Furs and fabrics and suchlike

[inventrix]

Lyn's been working on fashion for her peoples, which has gotten me thinking about mine. Well, not fashion so much as just... clothing.

See, in such a highly flammable environment, you aren't going to get nice fluffy plant material for spinning. No cotton, no linen. There might be something along the lines of silk - and considering the size to which insects are capable of reaching on this planet, it could possibly be easier to harvest sizable amounts than it is for our actual silk.

This leaves the primary clothing materials as being skins and furs. Possibly leaves? I still need to think about the leaves. Anyway! So the question of fur, wool, etc. came up as a possible source of fibers for fabric. I was hoping to make the fibers naturally flame-retardant, but I'm not so sure that would happen. Most animals will not need to be flame-resistant, as they will just, you know... run away from the fire.

Which means that fabrics will be exclusively in the colder regions, where you would quite possibly just want to use the whole fur anyway. Unless I go with the silk-like thing, but why would you develop spinning and weaving just to make something wearable out of insect cocoons if there is no other use for said spinning and weaving? It doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Comments

[aldersprig]

Fashion from furs! And skins! I can work with that.

As for spinning... go for it. People clothe for decoration, too. And perhaps sinew isn't always the most useful thing for sewing/decoration?

[inventrix]

Ah! I had completely forgotten about stuff like thread and embroidery. Silly me! :D

[aldersprig]

That's what I'm for! :-D

[aldersprig]

I can think of some really lovely stuff with leather, actually. They'd probably have developed tanning techniques more quickly, so you end up with some pretty flexible thin garment leather. The question really ends up being sweat.

[(Anonymous)]

This reminds me.

Is photosynthesis especially vigorous on your planet?

For your planet to maintain its high oxygen/low co2 with enough fires to influence evolution it would have had to be going on for whole epochs, wouldn't it? Wouldn't the CO2 rise and the O2 drop eventually? Or am I missing something?

Anyway don't write off a cotton analog. Fluffy seed are for wind dispersal - they could be fire retardent and use the updrafts from the fires for seed dispersal. As for linen analogs - would bast fibre really be a problem? They are inside the plant after all. If the outer bark is fire resistant it should be okay. Even if not a flax analog what about bark cloths such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedar_bark_textile or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapa_cloth ?

[inventrix]

An interesting question! No, the effect you mentioned would not, in fact, happen. What is more likely to happen (and what happened on Earth) is for the plants to leech oxygen from the atmosphere, and to... I forget the word, but essentially lock carbon into the ground upon burning. (Burnt plant material!) That process is theoretically where all of our oil originated.

It seems unlikely that a plant would evolve a seed design that inherently lends itself well to bursting into flame in the first place. I'm not sure such a design would last long enough to develop fire-resistant properties, or that an already fire-resistant system would morph into a design that is inherently more susceptible to bursting into flame.

Bark cloth would be exceedingly impractical, as barks would really be more like thick rough plantish shells than bark. Definitely not very conducive to fibers.

Much like the animals, plants that would lend themselves well to being turned into spinnable fibers would be in the cold regions. I suppose it's possible they could have a linen equivalent, then...

[inventrix]

And what I neglected to mention in my first paragraph of the reply is that there will be a process reversing the oxygen leeching which I have not yet decided on.