I'm getting asked time and again about what I do with my handspun. Well... that depends.

Sometimes I spin for a museum reconstruction project, so it's spinning for a certain end result, and the threads then get passed on to the weaver, or I do something with them.

Most of the other spinning I do is for no specific purpose, and a lot of it is yarns I do for demonstration. Thus they can be a little inconsistent... because of explanations like "see, this is how you make thicker yarn, and this is how you make thinner yarn, and this has more twist and this less..."

With that kind of yarn, not much is happening. It mostly sits around on spindles somewhere until I take it off, or until I need some bit of string, or have to demonstrate plying (yarn with little twist also plies up shittily, but ah, one copes).

Sometimes, though, I also haul it out (the better, not so inconsistent yarns) to do some experimentation, or fooling around. Like now, when I've set up a warp to test our Blindis band technique reconstruction once more, and (most importantly) take some decent photos of the process.



So... that's a bit of the brown handspun used...

If you've done research about early medieval embroidery, you've probably come across the Maaseik embroideries - silk and goldwork, preserved in Maaseik, and there's pictures of them online at kikirpa.be.

Brand new, though, is this: Alexandra Makin has made a presentation about these pieces, and the results of an examination that she did. Watch it right here:

This was a busy Monday - and I actually snuck some work into the weekend to make it a bit less busy. There was the harvest of the woad seeds, which are now back in stock in the shop.

There's also a plethora of spindle whorls again, which now have to be sorted into their weight categories, and then I can start to plan the next online spinning classes. Yay!



I am always happy to look at these sitting in their box in one giant heap.

Finally, of course, there's Forum planning going on. My list of things to bring is growing steadily longer, and my excitement is also steadily growing. It's so nice to have a European Textile Forum again this year, after having to take a break from it last year. My beloved one week of utter textile madness and crazy coffee over-consumption!

I'm back with my Bronze Age Fibre problem. Well, it's not just my problem... it's a pretty common one if you look at reproducing fabrics from that time. Let's take a look...

Modern Merino wool, which is seen as rather fine stuff, has - if of the fine kind - fibre thicknesses of around 20 micron. Sometimes you get extrafine, which is at about 17 micron.

Bronze age fibres were, mostly, around 17 micron. There's fluctuations, of course, but that's the main component of the textiles - really, really fine fibres. Then there's some few extra coarse ones thrown in, with 45-150 micron thickness. A diagram of fibre thicknesses counted was published in Skals, I., & Mannering, U. (2014). Investigating Wool Fibres from Danish Prehistoric Textiles. Archaeological Textiles Review, 56, 24-34, and thanks to the generousness of ATR, you can download the whole issue with the article included here. To save you the search, the histogram is on p 26, and it looks like this:



Getting this mix of fibres is difficult these days. I have gotten some superduperfine special wool now, with (according to my supplier) around 15 micron of fibre thickness. You can see it to the very left in this picture; next to it is a sample of my beloved Eider wool, and on the right Valais Blacknose wool.



Even though it's just a macro photograph, I think the difference is quite clear. The difference when you touch it is very clear as well - the superduperfine wool feels like silk, and it's supershiny (which is partly due to some post-shearing treatment), while the Eider and Valais are just normal shiny.

I've also compared it to the Manx Louaghtan, which is an old breed, and to another wool sample that I got for these comparison reasons:



Again the superfine is on the left, followed by my South American test candidate, then the Manx (which appears more saturated brown than in real life) and, for comparison, the Eider wool again. Both candidates are definitely finer than the Eider wool (which should have around 30-33 micron), but considerably coarser than the superduper benchmark.

And here you are. The Bronze Age Fibre Problem, in pictures. The superduperfine wool lacks the coarse fibres strewn in, and has been seriously processed to make it silky, smooth, and shiny. It also is very, very white, and BA fibres are mostly quite heavily pigmented. The two coloured wools have a mix of coarse and fine, but way too many coarse fibres strewn in to match the BA originals. They are, however, nicely pigmented.

So, like with many reconstruction projects, there's the choice between compromises. Use the very fine fibre although it has been heavily processed, dye it, and accept the fact that it lacks the coarse hairs? Try to blend some extra coarse fibres in (it would still need to be dyed)? Or use a wool that is naturally pigmented and not supertreated, but has too coarse fibres, or too many coarse fibres for the amount of fine ones?

Or... would someone please invent a time machine and fetch a handful of Bronze Age sheep? Pretty please?

Bronze Age! Yes, that's a bit before my usual time span, but I'm getting more and more fascinated by these very early textiles. First of all, I wonder how much of a difference the fibre makes - would you be able to tell, from the touch of the finished cloth, whether the fibre has 15 micron 0r 22, or 30?

I'm also fascinated by an oddness in the weaving technique. The surviving blankets were huge - the one from Egtved was 190 by 258 cm. That is a width that would be hard to handle for a single weaver. Add to that the fact that there are weft crossings in the fabric - there's just one weft per shed, but it's not the same one all the way through. Weft A comes from the left, weft B from the right, and at some point roughly in the middle, both go to the surface of the fabric and cross each other. Then weft A continues its journey to the right in the next shed, while weft b goes to the left, and they turn normally at the selvedge. This sometimes occurs with three weft threads instead of two.

Thanks to the wonderful image database of the Danish National Museum, you can have a look at this weft crossing thing in the Trindhoj blanket here. There's some crossings in the area left of the hole - you can download the image and then go hunting for these oddities with your image viewer of choice.

My suspicion is that two (or even three) weavers worked together on these superwide fabrics, and the crossings are where the spools or sticks or whatever they used changed hands from one weaver to the other.

This is really fascinating, and I'd love to try this out. The only tiny issue is that this requires a superwide loom (with the corresponding large number of weights, and large amounts of yarn), and some other people willing to have a go at weaving... Though a bit of testing might be possible with a loom and fabric with less width, to get an idea of the method, at least.

 

Things going on here? All of them.

Planning for the Textile Forum is going on, and our programme is about finished. Prep for NESAT is the next step.

I've also done some research on Bronze Age fabrics for a possible museum project (yay!) and learned that these fabrics are wildly different from the usual medieval stuff. There's fewer threads per cm, for one thing; then the usual warp and weft spinning direction is just the opposite of what you usually get in medieval cloth; there can be several wefts in one shed, and they cross over each other at some point... and the fabrics are quite wide. Quite, quite wide...

One of the problematic points for recreation of these really old fabrics is the fibre, though. Bronze Age sheep were different animals from what we have today, so the wool is mostly underwool, with around 17 micron thickness - with the occasional thick hair thrown in. Now, modern really fine-wooled Merino sheep have about 17 micron fibre thickness... but there's, of course, no coarse hair in their wool.

Which means I've been looking around, and am trying to find good sources for fibre that is at least sort of close to the original. Soay sheep might be an option, but there's not so many of them around, and getting their fibre might be a challenge.

This, by the way, is a rather common problem when trying to reproduce old things - the available material today can be so different from the original that trouble ensues. For instance if you need cattle metapodia, or cattle thigh joint heads, for a certain object... but the modern cow is much, much larger than the Roman era cow was, so your object will have the wrong size, or the wrong proportions.

There we go, then - looking for compromises, or good solutions to the problem...

If you need some eyecandy on this Monday evening, you could go to the site of the Met Museum and take a look at this Italian belt from the second half of the 14th century - with lots and lots of beautiful metal ornaments. Lots and lots and lots; so many, in fact, that the beautiful tablet-weave is almost completely hidden.

Fortunately, though, the makers of the Met's digital catalogue also took a photo of the back of the band, at least of one part, and there you can see the weave.

Stunning, isn't it?