This time of year, everything was full of wild flowers, too.
Of course it's not only fields and pastures and vinyard - there are the houses as well, which I have mostly omitted until now. Here they are, finally:
As you can surely guess, one of these houses was much more important for me to see than the others - the weaving house. We spent a little time inside that, so I could get an overview of the looms, tools, and loomweights available.
One of the permanently installed looms in the weaving house.
The house has three looms that are permanently installed there, plus a mobile loom that can be taken to wherever it is needed and used there. The looms are used for showing weaving technique to visitors, but also to test out things.
There's also a bunch of differently-shaped loom weights available, as well as some other textile equipment. I am already looking forward so much to working with all this at the Textile Forum.
Friday before last, I had a Grand Day Out - I hopped onto the train early in the morning to go to Lorsch, or rather to Lauresham, in preparation for the European Textile Forum.
Usually, we have this little conference in Mayen, at the Lab for Experimental Archaeology, but this year, LEA is due for some construction works. As it was not entirely clear in time when those works would be finished, we had to find an alternative place to hold the Forum, to be on the safe side.
To my great delight, as I have fond memories of working on archaeological digs in Lorsch, the good people at the Open-Air Laboratory for Experimental Archaeology Lauresham offered us their place to be. Because going to the venue for a visit is always a good thing (you don't want to plan a conference blind!), after figuring out most of the things that needed figuring out via mail and phone, off I was to meet with Claus Kropp, the leader of the Lab.
The place where we will be for our conference (at least mostly) is the Visitor Info Centre, which looks a bit like a glass house:
When you are closer, you can see that it's actually not a glass house to grow plants, but to grow knowledge:
There are rooms in the blocks inside for working, and things such as conferences, or school events, or small exhibitions. There's also space for exhibitions in the corridor, which - with all that glass - is very light and spacious-feeling. We will be a very happy group in that place!
There is, of course, also a little museum shop where you can get all kinds of things: honey made by bees on the location (bees are important in Lauresham, not least because there is a manuscript with a bee-keeping prayer written in Lorsch in the 9th century), mugs with an artistic rendition of Lauresham, ceramic mugs and music instruments and piggy banks...
...and you can even buy a reproduction of a pin found directly in Lorsch, dating to the 8th/9th century:
Besides checking out this building, I also got treated to a tour of the grounds of Lauresham proper. It was absolutely beautiful - there's a small vinyard, there are fields tilled with reconstructed ploughs using the working animals in Lauresham. The grains that are farmed here are of course old and often very rare kinds, such as this special type of rye, Waldstaudenroggen:
There are also Valais Blackneck goats, a very old breed:
Lauresham, as an ideal-typical reconstruction of an early medieval manor farm also has a small chapel, with a door modelled after an original 8th century find from Germany:
I'm already looking forward so much to the conference. It's promising to be another lovely week full of textile research, networking, and exchange of knowledge and information. There will be warp-weighted looms. There will be really old architecture. There will be so, so much coffee... and probably almost as much chocolate...
It has taken a good while, but it's finally all settled - the European Textile Forum 2019 has a venue, and it will take place November 4-10 as planned.
Our venue for this year is the Lauresham Laboratory for Experimental Archaeology, connected to the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Lorsch Abbey and a spectacular place to be. I have a lot of personal fond memories of Lorsch, having been on archaeological digs there several times, working together with lovely colleagues, and having some memorable moments. Like the one where one of the students found some coins right after the assistant prof promised a money prize for finding a coin. Like the one where I was staring so hard at the greenish-pinkish bands in the sand there, to find the line between an old trench and natural undisturbed soil, that I stopped seeing in colour and had to stare at a white wall for a while. Like assisting the technician in taking site measurements; he was a very, very special character, so working with him was sometimes quite exhausting (but I got treated to an ice cream sundae in the evening, which did make up for that). Best of all is that I was part of the student group that excavated in the so-called "Südosttor" area... and what had been thought to maybe have been the south-east gate turned out to have been the loo.
So I'm very happy to return to Lorsch, especially since I have not been there for years, and the whole Lauresham Laboratory is also new to me.
For the Forum, we are graciously given use of the Visitor Information Centre with several rooms, plus use of the facilities in the open-air laboratory itself. This includes houses and workspaces modelled after archaeological finds and ideal-typical monastery plans and descriptions from Carolingian times. Most important for our purposes, there is a dye house on the grounds, as well as a weaving house with three warp-weighted looms installed there plus one mobile warp-weighted loom. I cannot tell you how thrilled I am at how this all worked out, and I am so much looking forward to our conference!
I have also been promised that our group will get a tour of both the Abbey grounds and the Laboratory, which will surely include a visit to the 8th/9th century Gate Hall, the most famous building in Lorsch, and truly, truly spectacular.
So now, finally, it's time to send out the Call for Papers. As every year, we will have a focus topic, and this time it's "Shared Warps, Shared Wefts". You can find the CfP on our website, or you can download the pdf version here.
Last details regarding the conference still need to be figured out, so registration is not open immediately, but will be possible from May 27 onward.
For now, please save the date if you're planning to come, and spread the word about this conference if you know people who might be interested!
For those of you interested in the lightfastness tests, here are pictures!
This was how the setup looked at the start...
I covered the parts to be protected with cardboard and stuck the whole shebang into the window of our wintergarden, facing south. After 7 days, I took it all down and checked the fading.
On the blue wool scale, each reference strip takes about two to three times longer to begin fading as the next lower strip in the scale. As the Material Technologies Limited website states:
Under normal solar testing conditions, reference 1, the least permanent, will begin to fade in 3 hours to 3 days, depending on geographic location, season, cloud cover and humidity; reference 3 will fade in 5 days to 2 weeks; reference 6 in 6 to 16 weeks; and reference 8, the most permanent, in 6 to 15 months.) These scales are used for paint lightfastness testing under international standard ISO 105-B, and are also used by gallery curators to measure the accumulated amount of light received by museum displays of paintings, textiles or photographic prints.
This fits in fairly well with the speed of fading that I had, with reference strip 3 already noticeably faded after the 7 days that I took it down for the check. And this is how the birch looked:
As you can hopefully see, there's distinct fading on the first blue strip, and there also is fading on the second and third one. It is not so easy to see on the photograph, but in actual natural daylight, there also is a little fading visible on the birch-dyed cloths. That would place the colour fastness regarding light of these strips somewhere between strip 3 or 4 - not too bad, seeing that modern recommendation for clothing dyes is to have 4 or better.
This, by the way, is another example of it being rather difficult to document nicely and clearly - not everything is easy, or even possible, to show on a photo.
After taking these pictures, the strips were covered again and went back into the window. I'll take them down once more soon, and see how things look then.
One of the things about archaeological experiments is that they always take longer than expected... and then, in the aftermath, there's... the aftermath.
Which, in the case of the Pompeii Dyeing Experiment, involves making reference cards for the different dyeing results. Which means labeling sheets of cardboard, punching holes next to the labels, and then winding off tiny skeins of yarn which are in turn pulled through these holes and fastened.
If you have never done something of the sort, let me tell you: it takes a ridiculous amount of time, and it is stunningly boring work, and I can totally, utterly understand if a dyer does not do yarn colour reference cards (which are only an indication of what colours are possible anyways) and even better why they are not handed out to customers.
[caption id="attachment_4258" align="alignnone" width="640"] Work in progress - I'm less than halfway through here. Altogether, it's four sets of three cards with five skeins each, so it's sixty samples to wind and attach. Can you feel the boredom oozing through the picture?
Now, though, it's finally done, and I can send off the cards to their respective owners (among them the Lab for Experimental Archaeology, for their archive of experiments done at their place). And then, some samples will go into a different lab for testing - so there's a post office run in my near future, which will be followed by a deep, heart-felt sigh of having finally finished that part of the Textile Forum Aftermath!
Yesterday's post reminded me that I have not written about the Forum yet... so here are at least some pictures that I took to hopefully delight you!
There was another instance of the Pompeii Dyeing Experiment, so liquids were boiled up and, in this case, also decanted in sampler jars (also known as "empty jam jars"):
Then there was some tablet weaving:
and there was lots and lots of braiding, much of that with loops:
Work in progress - I'm less than halfway through here. Altogether, it's four sets of three cards with five skeins each, so it's sixty samples to wind and attach. Can you feel the boredom oozing through the picture?
