(continued from part 5)

There was, of course, even more stuff about looms and weaving. Together with Florian, who works at Lauresham, I'd been pondering and planning a loom made from hardware store parts - things you'd easily get at a typical German Baumarkt. The aim was to have an affordable loom from parts you can get without having special stores, and it should of course also be easy to build.

[caption id="attachment_6419" align="alignnone" width="300"] Putting together the two uprights - since we had the luxury of a lot of clamps, we used them. The boards are glued together, and then secured additionally with a few screws.


Most of the cutting-to-length of the parts can be done in the hardware store, where there's usually a cutting service point. That greatly reduces the amount of work and time necessary for making the loom - most of the tasks that are left is assembling the bits by glueing and screwing.

There's still some details to fine-tune, but overall, our little side project was a definite success. The hardest part about this loom is squaring off the ends of the round beam - it would be possible to use another solution, but the square ends will sit very securely in the upper part of the loom, and getting the sawing done was successfully undertaken by someone who does not have a lot of practice with this.

[caption id="attachment_6418" align="alignnone" width="300"] The upper part of the loom, with the square end of the round beam sitting nice and snug in the uprights. For the first test, another beam with a weave already attached was used - for "proper" weaving, you'd attach your weave to the beam directly or via a narrow slat or rod that the starting border has been stitched to.


The loom comes in at about 80-90 € for the materials, plus the cost for the loomweights. I did manage to find something hardware-store-y for that as well, though it might need pre-ordering, as it's not an utterly common item. Curious?

It's a certain kind of pipe connector that weighs about 120 g each, is about 3 cm wide, and can be strung up easily. So for someone who prefers to buy weights instead of getting hold of some clay and forming, then drying them, this is a viable alternative. They come in at about 3-4 € per piece, which means that if you want to do a very wide weave, it will cost you quite a bit of money. On the other hand, it also means you can get them from a suitable supplier and will have no work at all with them.

The finished loom is a full-size thing, with 140 cm between the uprights, and a bit more than 2 m in height. It's heavy enough to stand securely in our first tests, and it should be possible to adjust loom position to keep the shed size large enough for easy weaving even for beginners. The prototype is still being tested.

(continued from part 4)

The special thing about the pharaoh band is that there's extra heddles and extra warps that, when lifted alternatingly with the regular warps, form a pattern in the middle of the band. It's fascinating, and beautiful, and surprisingly difficult to get everything sorted out and aligned and moving like it should and behaving. You need to have the heddles straight so they can glide down or let the other threads glide up, but they can't be really pulled because you want the other shed.



And, as usual, when somebody skilled at this does it, everything looks easy...

What I personally found much, much easier to do was weaving with goat hair on a Sudanese ground loom reconstruction. That was a very coarse weave, and there was only the natural shed, the countershed had to be picked out with a stick each time. With only a few and very thick plied threads per centimetre, though, this was relatively quick and easy to do. I had a stint of weaving on the loom early one morning, and a second bit of weaving on a sunny afternoon, and I really enjoyed the feel of the smooth, warm goat hair yarn on my hands.

 
I've been wondering about that kind of yarn ever since I read Hald's article about Bedouin spinning and weaving with goat hair for tents, and now finally I've touched it and worked with it. That was definitely one of the many, many "hooray!" moments I had at this Forum.

 

(continued from part 2)

I did hop into the car for a long drive to Belgium - because the next thing that happened was the European Textile Forum. To my utter delight!

The Textile Forum is my week of sheer and utter textile madness, and I missed it so much last year when it had to be cancelled due to the pandemic. It was a chance to take and plan for this year, but the stars lined up favourably, with a wonderful venue in Belgium that would have enabled us to cancel everything up to about two weeks before the Forum, if things should explode.

Fortunately, they did not.

First of all, let me introduce you to the house where we had our conference, called "Merveille de Méry". It's utterly beautiful, and spacious, and situated a bit above Tilff-Méry in the woods, so it's quite quiet and with lovely green surroundings.


Unfortunately, I didn't take any decent photos of the house itself - but you can have a look at it on its own website (where you can also book it as a vacation home for up to 18 persons).

There was ample space in the garden for working, there was the multi-purpose room in the basement prepared with looms and tables for more weaving, and of course we spread out over the rest of the venue as well - the main room, where we had the presentations, and the balcony. At one point, there was a little abandoned bow loom sitting on the stairs late at night:



The topic of the week was "Sticks and Stones May Make a Loom", and being a non-weaver, I think this was the Forum where I did learn the most. It was absolutely amazing, and my weaving skills have increased a lot. They are still rather puny, I'm afraid - getting a lot better at something you have no real experience with is easily done while it may still let you end up in the "not very good at it yet" section.

I had a lot of fun, too.

Weaving included several weaver-tensioned trials, and I have finally understood, during that week, why you'd want to tie yourself to your piece of work. That had always been a mystery to me before. I will still use two fixed points for my tablet weaving in the future, but for bands or other types of weaving? Weaver-tensioned is definitely an option.

Basically, what weaver-tension weaving does for you is give you a lot of flexibility in your tension - and if you have mastered it, in a good way. You can reduce tension for some steps of the process, such as when you are changing sheds, and increase it for others, such as pressing in your weft, and this becomes an intricate and subtle dance with your tools and materials. It is absolutely fascinating to watch when someone does this well. It also means you can lessen the abrasion on your threads by only using as much tension as necessary for each step, and since that can differ, weaver-tensioning gives you the ability to use less tension overall.

Me, I'm still struggling with this intricate dance. I know, in theory, when I want to do what, but the movements are too big, too jerky, and my tension is usually either way too low or way too high. It is a question of fine-tuning the whole body fine motor skills, so to say... so maybe it's a good thing I have a full three items to practise on.

One of the lovely things about doing the Textile Forum organisation is that I'm always learning new things, and getting to know more from other, quite far-away bits of the textile world. Case in point? This article about Tutankhamun's Collar.

I wasn't aware of the fact that a lot of textiles were found in Tutankhamun's grave - though I will mention right now that Ancient Egypt is quite a bit away from the European Middle Ages, which are my main field. The article about the reconstruction shows very, very nicely some of the many different methods that can be used to re-create or re-construct something, for different purposes. It also shows that it is well worth to repeat a process, after comparing the outcome of the work with the original and maybe looking at some additional sources again.

Also: What an ingenious piece of weaving! I'm already looking forward to seeing more of this at the Textile Forum!

These are crazy times. Crazy, with a capital C, or maybe with all capital letters. But anyway, even though it's all crazy, and even though we don't know how things will develop from now onwards (at least not in the medium run, it's pretty clear what will happen here in Germany in the next two or three weeks), a bit of optimism might be what we all need.

So. I'm very, very excited to announce that we will try to have a European Textile Forum this year! If all goes well enough, we will meet in Tilff-Méry, Belgium, from August 9 to August 15.

Our focus topic this year will be "Sticks and Stones May Make a Loom", and we will explore weaving techniques and possibilities on "primitive" looms during the Forum week.



If you're a weaver, or a researcher, and that sounds interesting for you, you can find out more about it on textileforum.org, where there's the Call for Papers and the registration form online now.

After thinking about it for weeks turning into months, and trying to put off the inevitable, I've finally succumbed and faced the facts: There will be no European Textile Forum in 2020.

I'm really, really sad about this, as this week of absolute textile research craziness is one of my highlights each year, but the situation worldwide is still insecure, and there's no way to predict where we'll be in November, and what things will be allowed, or possible, or sensible. In addition, though it's a small conference, it is one where we are a very international crew and work closely together - including physically close. This, together with the shared space to eat, sleep, and work, are part of the charm of the Forum, and play a large role in making it as effective and special as it is.

With all the tools and materials, sometime quite exotic, that are brought either by myself or by other participants so that everyone can work together on a project, and with the hands-on approach to so many things, there is no good way to just lift this over into virtual space either (as many other conferences have done). My own personal ample experiences with video meets and webcams have also shown that they won't be really suitable to showing things in high detail, which means that sharing ongoing work with each other would be much harder than just handing over the thing, or having someone else come over and take a look.

So rather than bending our concept and trying to make something work that is not suited well for the virtual space, we'll take a break, and hopefully everything will be under control enough for a normal Forum in 2021.

I'll miss it, though. A lot.

 

I'm back home, and I am trying to catch up - there's a long list of homework I have brought from the Textile Forum (as always), plus the usual things that are on the list, so it won't get boring here soon.

The Forum was amazing - we had weaving, and tablet weaving, and there were tours of both the monastery grounds and the Lauresham Open Air laboratory; there was a museum visit; there was incredibly delicious poppy seed cake, and of course there was chocolate and coffee, coffee, coffee. My gran kindly lent me her large coffee-machine, so I could make four to five litres of coffee in the morning - enough to tide the group over until about lunchtime.

It was actually the tenth European Textile Forum. The tenth - our first one was back in September 2009, when I ran the Spinning Experiment. I have a hard time believing that it's been that long, and that often. We only had one single gap year since 2009, and that was in 2011, the year before we found our longtime home at the LEA in Mayen. It does look like we did not completely misbehave in Lorsch, as we've been offered to come back - which might be a smart thing to do for topics where we need looms for our Forum explorations.

Speaking of looms - one of the things I found out during that week: I can do a decent starting border, but I am not very good at tying loom weights securely to their threads; while I am comfortable making the warp crossings needed to weave tapestry inserts, my actual weaving of the ground fabric was not looking good (and I quickly stopped, so I wouldn't ruin the beautiful work that Tracy and Florian had done). So I'm probably a good minion to have in the workshop for the related works, but I'd need some training to be an actual weaver. It was great fun to minion, though, and I did learn a lot about warp-weighted loom work.

I'll tell more stories from my adventures, both at the Knitting Symposium in Leiden and from the Forum, during the next days...