At the very beginning of the world, people didn’t need clothes. They were “naked and were not ashamed.” (Genesis 2:25) But now we do need them—both to keep warm and to keep from becoming dreadfully embarrassed. (Clothing also represents our need to be covered by Jesus’ perfect goodness.) We need blankets, pillows, rugs, string, curtains, and rope too.

People are creative like God their Father. To meet all these needs, they invented textiles.

Textiles are fabric. People make them by locking together bundles of yarn or thread. But before you can have yarn or thread, you have to start with teeny-tiny fibers. These fibers might come from:

• wool (sheep hair)
• mohair (goat hair)
• angora (rabbit hair)
• silk (from silkworms)
• cashmere (hair from cashmere goats)
• llama fleece
• alpaca fleece
• qiviut (musk ox wool)
• cotton
• linen (from the flax plant)
• ramie (from a kind of nettle plant)
• polyester (man-made fiber)

Let’s imagine we’re making our yarn from wool.

STEP 1: Sheer your sheep. He needs a haircut . . . and you need his hair. Perfect!

STEP 2: Sheep aren’t exactly tidy. Wash that wool, baby! (In the Bible, fullers’ soap was used to make wool as white as snow. See Malachi 3:2.)

STEP 3: What a card. A machine pulls the curly fibers through metal teeth. This is called carding. At the end of carding, your fibers will be lined up into thin, flat pieces.

STEP 4: Spin! A spinning wheel creates wool strands. The fibers twist together and stick. Finally, this wool is looking useful. Depending on the type of spinning, it looks like yarn for knitting . . . or the type of very thin wool yarn you’d use to make a classy suit.

STEP 5: Dye it. Weave it. Knit it. Wool loves color. Add it to boiling water and dye, and you’ll get any color you want. Then weave that fabric or knit that sweater.