I am back home from the Forum, and it was wonderful - a whirlwind week, as it usually is. Every time, I am surprised at how quickly time flies past when we are in Mayen, and every time I'm delighted with how much is happening. Little detail problems are suddenly thrown into the spotlight, and then people throw themselves at the problems and try to figure out how something was made, or why something might look as it does.

This year, we had an array of really interesting discussions and tests. The effects of the de-gumming on silk when dyeing was one of them, and first results were really interesting - the de-gummed silk takes on less colour than the gummy silk. A number of little test skeins were dyed, and they have gone home with Ruth, who will do light-fastness, wash-fastness and rub-fastness tests with them in order to see how well the dye sticks to the various samples.

[caption id="attachment_3461" align="alignnone" width="304"] Silk being dyed...


[caption id="attachment_3460" align="alignnone" width="465"] ...and the skeins after rinsing.


We also had some reeling of silk, some tablet-weaving and, to my great delight, some hacking of slits into pieces of silk to explore the pinking and slashing techniques. That was not only extremely interesting, but also a lot of fun - and the slashing does explain why some fabrics might have been woven in just the way they were done.

There were also really good discussions about swastika motifs in tablet weaving and the problems this motif can lead to today (especially if you are based in Germany), and discussions about the terminology of wild vs. domesticated silk.

And of course there was lots of coffee. There was chocolate. There was the traditional stroopwafel spinning...



it was a wonderful week!

I'm off to teach a full weekend's worth of workshops - spinning, tablet weaving, loopbraiding, and sewing techniques, and I'm all excitement.

Especially about the tablet weaving course. It's been so long in the "I would like to do this" stage, followed by a very long planning stage, and then, a while ago, the test run. Then some more smoothing of rough edges and planning and updating the plan and the printouts... and now it's going to get its first run out in the wild. Proof of this? A huge stack of stuff sitting in the car, waiting to be ferried off. This is by far the most material-intensive course that I teach, because I use clamps to set up the warps (mimicking the medieval tablet-weaving stands).

[caption id="attachment_3447" align="alignnone" width="902"] Starting off easy - a few straight lines, a bit of doubleface, getting an understanding of how things work.


Since I'm currently also doing brain-bending exercises with free patterning, it's an especially nice feeling for me to be teaching a method that will allow the new weavers to do their own on-the-fly patterning, from a deep understanding on how these things work. At least that is my cunning plan - and the system I teach is quite robust in regard to mistakes, too.

Well. Let me put that a bit more into perspective. If you make a mistake, the system allows you to unweave the bad bits, then re-sort the tablets into their two packs as you un-weave the last correct pick that you made, then do the last pick again and work your way forward once more, hopefully correctly. You will not need a drawing or pattern draft to re-align tablets. You will need, however, patience and an adequate assortment of sighs, curses, or motivational beverages of choice, depending on your character. As always, the best thing is not to make the mistake in the first place...

[caption id="attachment_3446" align="alignnone" width="403"] Speaking of the brain-bender, here's the current status. As you can see, I have done my best to try out how to deal with mistakes. Those, by the way, are mostly due to my weaving in the evening at the moment, when I'm already a bit tired... as a robust system should be up to a tired weaver, right?


By the way, there will be a similar-ish workshop on patterning at the European Textile Forum, and due to last-minute cancellations, there are two spaces left once more...

There's two events coming up where I will give a presentation or paper: the European Textile Forum in November and, shortly after that, the Symposium to celebrate 30 years of Living History by IG Wolf, and I'm really excited about both of them.

The European Textile Forum, as a dear child of my heart and Sabine's, will be focused on silk, that lovely luscious material, and the preliminary programme is already rather lovely and varied. There's still a good bit of organising work to do for me, scheduled to happen during the next few days (whenever I'm not busy preparing for the fair at Bielefeld), but so far, everything is fine and I'm already really, really looking forward to it. The presentation I've planned means that I will have to sit down and do some more nice, brain-bending tablet weaving, too... something I'm also looking forward to. Yay!

The second one - IG Wolf is one of the groups doing Living History, and LH demonstrations, with lots and lots of attention to detail, and lots of love and enthusiasm to go with it. They have been going strong for 30 years now and are celebrating in style: not with a party, but with an actual symposium for a whole weekend, featuring a number of papers under the motto "Theorie trifft Praxis". I'll be talking about spinning and fabric reconstruction/recreation, with all the many problems that can (and probably will) come up.
You can have a look at the programme here - and if it tickles your fancy, there's good news: they still have space available and take registrations until September 15, so you can register here and join the fun!

 

Things currently going on? Lots.

Knitting is progressing, slowly but surely, so there might be a new sweater this winter. There's stuff for the next museum project hanging out here, waiting for the next step. I also have to take stock of the things in storage for the shop and re-order a few items.

Apart from that, planning for the next European Textile Forum is going on, which includes figuring out the programme, which will most probably include a nice excursion. (If you're interested in the Forum, or know somebody who might be - please spread the word, and if you are planning to come, register soon. We have a few places left, but not many, and having people register early makes things much easier all around.) Together with the planning, I'm trying to solve a few not-yet-issues at the website, which - as usual - takes way more time than it should.

Then, there's article writing and conference preparation for other talks - which is, fortunately, mostly under control at the moment (which means I'm not ridiculously behind schedule, and can still sleep at night).

To balance all this, there's cake, and tea, and coffee. Because everything is better with cake, tea, and coffee...

As every year, sometime in the spring, planning starts for that certain week-long event in November that makes me exhausted, happy, incredibly tired, stressed out and full of old-textile-y bliss all at the same time. Oh, and full of coffee and chocolate, too.

I am, of course, talking about the European Textile Forum, which will again take place in November this year, again in beautiful Mayen on the premises of LEA. This year, we'll be looking at silk as our focus topic (but as always, we're open to other topics as well). The Forum week will be November 6 to 12, as usually with a mix of theoretical and practical. The Call for Papers is out now, and registration is open, too.

I am really, really looking forward to getting to know more textile people, learning more on different aspects of silk and possibly also getting an experiment or two under way again. Waiting for registrations and paper proposals to come in always feels a bit like waiting to open a present!

So - I'm all happy, pleasant anticipation for now. If you want to know more about the Forum, or (even better!) want to participate, you can read more and register via the links above.

Aaaah, Textile Forum. One full week of lovely textile madness... coming right up.

Here's another little gem regarding the measurement of twist angles: the Human Factor. As in "different people get different results".

I had been suspecting it for a while, and the last Textile Forum gave me the opportunity (and the willing participants, a big thank you to you all!) to do a little test.

If you'd like to play yourself, here is the photo of one hand-spun thread. What twist angle would you read out for this one?

Once you're finished, scroll down... and see what others measured.


Done?

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Here you go:


As you can see, measurements of the eight participants of this mini-study range from between 20° and a bit to 48° and some, depending on where the measurements were taken... and who took them. Several people took measurement in a similar spot (there are two small black dots about in the middle of the thread), but even then, results range from 31° to 48°.

So. Twist angle. Hello there. It would have been nice to have a reliable, measureable something to describe threads with... right? Describing fabrics or threads with words is hard in any case, but this just seems to make it even harder.

Sigh.

Back in 2012, we already did a dyeing experiment at the Forum, investigating the influence of kettle materials on the colour outcome. Our outcome showed a significant difference between the kettle materials that we tested - which were lead, copper, and iron. The results of this experiment were published in EXARC journal (you can read the article here).

In 2013, I was able to do an add-on to this original experiment, investigating whether the influence was larger in the mordanting or in the dyeing process. Sadly, I omitted the reference (NEVER leave out the reference!!) so there was no way to compare the original experiment and the add-on with each other. (Any comparison would have been limited anyways, as they were two different runs with different batches of birch leaf - but having two references to compare would have given good information about the similarity of the dye batches. Well.)

And ever since 2012 and the original experiment was done, I've been looking for somebody who would like to repeat the experiment... but nobody took the bait.

So this year at the Forum, we did the repetition ourselves. We did the full run this time around, though, combining the original experiment (metal in both the mordant and the dye) with the add-on (metal only in the mordant, or only in the dye). This caused some serious brain-bending and thought-knotting in the preparation as I was trying to make the run as efficient and as sensible as possible while avoiding any contamination between the skeins and any other issues.

There were two reasons for this re-run: One, to see how the three different batches (metal in mordant only, in dye only, in both) compare to each other. Two, to finally have an archaeological experiment repeated (something that, to my knowledge, has never happened before).

So things happened. Skeins were wound...


...and mordanted...


... dye liquid was boiled, and filtered off...


...and split up between fourteen pots.


Then, skeins were dyed (that was a long night!).


They were rinsed, and labelled, and dried.



And, of course, they were discussed!


So, the outcome?

Our experiment was successfull on both counts. One, it does show that there is a more pronounced influence of the kettle wall when dyeing than when mordanting, and that it adds up when the metal is present in both. Two, that it is really important to repeat archaeological experiments, because the natural stuff that is part of almost all of them can result in weird outcomes, or in huge differences.

You can see the differences here - top left is the original experiment result in birch (top right was a madder dye run). On the bottom left, metal was present while mordanting and dyeing; bottom middle, metal only when mordanting; bottom right, metal only when dyeing.


Time well spent, I'd say.