The eye, the nose, the neck. Ah well.



First, let me tell you about the main difference, for me, in weaving ass-first versus nose-first: When starting with the nose, I will very easily end up with a baboon ass on the dog because of getting the timing of leg slope start and back slope start not quite right. When starting with the tail, I have a high probability of ending up with a too-thick neck because of somehow fuddling things up in the middle, and then getting the timing for the neck not quite right. I suspect that if woven cleanly, the thick-neck-problem might evaporate. (It's on my list to manage that the next time.)

The nose area, however, is a different beast.

[caption id="attachment_5364" align="alignnone" width="328"] Photo from UNIMUS.no


[caption id="attachment_5365" align="alignnone" width="441"] Photo from UNIMUS.no




If you compare the look of the back of the band in the tail and leg region, you can see that there is a characteristic look of broken narrow lines - that's the back of the regular diagonals structure, which is exactly what we have on the front for a while: white, purple, white, purple.



The noses on my dogs are all one of these regular stripes as well - white, purple, white; a single (two-thread) line on top of the band, and the regular broken line on the back. Except in the very first dog, where I did a wide nose.



Now, the rules of normal twill dictate that a line you "draw" on the background is either one line (two thread's worth) wide, or three lines (in order to go out with a nice clean line again). Three lines because you have, in the diagonal base setup, a white line coming out of the twill, then your pattern dark line, a light line, a dark line, and then a white line going back into twill again. For a wider line, you cover up the light between the two dark lines by change of tablet turn direction, but you still have to weave into the regular dark line to get a clean shape. So. Two or six is the choice you have.

The original animal's nose is wider than a single line (of two threads) and much more narrow than a regular wide line, though, and that is technically not possible without doing Strange Things (TM).

I suspect the sneaky and ingenious use of some double-turns here, to get the effect. I'm not sure yet how and where they need to get started, though. This is one of the cases where I'll actually sit down with pen and paper and start drafting this to see where lines meet normally, and where lines have to start, or change, to get the desired effect.

And then I can see another dog-weaving stint in my future...

(By the way, in case it interests you: If I don't make silly mistakes and have to weave back, weaving a doggie takes me about one and a half hours. Do try this at home, but not late in the evening when tired, especially not late in the evening when tired plus distracted by other stuff going on in the room that you feel the need to participate in while making silly mistakes in your weaving.)

The Evebø band... oh, source of joy and questions. For me, at least.

The Evebø band is a find from Norway and dated to the 6th century; it's a tablet-woven band with twill technique patterning, and very good, very detailed pictures of the band can be found at the Fotoportalen Unimus. Including, to my great joy and delight, photos of the back of the band... because, as simple as the band might look at first glance, there are some strange things happening with the animal that might be a dog (though the Most Patient Husband of Them All says it looks more like an ant-eater to him, and I sort of agree).

[caption id="attachment_5364" align="alignnone" width="368"] Photo from UNIMUS.no


The original band happens to have a 20 tablet pattern zone, which coincidentally is the width of one of my playbands... so of course, at some point, I had to weave the Evebø ant-eater doggie. And as we all know, dogs are pack animals.

So. Let me introduce you to my Evebø dog collection:



The first one, in the upper band part on the image, was woven starting from the nose, after just a sketch of the original animal. Though I was sort of aiming to reproduce it, I wasn't going for the "have to match it exactly" approach, but more for the general direction. As you can see, it has a wider nose than the original, a much thicker neck, and a baboon butt.

The rest followed a considerable amount of time later - they grow younger from right to left. First (rightmost) was woven from the tail onwards; then, because the first one had been so long ago and that made it hard to compare what the differences were, I did another one starting from the nose (you can easily tell that by the baboon butt). Finally, I did a third one, trying to a) weave less mistakes than in the first ass-starter, and b) matching it as closely as possible to the original. Which was... well... not completely successful in both cases. As you can see mostly in the chin and nose area. Sigh.

If you compare my versions with the original, you can find quite a few differences (even disregarding the baboon butt versions, and just looking at the ass-first doggies). A small thing is the forelegs not having the split further down than the hind legs in one case - though that is just a question of me not paying enough attention to where the split was supposed to come, and not a technical issue.

The really interesting differences, though, are in the neck, eye, and nose area... can you spot them?

Addition to clarify things, June 4 2020:

Silvia very correctly points out in the comments that she knows of no tablet-woven bands that appear in just one colour, but have a twist direction turn pattern that points to an original patterning. This is true - I don't know of any either (though my overview is not as good, or current, as Silvia's).
Knowing a little bit about how many textile finds are not published, and how decisions are made on what to publish with the very limited time and resources available... my suspicion is that at least a few bands exist that lie somewhere in an archive or a freezer, which would carry a hint of original patterning in form of twist direction changes. Or none at all, if the pattern was formed while only turning the tablets in one direction. They are, however, too unspectacular to be looked at in detail, or published. The same is probably true for bands that still do have a visible (maybe just faintly visible) simple pattern. Since tablet-woven patterns come out best when contrast is high, the chance of the pattern staying visible even in discoloured bands is relatively high.
So - I am not trying to say that there are lots of simple bands published who originally had a colour pattern, which has disappeared now. I'm trying to point out that there is a possibility of simple patterned bands discolouring in a way that would make it harder or impossible to see what the original pattern was. How likely that is, exactly, and how many of these might be in archives or storage boxes, is another very interesting question, but unfortunately not one I'm able to answer. I just think it's something worth to be aware of.

End of addition.

 
A while ago, I botched when setting up a warp for a tablet weaving demo band - I took two colours I liked, held the balls of yarn next to each other, went "yeah, that looks good", and warped the band in a setup for diagonals or twill.

Just to find, a few wefts in, that the contrast wasn't as good as I had thought it to be. A quick check, and yes - the grey value of the two colours is identical. So while the pattern is visible in normal lighting, the contrast isn't high enough to use this as a demo band for showing how to weave twill.

It is, however, perfect to show something else: What can happen to a tablet-woven band when it's buried in the soil for a few hundred years and turns all brown all over. Because then, all you might be able to see is that there must have been a pattern of some kind.

Case in point?
Let's take one of the most simple patterns you can weave with a diagonals setup: diamonds. It looks like this on my band:



Now let's put it into virtual soil to turn all brown - or, in this case, convert the picture to greyscale.



You can see the turning points across the whole band, coming in at more or less regular intervals - so you can assume that some pattern must have been happening here. You won't be able to tell which one, though.

Let's spice it up a bit. Imagine you're the archaeologist and find this:

[caption id="attachment_5317" align="alignnone" width="640"] Click on this link to find out.


Are you able to guess what it looks like in colour? Click on the link to find out.

So there we are. A band like this would probably not get published prominently - and I think that we might have found many more simple patterned bands in the Middle Ages than our finds show today. No metal (as in the brocaded bands) will mean worse chances at surviving in the soil, and small bits and pieces of uniformly coloured bands will give scant hints at the patterns that might once have been visible...

Things I learned in the past days:

1. Filming a video presentation of something makes me extra-super-duper nervous. Part of this is the thought in the back of my mind that every "erm..." and every silly facial expression and every little imperfection in speech will be recorded and thus preserved FOREVER, and thus I should be absolutely perfect, and that is hard to do.
2. Writing subtitles in English underneath a German spoken text is hard, not only because I can (duh) talk much faster than I can type. There's also the temptation to deviate (too) much from the things I actually say, to make it more clearer to the reader, or to cram more info into the text... which I as a viewer would find confusing, and not ideal.
3. There was very, very, very little twist in the threads used to weave the Albecunde belt. My tests done with my (only very slightly twisted) embroidery silk look like this:

While the original belt looks like this:



You cannot see the pattern as clearly on my test piece as you can on the original - it looks very pronouncedly diagonally structured in one twist direction, but more like a mushy solid surface in the other. On the original, there's a diagonal structure visible in both directions, and it's only a very little more pronounced in one compared to the other.

Here's closeups to make things even more clear:



You can see that the diagonals with an S-slant are much more defined than those with a Z-slant. That's because my thread is slightly s-twisted. It's not much, but enough to make quite a visible difference in the outcome; enough of the z-twist the tablets introduce is levelled out by the yarn twist to show. The twist is visible, if you look closely, in the areas where I changed tablet twist direction.



This is a detail, closeup, of the original. Here, too, you can observe the individual thread twist in the places where tablet turn direction changes - but it is so slight that it's almost impossible to detect. The best indication of it being a hint of an s-twist is that the S-cords in the tablet weave are a little bit more defined than the Z-cords.

Here's a microscope picture, going even closer to the threads:



This shows how important even a little bit more or less of twist can be when you are weaving a pattern that relies, for its effect, exclusively on the shine and the light refraction of the silk used - and how much knowledge and skill went into this band.

You can hear more about the Albecunde band on Sunday in the presentation at Virtual Lauresham (and see my video thingie...)!

Thank you to the Diözesanmuseum Augsburg for letting us study the belt in detail for our reconstruction project!

I've recently started to bake bread again (I blame one of our friends, who reminded me of the joys of sourdough), and if you bake traditional sourdough bread, the dough needs to hang out in a warm enough place for quite some time.

The typical hack for this is to put the dough in its covered bowl into the oven and turn on the oven light - just the lamp; this puts out enough heat to warm the inside of the oven to about 30° C if you leave the door open a bit. However, our oven is a shiny new-fangled thing with a light that goes out after about 15 seconds... so I needed another way to gently heat it up.

The solution? A candle or, in my case, an oil light. There was a bit of trouble at first, though, as the light went out after a short while - and it took me a little time to discover the reason. Which was... old oil on the swimmer.



When I sell these, I usually tell my customers that if they are not using the light for a while, it's a good idea to take the swimmer out and give it a good rinse to clean it, then dry it.

Very obviously I'm not always taking my own advice... this swimmer has been in use for a rather long time, with breaks inbetween uses where I sometimes took it out and rinsed it  and sometimes not. Over all this time, a good layer of gummified oil has accumulated both on the metal bit and on the cork.

That is, unfortunately, not just an optical issue - the gummified oil warms up when the light is burning, and then seems to get just liquid enough to get into the wick, blocking it up. Which means that the wick cannot get enough oil through anymore, and the flame goes out.

So - should you have an oil light that does not work properly anymore, check it for gummified oil; clean it if necessary (hot water and soda, and a good long soak in there, will help), or get a replacement swimmer.

Both these techniques, as far as I can gather, were born out of necessity and poverty. Mending clothes was something done everywhere and in every time period when the cost of the textile, or the garment, was high enough to make mending feel worthwhile. In some cases, mending was done to be as inconspicuous as possible, while in other cases, the higher priority was to fix it in some way so that it would be okay to use again, with optics playing a secondary or no part. Which kind of mending was done probably depended on many different factors, including the personality of the mender and the owner of the garment.

Mending things usually is associated with poverty - if you are rich, you can afford to have new, unworn and undamaged things, and thus no mending. While having mended stuff would probably have been the norm for most people during most of human history, this association did its part to lead to our modern culture of throw-away clothing, bought very cheaply and in poor quality, worn a few times and then ending up in a landfill, or getting burned in some wast combustion plant.

Today, mending is becoming more fashionable again, in a turn against wasteful consumer culture. This also means that visible mending is turning into a kind of fashion statement - including the aforementioned techniques of sashiko and boro.

So did we have these, or similar techniques, in the Middle Ages in Europe? Whether that is answered with a "yes" or a "no" partly depends on how you see the different aspects.

Firstly and most importantly, we did have a similar tradition in the widest sense - that garments and textiles were mended, re-used, and re-purposed; especially in poorer areas or by poorer people, who could not afford to buy shiny new things all the time. For the boro tradition, what comes to my mind first is the textile equipment of the Man from Bernuthsfeld, whose tunic was put together from many different patches of many different fabrics:
However, this tunic is a special case - there's nothing else made in a similar fashion from the Middle Ages, as far as we know, and there is a lot of different speculations on why the man wore something like this.

There is a tradition in the European Middle Ages, though, that could be seen as a parallel to Japanese boro: Re-using the fabric of a garment to make something new out of it. This was done with garments that had a high value, either a tangible one (a very costly fabric) or an intangible one (something worn by a saint). Examples of these re-purposings are two Swedish altar frontals made from expensive garments that were donated to the church, or the Sixtus chasuble in Germany which was pieced together from another fabric, or St Birgitta's mantle in Sweden, which was made from what was a tunic or dress before.

There's also plenty of evidence for patches being sewn onto garments, sometimes in several layers, like in the underpants from Lengberg. Mending was not restricted to lower-class garments or less expensive fabrics either; for instance, the golden gown of Queen Margareta also has mends and patches. Off the top of my head, though, I don't know of patches reinforced with running stitches, or these stitchings being used as decoration.

So - I'd say that we had some aspects to mending traditions in Europe that could be considered similar to boro in Japan, but nothing that exactly or closely parallels the two Japanese techniques.

 
 
Read more about:
The Bernuthsfeld man:
Farke, Heidemarie. "Der Männerkittel aus Bernuthsfeld. Beobachtungen während einer Restaurierung." In Textiles in European Archaeology. Report from the 6th NESAT Symposium, 7-11th May 1996 in Borås, edited by Lise Bender Jørgensen and Christina Rinaldo, 99-106. Göteborg, 1998.

St Birgitta's mantle:
Andersson, Aron, and Anne Marie Franzén. Birgittareliker inlånade till Historiska museets utställning "Birgitta och det Heliga landet" 30 november 1973-17 februari 1974. Vol. 59, Antikvariskt arkiv. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1975.

Margareta's Golden Gown:
Geijer, Agnes, Anne Marie Franzén, and Margareta Nockert. Drottning Margaretas gyllene kjortel i Uppsala domkyrka. Stockholm: Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien, 1994.

After being happy about figuring out the setup and sequence for my twill tablet weaving demo for NESAT, using up the last of my playband, I set out to warp a new band. Logically, that band also needs two colours, ones that play well together as in "give good contrast".

Well. Let's say my brain was probably not fully online when I was making the new warp... I looked at the colours, thought "they look nice together", found that the two colours were rather different from each other, then thought for a split second "but they are both rather light..." and then proceeded to warp anyways.

Which was, in retrospective, not a good choice. That quickly became clear when weaving the first few picks.



Yes, the two colours do look nice together. Yes, you can see the lines. However, contrast is not very high after all, and high contrast in every imaginable lighting (including not-so-good lighting) would be a very smart thing to have for a demo band.

The reason for the not-so-good contrast is the difference, or better the lack of difference, in the grey value of the colours... which becomes very obvious if you use one of the convenient quick filters that will turn your image into grey-scale or, in this case, because I like it, sepia:



Nice, isn't it? You can see the structure of the band, and you might be able to guess where one or the other colours are, because of teeny tiny differences in darkness - but then that might just be an effect of the slight irregularity of the colours.

So this warp is not what I need for my demo. But. The effect of "everything the same colour" is just what you get in so, so many cases of archaeological textile finds - which, of course, includes tablet weaves. In these bands, there's sometimes a hint of pattern weaving because of changes in twist direction in the band.

I've had this idea of trying out how a band with a few different pattern types would look if everything turned the same colour for a while now, and this oopsie warp now means I have something to do exactly that. It's just 10 tablets, and not very long, so it will not result in spectacular stuff, but I'm planning to do some "threaded-in patterns" using tablet threading direction and alignment, a bit of "4 forward, 4 back" patterning, and then some Egyptian Diagonals and twilly stuff to round things off. Make photos of the band in colour, turn them into sepia, and see.

I think this sounds like fun - it just remains to see when I'll find the time for said fun, as there is still the "real" NESAT demo prep work to do. (Also there's a queue of fun stuff waiting for their turn... which, yes, is a luxury problem.)