If you're following me on Instagram, you may have seen some pictures of this on-going project already. It is, so to say, a left-over from last year's European Textile Forum, where we tried to explore the making of membrane gold threads.

Membrane gold threads are the cheaper version of real gold threads - it's a gilt animal membrane wrapped around a fibrous core. In our case, we built on the analysis results of some Italian threads that Cristina Scibé is researching.

There's a lot of unknowns or insecure things in the reconstruction of the process, and we were (and mostly still are) unfamiliar with most of the materials involved, so there was a really steep learning curve and there were plenty of "d'oh" moments.

But we have arrived at a process that is working, and that would be plausible also for production.

The photo shows the two spindles I am working with for wrapping strips of stuff around the core - one with the two linen single yarns, and the other with the wrapped yarns. These are not membrane strips, but modern metal and metallised plastic strips, done for practise purposes, as the membrane is a little too much work and too much of a resource to use as training material.

It's an utterly fascinating project... and I will give a little presentation about it on the EAA in Belfast this year. I'm already very excited about that!

There's a bit of research happening here right now - not only for some work projects, but also for a little bit of extra. There was, you see, this project at the last Textile Forum to try and find out about how membrane threads were made.

Membrane threads are, to explain it very quickly, the cheap version of gold (or silver) threads. Instead of wrapping a strip of gold or gilt silver around a fibrous core, organic material is gilded or silvered with leaf metal and then cut into strips and wound around a core. Usually, that core is made of cheaper material as well, and not of silk like usual for the proper gold threads. 

In our case, we used bovine gut membrane and linen thread as core, plus leaf silver for the silvering. There was a stack of questions when we started the project, and then there were more and more questions, and now there is still a lot, but also mostly new ones - which is nice, as it means we found answers for many of the questions from the first batch.

I will present our results in August at the EAA conference, and I'm already looking forward to that a lot. The next steps will be a comparison between the originals and our results (where one of the outcomes will, very obviously, be that ours are not very well crafted...) and then we will know more about how our process compares with the original one.

For now, though, I am very happy with what we did.

Even though we lack proficiency in all the relevant steps (mixing the appropriate glue, gilding the membrane, cutting it and winding it around the core), we have arrived at a workable solution for all the process steps that feels like it would be suitable for actual production. It's still a complex, time-consuming process, but then that's the case with so many texile-related tasks that it fits right in. 

And I can't tell you how nice and satisfying it felt to actually produce silver thread in our last go at this reconstruction process!

Somehow time's always too short to get all the things done. Case in point? One of the many, that is? 

I've had a revamp of the distaff spinning kit in the pipeline for a while, and there has actually been progress, but it's not completely finished. One of the reasons for that is the Most Patient Husband of Them All, who did a proofreading stint of the draft and had a few very sensible comments... one of them being about the unequal lenght of the pieces of combed top on the distaff band in the dressing instructions photos.

So "new photos" got on the list... and they have happened this week, so one step further along. 

Since I wrote the last distaff dressing instructions, I've changed my process a little, and it now includes unfolding the top.

Most of the pieces of combed top you can get commercially produced are a rather solid, thick band of fibres. However, there's usually something like a seam in the middle of it on one side, and it can be unfolded, leaving you with a wide, thin band of wool - something that is nice to use for dressing the distaff, and unfolding the top also helps in loosening up the fibres a little where they were compressed due to storage of the top. It works well, too, with just the folded tops, but I think it's even better when taking this extra step.

It's fascinating, by the way, to look back occasionally and see how different processes evolved over time - sometimes by chance, sometimes due to some problems, sometimes due to a change in materials, or getting more familiar with a certain material or preparation. 

When I was in school, I used to love whenever there was a film to be watched. For one thing, it meant less lesson time, as setup of the film equipment would take time; then it was usually amusing to watch the stuff.

Most of the time, these films were already quite old, dating back to the 70s or even 60s. So these educational clips had their own peculiar charm - and I'm very much reminded of these by the films in the TIB.

The TIB is the information portal of the Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, and you can find a video collection there, among a lot of other resources. Which, for instance, includes this gem:

I haven't figured out what the woman spinning the tow does with that circular hand motion, but in one of the shots you can see a lot of debris on her skirt, so maybe it's trying to take out the debris? Towards the end, there's a very quick bit of distaff dressing as a bonus, one of the many, many different ways to get flax ready for spinning.

It's a lovely little film in any way, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

Fibre processing and spinning always takes a long time - and it can be done with simple tools, as a rule. A Czech Centre for Traditional Technology has a very nice video on Youtube showing several steps from the dried flax plant to winding a shuttle bobbin for weaving - with a delightful mix of old and new items (watch out for the modern plastic-handled scissors!) 

The video is in Czech with English subtitles, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. 

I've mentioned the Bible as one of the gender-spinning-question related items in the last post (before the long weekend of Pentecost - just in case you wondered about yesterday's blog silence). 

There are a few mentions of spinning in the Bible. Finding them is made relatively easy by the helpful BibleHub site, where you can look for keywords and then get information about them, and related terms as well. 

One of the mentions of "spinning" is in Exodus 25:35, and it goes:

And every skillful woman spun with her hands, and they all brought what they had spun in blue and purple and scarlet yarns and fine twined linen.

Exodus 25:35, English Standard Version

The BibleHub site also lists the different translations, another very helpful feature. 

So. Here it's "woman" in all versions. Another interesting bit, for our intents and purposes, is Proverbs 31:19, which is from a passage about the virtues of a noble woman: 

In her hand she holds the distaff and grasps the spindle with her fingers.

Proverbs 31:19, New International Version

In this part, spinning is closely linked to women, and especially virtuous (as in good) women. The making of yarn, and cloth, and further on in the passage clothing the family, is something mentioned as a positive aspect. 

If that connection was seen as a strong one (which would be sort of standing to reason, given the importance of textiles and textile manufacture), it is not a great jump to using it as a kind of symbol in artworks to signal that a specific woman would be one that is virtuous/good/productive.

Spinning can also be seen as negative, though - it depends on the context. You can read more about the topic in "Equally in God's Image: Women in the Middle Ages". 

However, in both cases it's very much associated with the female gender.

The question remains: How much of the women-only impression that we get from our sources is due to representation bias? Were there men spinning in the Middle Ages, in relevant numbers? How about children - male and female? It would be really, really interesting to know more about this - also because finding out whether there's a strong representation bias in this case might give an insight in possible other representation biases.

While I'm working on all the gazillion things that have to be done (including trying to figure out how to get the RSS feed for the blog set up properly), here's an interesting video about wool processing, from washing to spinning, in the Pyrenees: