Monday, March 9, 2015

Zwirnerei Sachdenring thread from Glauchau Germany

I am fascinated by vintage things. No surprise here I know. While at the flea market in Dresden one of the sellers had a package of thread in assorted shades of brown and one gray color. 
Looking at the company name, I had never heard of it so in typical "me" form, I bought the pack of thread. What is it and can I use it in my future work? No matter, the price was right and if it isn't usable, well that's ok, they are pretty.

Looking further at the package to top had this information:
On investigation, a couple words were not in my German vocabulary it is a pack of 6 balls of thread each being 5 meters long in length and 8 ply. It looks like it is multiple threads twisted in a pair or 4 threads each, hence the twist name.

On the bottom is this:

 Wonderful! I have the town name and could look it up to see what happened to the company

I went to the internet. What I found is sort of what I knew and is sad. After the wall fell, many East German companies could not compete with the West and jobs were lost as plants closed down. I remember reading about it in the newspapers. In my search I found out, according to the Sachsen.de Archivwesen website that the company SEV Zwirnerei Sachdenring in Glauchau Germany was in operation between the years 1895 and 1991. The plant manufactured thread for the repair of clothing. I really never realized that one bought thread to repair clothing. I knew you could buy yarn to repair sweaters but it never occurred to me that one could buy thread for the expressed purpose of repair. Isn't that what regular thread is for?

It is sad to think that a company that survived WWI and WWII would go out of business a about two years after the wall fell. I found myself feeling for those who lost jobs. It seemed everything East was not wanted and instead everything West was what everyone from the East wanted to buy. I suppose too that the colors of the thread, 5 shades of brown and one shade of a darker grey, were not exactly useful with the influx of fashion from the West. Besides, who wants to repair clothes anyway?

Most exciting, even though sad, is that a "face" can be put on this factory. In my search to find out about this factory I found a website by Andre Joosse. His website is worth spending some time looking at. He travels into abandoned places, Urban Exploration as it is called and photographs them.

 Now I have a face to the name on my thread. You can see pictures of what is left of the Zwirnerei Sachdenring factory in Glauchau Germany built in 1895 here. The factory was abandoned in 1993, two years after the Sachsen.de Archivwesen shows it went out of business.

2 comments:

  1. I too love vintage things and your post not only features the vintage item but adds so much to our knowledge of it and of the past. Thank you for sharing. I now must visit that site.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I enjoyed reading about your research about the thread. that is sad that "progress" tends to leave many behind.

    ReplyDelete