Our red hat lady Christmas ornament is 6.5 inches long, including the 3 inch long, red satin ribbon hanging loop. The red hat lady Christmas ornament depicts a red hat lady wearing a long purple gown with purple glitter on the bodice and the toe of one red glittered shoe peaking out from the hem of her dress. The red hat lady Christmas ornament also has a red rose, with a rhinestone in the center, attached to one of her dress straps. The red hat lady Christmas ornament is also wearing red glittered gloves and a red hat with long red and purple feathers
Clothing.
Food, shelter and clothing are the three things people must have. They need and want many more things but they do not think much about other needs until these three are satisfied.
It is easy to see why food and shelter are needed. People cannot live at all without food. In most part of the world they cannot live long without shelter. But in many climates people could keep alive without clothing.
How Clothing Began.
Every child knows the difference between dressing and dressing up. To dress is to put on clothes and we do it every day. Dressing up is getting ready for a party or putting on a Halloween costume or digging old fashioned garments out of a trunk in the attic. Anyone would think that clothes were invented so people could dress. Scientists tell us that people probably dressed up long before wearing clothes became a habit. They decked themselves with feathers and ornaments, painted their bodies, or wrapped themselves in the skins of animals. Then they found that some of their decorations kept them warm, or protected them against scratches and cuts. We are told that clothing as we know it probably began in this way. Even today, many millions of people wear little or no clothing, but they all use ornaments and decorations for dressing up.
Clothing Customs.
Another important reason for the clothing we wear are customs. We like to look like other people, so we wear neckties or hats or jackets whether they are comfortable or not. On very hot days, we might feel more comfortable in bathing suits, but we would feel foolish to go shopping in them. On cold days, we may wish we could take a blanket from the bed and wrap it around us Indian fashion. But it would take a brave boy or girl to walk to school in such and outfit.
Clothing Materials.
When primitive people began to use clothing, they had to make it from the things they found around them. In cold lands, they often used the skins of fur bearing animals. In warm regions, they sometimes used the bark of certain trees, or wove their garments from grass. Some tribes scraped the skins of animals and made a soft leather. Even today, some African tribes make clothing from the hides of cattle.
The first woven material for clothing was lines. In ancient Egypt and in many other lands, people learned to make threads form the fibers of the flax plant and to weave them into cloth. The Egyptians wove a softer, finer linen than we make today, but it was used only by coarse linen cloth and had few garments.
Wool was probably the second woven clothing material. We do not know what people first used it. Sheep are easy to raise and can live in many different climates, so that people in many parts of the world raised sheep as food and for their soft, warm skins. We cannot even guess who first thought of cutting off sheep’s wood and spinning it into yarn. Many people, poor as well as rich, were wearing woolen clothing very early in man’s history.
The Chinese were the first people to make clothing of silk. For a long time, no one outside China knew how silk was made. The Chinese sold some silk to other people, but they kept the secret of how to make it for three thousand years.
Cotton was first used for clothing in India about 3,500 years ago. It is now the most widely used of all clothing materials.
To these kinds of cloth modern science has added many others. We can now make clothing from wood, coal, glass, soybeans, milk, natural gas, and many other materials. Such cloth includes nylon and rayon. Nylon is made from coal, water, air, petroleum and natural gas. Rayon is made from wood pulp and cotton.
Leather, one of the oldest clothing materials, is used today chiefly for shoes and belts. Rubber, which the Indians of Central and South America first used for making cloth waterproof and sometimes for shoes, is now widely used as a clothing material.
Less than two hundred years ago clothing was far from plentiful, even in the most progressive parts of the world. In many families, garments were handed down form parents to children and often there were not enough clothes to go around. Many persons never had a new garment in their lives. Except among the rich, the idea of changing clothes was unheard of, for no one had more than one outfit.