And we go on with the series of CfPs - this time, it's sort of on my own behalf:

I am very happy to announce that the Call for Papers for the European Textile Forum 2023 is now open!

We will look into "Dimensions of Dyeing: Colours, Mordants, Processes."
The European Textile Forum in 2023 will take place in Mayen, Germany, in the Laboratory for Experimental Archaeology (part of the Leibniz Research Institute for Archaeology), November 6 to November 12. It is a small conference which aims to explore archaeological and historical textiles in both theory and practice. For this, we combine paper presentations and workshops or practical sessions on the paper's topic. These practical parts are either led by the presenter, for instance to teach a reconstructed method or technique and have the rest of the participants try it, or they can take more of a "community brainstorming" form, if the method is not yet known. With this combination, we also want to connect practical specialists and theoretical specialists.

This year it is time to look at colours and dyeing. Colours played an important part in historical textiles. Bright colours did not only show off wealth, they could also have symbolic meanings. Dyeing processes can range from very simple, with little knowledge and effort needed, to very complex, just as the dyestuff can be very cheap - such as leaves or walnut husks - to extremely expensive, such as Murex snails for true purple. At the Forum in 2023, we want to look at the many dimensions of dyes, dyeing processes, and the use of colour in textiles - including special cases such as the re-use of coloured textiles to make painting pigments, or the use of paints to colour textiles. Mordants and their role in dyeing should, of course, not be forgotten.

We'd like to invite you to do a presentation or workshop, or both, to explore the different procedures, tools, and materials related to mordanting and dyeing or otherwise colouring textiles. Work space outside and inside is available, so it will be possible to dye on open fire, or indoor using heating plates or similar equipment. Presentations can be between 15 and 45 minutes, with workshop time or time for practical exploration afterwards as necessary.
For more information, take a look at the full Call for Papers on our website. Registration for the conference is also open now, and you can find the registration form here.

Please do also pass this Call for Papers on to others who might be interested - thank you!

Not all that glitters is gold - sometimes it's just gilt silver, hammered into leaf metal, attached to a thin animal membrane and then wrapped around a thread core.

You might know about medieval gold thread, which was usually a strip of metal (often gilt silver, very rarely pure gold) wrapped around a silk core. Well, that's the "good" version, high-quality and rather pricey. And as always, if there's something posh and fancy and expensive, someone tries to get the same effect but for cheaper.

Enter the membrane threads. These are usually not around a silk core, but around a thread made from vegetable fibres, and the metal strip is replaced by animal membranes or, in other places, by a thin leather strip or by a paper strip. These are metallised with leaf metal, and here again, you can make it cheaper by reducing the amount of gold. How? By using "Zwischgold" - silver hammered out, then covered with a thin layer of gold, and this then hammered into leaf metal. 

Gold leaf is really, really thin, so thin that you cannot touch it with your hands. It will instantly cling to your skin and then dissolve. Medieval gold leaf was thicker than modern gold leaf, but it would still not be handle-able without gilding tools. Gold was expensive - so having the cheaper silver as the main metal and just adding a bit of gold would reduce costs considerably. New research about Zwischgold shows how it looked, and the thicknesses given are about 30 nm of gold in the Zwischgold as opposed to c 140 nm thickness of the regular gold leaf. 

This superthin stuff needs something to cling to, so it is stable enough for further processing. In the cheap gold threads that we were aiming to reproduce, animal membranes were used - to be more precise, a layer of membrane from bovine guts. 

So we had a go at silvering them - using not proper Zwischgold, but leaf silver, since that was a lot cheaper to get and is closer to the medieval original material. Then the membrane has to be cut into strips, and the strips then wound around a core, all of which proved to be do-able, but with a lot of room for improvement.

Both the gilding and the wrapping did require a lot of concentration! It also took us a while to puzzle out a method with which a longer piece of thread could be wrapped without getting too much of a twist buildup. 

A final very important part of making these threads, as we also found out: Time. Once the metal is on the membrane, it needs sufficient time to dry out properly, or it will come right off the membrane and right onto everything else - fingers, faces, tables, you name it! With enough drying time, it is much more stable.

Just like with the purple dye imitation, a good bit of work remains to be done on this, but we're very, very pleased with our preliminary results.

I am back, and I had a wonderful time at the Forum - with all the typical hustle and bustle and utter, complete and wonderful madness that this week brings.

We had threads and thread-making as the focus topic, which meant that there were lots and lots of things for me to load into the car and ferry to Mayen - from tools to heckle flax or hemp to all kinds of spindles and spinning tools, plus some other tools in case something needed cutting, sawing, drilling or sanding. (There was some drilling done, so these did come in handy.) There were nettles, and there was wool of all kinds, and some cotton, and as always, it was not enough time during the week to do all the things that I had hoped to do.

That does not mean, though, that there was only little done - on the contrary. We managed to really do a lot of things, with work going on from right after breakfast to long after dinner... spinning, splicing, and some other things as well.

Micky Schoelzke spent a lot of her time in the laboratory room, working on a large series of dye variations to explore fake purple - the imitation of true snail purple dye through the combination of blue (from woad) and red (from madder). Some of the tests were overdyeing, and some of the tests were dyeing fibre to later blend together in different combinations of shades and different ratios.

The blending was a lot of fun, with lots of people working together to weigh the fibres, then blend them, and then spin little samples for comparison. It also looks like blending fibres is much easier to do for achieving a purple-ish colour than the overdying method. The blend will result in a slightly speckled look of the finished product (as can also be seen on a few extant samples where this method was used), while the overdyeing gets a more even result that can come closer to the Real Thing. However, hitting the right colour when overdyeing is much harder than blending fibres together, especially since you can do a little sample with the blending and then adjust ratios rather easily, while overdyeing is much more fickle. Yes, you can do a test dye, but the time, effort, and resources required for that are much higher than to do a test blend or two.

There's still a lot to explore on this topic, and I'm looking forward to more on it. The comparative ease of the fibre blending opposed to the overdyeing is, however, an argument for dyeing something in the wool that I can readily accept - because I'd usually vote that dyeing something in the yarn, or in the fabric, makes more sense. Less felting (which will occur even if you are very careful with your fibre), less loss of dyed fibre, and the yarn needs to be wet-finished anyways so dyeing will take care of that as well... plus yarns are easier to handle than fibre is. But if you want to spin blends of colour, well, you have no choice but to dye in the fibre.

The other big experimental action of this year's Forum was making gilt membrane threads... and I will tell you a bit more about that tomorrow.

Autumn is coming, and with it the Textile Forum is drawing nearer, and that always marks my own personal Season of Madness - as things are getting sorted out and planned and organised. 

There's long lists of stuff to check, or pack, or look into - and since this year's focus topic is "making threads" which includes splicing technique, there was a little bit of nettle harvesting today:

These grew on public ground, and quite obviously on a piece of public ground that they found pretty nice, as some of the stalks are more than my height in length. Now I'll have to figure out what best to do with them until we need them in November. Ret them? Let them dry? Freeze them? Hm... 

Part of this day was spent on doing things for the European Textile Forum. We do have a date (November 7-13), we have a topic (spinning and making thread in the wider sense), we have a location (we'll return to Mayen), but there's a few things that have to be organised in a different way this time around. Biggest of them all is our catering - the company that used to provide us with food (including very creative uses of canned pineapple in a lot of dishes where I would not have expected it) seems to have gone under during the pandemic. Which means... getting a new caterer.

That's not quite as easy as it sounds, as options in a small place are limited, and we have specific requirements that have to be communicated properly. That is under way.

Another bit that has to be set up again is the registration form - the software that I used previously is not compatible with the current version of Joomla that the Forum website runs, so I've had to find a new one and am now getting acquainted with it. And building the form - so registration can finally happen. 

There'll be a bit of a price increase for this year's conference, as everything has gotten more expensive. I'm a little sad about this, but, well, it can't really be helped.

So... it does look like I've figured out and tested that form thingie, and the updated cost estimate, and now all that remains is finishing the info bits and the CfP, and then the thing can actually go online. Hooray!

I may or I may not be sitting here dressed in the Bronze Age women's clothing - trying it out (or on) before it goes on its happy journey to its final work place. I may also have taken a quick mirror-selfie before sitting down here to write this blog...

I may also have managed to resurrect the Textile Forum website, and wait for all the mails to go out (there's a restriction on how many mails can be sent in a given time, to avoid spamming and hogging of resources that you have not paid for, so sending out a few hundred mails takes a bit of time). 

  Just in case you're wondering, by the way: I managed to kill the Forum website by clicking the wrong button at the most inopportune moment ppossible to do so. Which removed the database (not good!) and some of the files. Resurrection was mostly a question of finding the correct set of files (that matched the re-uploaded database) and getting them back into their proper place.

Now things are running again, though it still does not look pretty - the site still suffers from template issues, which have been unresolved due to the need of getting a new one anyways, with the switch to Joomla 4. Which is on my schedule to do once the mails are all sent out, and then, hopefully, things will be easier to look at again, and the photos will also come back.

For now, though, the most important, and most urgent, bit was to get the date and time for the next Forum online. Which will be November 7-13, and we'll be in Mayen, Germany, at the Laboratory for Experimental Archaeology again. Our focus topic will be making yarns and threads: "Simple, Special, Spun or Spliced: Yarns, Threads, and Their Making". You can find out more about it on the website of the Forum.

I've been trying to get the Textile Forum website up to speed, and I was working along happily, and everything was looking good, and then I managed to seriously botch up. So, at some point in the process of getting the site updated and back to functional, I managed to kill it. Whether that is a fixable kill or a really bad one will have to be seen. 

Possibly tomorrow, as it might just be that I'll run out of brain juice pretty soon. Even though Madame the Cat is warming my arm as I type, and purring along. At the moment, I'm extracting a backup and hope that uploading the relevant files will fix it - if not, I'll have to do things to the database as well. Sigh. 

Ah, for those IT things to once work really smoothly. At least, though, I should be able to relatively quickly re-write the texts I wrote today, and that of course got eaten up by the botch. They were written in my quest to prepare for the next Forum... which will happen in November, and take place in Mayen, and I'm already looking forward to it.

So. Keeping my fingers crossed that things will not be too badly killed...