companies, alongside Bayer, Hoechst, Agfa, and Cassella. A United States government memorandum written in 1914 estimated that German factories produced approximately 75 percent of the dyestuffs used throughout the world. 

The first commercially successful synthetic dye had actually been discovered in Britain. In 1856, William Henry Perkin created the brilliant purple dye later known as mauve. German manufacturers, however, became particularly skilled at turning laboratory discoveries into reliable products that could be made on an industrial scale.

Germany invested heavily in chemical education, university research, and technical training. Its dye companies employed large numbers of chemists and established some of the earliest industrial research laboratories. They developed their own formulas, manufacturing processes, and international sales networks. By combining scientific research with large factories and experienced business management, German companies came to dominate markets far beyond Germany.

Many of the new colors were made from chemical compounds derived from coal tar, a by-product of processing coal. From this dark and unpleasant substance, chemists learned to produce an extraordinary range of reds, purples, blues, yellows, and blacks. BASF produced synthetic alizarin red in 1869 and, after years of research, introduced synthetic indigo in 1897. Unlike natural indigo, which could vary in strength and quality, the manufactured dye offered a more consistent color.

When the First World War began in 1914, the international movement of German dyes and textile chemicals was interrupted. Shipping became dangerous, trade routes were restricted, and chemicals and manufacturing facilities acquired new military importance. An American trade appeal warned that the United States had only about sixty days’ supply of textile chemicals and dyes remaining.

This affected much more than brightly colored cloth. Cotton, wool, and silk manufacturers needed chemicals to clean, bleach, prepare, dye, and finish their materials. Even white fabric depended upon them. A thread manufacturer might still possess cotton or silk but be unable to reproduce a familiar shade or prepare the fiber in the usual way.

For the stitcher choosing thread in a shop, the complicated chemistry behind those colors would have been invisible. She would simply discover that a familiar shade had become difficult to obtain, more expensive, or slightly different from the one she had used before.

The linen was needed in the sky

The First World War also placed enormous new demands upon linen. Irish mills produced millions of yards for covering aircraft. Linen was light, strong, and valuable far beyond the sewing room.

At the same time, the German occupation of Belgium and northern France affected important linen producing regions. Raw materials, mills, workers, and transportation were all caught in the conflict. Military demand pulled linen in one direction while occupation and interrupted trade limited it in another.

Aircraft linen and sampler linen were different finished products, but both belonged to the same wider world of flax, spinning, weaving, and shipping. When governments required vast quantities of cloth, the needs of the household sewing basket became very small indeed.

The Vintage Aviator, “Working with Irish Linen,” on the use and application of aircraft grade Irish linen based upon First World War specifications. (link at the end for further reading)

Wool had another customer waiting

Wool faced similar pressure. Armies needed uniforms, blankets, socks, and countless other necessities. By 1917, the British government had taken control of wool supplies to make certain that military demand could be met.

For anyone who loves an antique wool sampler, that connection is worth pausing over. The same raw fiber that could become a shaded rose or a dark stitched background was also an essential military material. This does not mean that every embroidery wool vanished from every shop. It means that wool was being directed and managed around needs far greater than decorative needlework.

Sometimes the missing ingredient really was the thread

Occupied Belgium gives us one of the clearest examples of a needlework tradition being separated from its supplies. Belgian lacemakers still had their skills, pillows, and bobbins, but the Allied blockade prevented thread from coming in and finished lace from going out.

Relief organizers negotiated a special arrangement that allowed thread to enter Belgium and completed lace to be exported. Americans, including Herbert Hoover’s Commission for Relief in Belgium, helped create that lifeline. It gave lacemakers a way to earn money while preserving a beautiful tradition through the war.

Lace is a close cousin to embroidery rather than the same craft, but its story shows the problem with unusual clarity. Skilled hands could not continue without the humble thread that connected them to farmers, spinners, merchants, ports, and customers.

And what happened to the needles

While general wartime metal controls impacted manufacturing in ways that require detailed factory records to fully trace, WWI created a distinct crisis for domestic sewing tools. Before 1914, Redditch, England, was the global center for high-quality hand-sewing needles. Government steel rationing and the requisitioning of these factories for military machinery and surgical needles resulted in a severe global shortage of specialized domestic needles, forcing stitchers worldwide to painstakingly preserve and reuse their existing tools.

The idea invites us to look more carefully at old needlework tools. Today we can choose among tapestry needles, chenille needles, crewel needles, beading needles, and many others. Earlier stitchers also knew their tools intimately. When a particular size or shape was no longer made, a technique could become harder to practice exactly as it had been before.

The history inside the sewing basket

Across these different wars, the pattern repeats in surprising ways. Silk stopped moving and cotton was adapted to take its place. Flax seed failed to reach Irish fields. Cotton shortages silenced English mills. A new border separated DMC from its French customers. Dyes, linen, wool, lace thread, and needles all became entangled in military demand and interrupted trade.

Not every stitcher experienced every shortage, and war did not cause every change in nineteenth-century needlework. Fashion, invention, industrial growth, and personal means mattered too. But the materials in an old sampler did not appear by magic. Each one had travelled through a long chain of growers, merchants, dyers, mills, and shops before reaching the stitcher’s hand.

The next time we look at an antique sampler, we might ask one more question alongside who stitched it and when: what had to happen for those materials to reach her sewing basket?

A final stitch

I hope you enjoyed following these threads through history as much as I enjoyed gathering them. Looking at the materials in our sewing baskets in this way gives us another connection to the stitchers who came before us.

Much love,

Birgit

🧵 A Stitcher's Side Note: What was Sea Island Cotton?
The American South was famous for "Sea Island" cotton, a premium variety named after the chain of barrier islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. Because of the coastal climate, this cotton grew exceptionally long, silky fibers. It could be spun into incredibly fine, glossy embroidery threads that felt like silk but were remarkably strong. When the war cut off this specific supply, stitchers didn't just lose volume—they lost the elite quality they were used to.