Here are a few images from the workspace, so to say - I've been outfitting part of the new embroidery frames with bands to attach the fabric.

The way these frames work is rather simple: You baste or herring-bone-stitch your embroidery ground fabric to the bands at top and bottom of the frame. Then you tension the fabric between the frame bars with help of the wooden pegs; if your fabric is a long strip, you can roll it around one of the frame bars to store the excess. (The bars are fairly rounded to avoid sharp crimps in the fabric or, as you progress, in the embroidered fabric.)

Once your vertical tension is thus established, you get a nice horizontal tension by stitching the left and right edges to the vertical slates. Using a needle, you pierce the fabric, then wind your tensioning thread around the slate, then go through the fabric again.

This setup of the fabric is, obviously, more time-consuming than just plopping a modern round embroidery frame onto a piece of fabric, but it will give you a higher, more controlled tension that will not slack off quickly or easily.

To make all this possible, though, you need the bands on top and bottom of the frame - and fitting these is a story of its own.

First of all, the bands are cut and their edges are hemmed. Then the real thing is up - the attachment. I use small copper tacks to attach the linen bands to the frame; they have to be placed close enough to each other so the band doesn't get a lot of opportunity to sag between attachment points.

They are tiny, and soft, and they look really nice. As they are tiny, it's rather fiddly to handle them, though. And because the wood of the frames - birch, beech, or maple - is rather hard, it's also very easy to just deform the tacks instead of hammering them in - which is why every one needs some pre-holing. I do that with help of a slim steel nail.

Once every attachment spot has its hole prepared through the band and into the wood, the tiny tacks are inserted into the holes, two or three at a time. Theoretically, I could insert all of them at once, but experience has shown that this does not save time, as the vibrations from hammering in their mates makes those further down the row jump out of their prepared holes again... which is not very helpful.

So there's bit by bit fitting and hammering, until all of the holes are filled. And then the process is repeated for the second of the bars for each frame.

Once that is done, the two fitted bars get bundled with their side slates and four pegs, turned out of the same wood - and they are ready to be used for some lovely embroidery!

 

 

There's something new in the shop - I have finally found someone to make some more copies of the weaving knife found in Dublin, DW80. It was found near Christchurch Cathedral, in unknown context, but is probably Early Medieval/Viking age.

 

They arrived looking like this:

 

 

It's beech, walnut, Zwetschge (a kind of plum) and ash wood; and of course I promptly went ahead and applied some linseed oil and sat the blades in the sun so the oil could soak in nicely.

 

 

The wood looks even more gorgeous with the added depths of colour and the shine it has. Linseed oil will harden by an oxidation process, protecting the wood.

 

These versions have the form of DW80 without the embellishments, by the way - but the functionality is the same as in the original. I've used (and had other people try) this form, and it is wonderful. The pointy tip can be used to pick out individual threads, or to single out a troublesome tablet, or to clear the shed. The main thing, though, is the form of the blade: its curve allows the weaver to gently yet firmly press the previous shed into place.

 

Yes, it's usually called "beating in the weft", and that is what a lot of people do when tablet-weaving. When you have a full-size standard horizontal loom, the motion to settle the weft is indeed beating. The type of loom makes this a sensible and efficient way of doing the task at hand.

 

Of course you can use a similar sharp beating motion to settle your weft on a band, but there are distinct disadvantages to this. One of them: You will need a lot of space between your tablets or your heddle to build up speed for your beating implement before it hits the fell. At least I do - otherwise, my beating is not hard enough to really get the previous weft packed in tightly. You also need to hit with the beating implement exactly parallel to
the fell, or you will end up with uneven weaving. The main reason against real beating in my opinion, though, is that you will put a lot of strain on your tensioning spots and/or knots. With both tablet and rigid heddle weaving, I find that finding the correct tension is one of the key points that will make your weaving go from "okay" to "smooth going with excellent results". Tension has an influence on the width of the band, the elongation of the motifs, and the ease of changing sheds. Fiddling with tension, to arrive at that point sometimes means working with very, very delicate adjustments, held by knots that will sit tight where they are... unless there are sudden, strong changes in the tension on these knots. Which is exactly what happens when you beat in the weft.

 

So I much prefer to press in the weft; I can even hold the band with one hand to build up counter-pressure if I want to press very strongly, using the weaving blade with the other hand. The curved shape allows me to use a kind of rocking or rolling motion across the fell, exerting pressure in a small spot at a time, so I can make sure that the fell is completely straight. No sharp, short motions, but a nice, quiet, gentle flowing move that fits in very well with my general style of movement when weaving.

 

In case you are curious enough now to want one of your own: Here is the shop link!

There's a German saying which goes "Wenn einer eine Reise tut, so kann er was verzählen" (if someone goes on a journey, he has stories to tell). Well, that's definitely true for the trip I had to Oberstdorf...

On about halfway to the fair, I made a stop to re-fuel the car and have a potty break... but when I wanted to drive away from the fuel pump, my trusty (not-so-)little car refused to do it. The engine started almost normally, but died again at once... so I finally got to use the breakdown cover that we got back when we got the car.

Which was when I stuck the little card into my wallet. Which was not yesterday - and accordingly, the number was not working anymore. So a little bit of internet searching and phoning later (thank goodness for having a smartphone), I was able to tell a friendly young man what had happened, where I had planned to go, and a little bit later, I got told that a pickup would be coming to get me and my car to the next associated car workshop, where I'd get a rental car to continue my trip.

And that is exactly what happened. So I got to handle all my stock and fair booth stuff once more, after loading it into the car early in the morning, now cramming it into the rental car (which was quite a bit smaller than mine). After that was finally done, off I went - to arrive in Oberstdorf a few minutes before the hall was due for closing. Margit had in the meantime set up her own part of our booth, and prepared as much as possible for me - figured out where to place the workshop table and benches, where we would place my tables, and gotten my paperwork and parking permit sorted out.

Then we spent about twenty extra-exhausting minutes running to the car and transporting my stuff inside as fast as possible, so we'd have it in there to finish setup in the morning. We just managed to get it done before the hall closed... and I got to enjoy speed-booth-setup in the next morning.

It all got done in time, if only just, and I remained a little confused as to what of my things was where throughout the fair, as I had had to re-pack (and consequently re-order) things when changing cars. Nothing crucial had been left behind, though.

Needless to say, I was extra tired in the evenings... what a good thing that I could fall into bed nice and early. Apart from the car calamity, though, we had a really good time - nice weather, nice customers, and nice colleagues. I actually managed to catch up with two of them - Renate from Wollstube Wollin (who stood opposite us, and who is to blame for my going home with more yarn to knit), and the lovely Solveig from Alice im Wunderladen, who spent her break with Margit and me.

Meanwhile, I am back home, the car has been repaired and is also back home, and all that remains is - as usual - to re-fill things that have become low in stock and to do the fair homework... and then the next fair will be the Nadelwelt in Karlsruhe. I'm looking forward to that, and hopefully to a smooth trip there and back!

I'm getting asked now and then about the oil light swimmers in my shop - are they available on their own? And now... they are.

With my last order of the complete sets, I was able to also get the swimmers solo, both the three-bladed and the round type. So now everyone who wants to have an extra wick-holder or five... can!


The new silk colours for the embroidery silk are in the shop now as well. I am quite in love with how the new lineup of colours looks:


I'm really happy about this. And I'm even happier that these are not the only new thing coming into the shop... there's several things that have been in the pipeline for a while, but had not yet come to fruition. Now, though, things are moving, and if everything goes according to plan, I will have something shiny and nice in about two weeks' time...

I've gotten involved in a project, sort of, and that led to my finally stocking up on silk colours for the embroidery silks - emptying out the remainder of the undyed silk stock that I had left.

Somehow, this seems to be linked to fellow archaeologists prodding me - I actually started the project "embroidery silks" because a colleague, years ago, was asking me if I knew a source for naturally dyed silk, historically accurate, for embroidery. I looked around a bit and found out that this stuff was hard (read: impossible) to get. Then the usual thing happened - I looked around some more and found appropriate raw material (only slightly twisted mulberry silk), stuck my head together with my dyer, made her sigh and moan, and ended up with an assortment of embroidery silk colours.

Similarly, a few months ago, I got into contact with another colleague, who is working on a reproduction of an embroidery find, looking for appropriate threads to do the stitching... with a range of colours, most of which were not in my stock.



So soon, now, there will be some new colours in the shop for embroidery silk. I'm all excited that the colour range is finally a bit broader - with, among other things, a nice light, bright green, a darker blueish green and three shades of pinkish colours added in!

The new colours are already wound off, so one of the tasks for the next few days is to take photos of the current complete range and list the additional colours in the shop. The biggest challenge in this, by the way, is the photo-taking part, as a) colours and b) silks are notoriously hard to photograph...

...a-changing. Things, in my case.

I have mentioned that there has to be some iron gall ink making to be done - which also involves portioning that ink and packing it into suitable vessels.

Back when I ordered the first batch of ink, I looked for small bottles that would not look obviously modern. I finally found some that loosely resembled an ink bottle I found on a late medieval image (which, to my chagrin, I did not write down, so I don't know which one it was anymore). So I ordered those, stoppered them with a cork, put on a plastic shrink collar for extra security before selling, and that was it.

Now, however, these bottles are not available anymore. They have almost-twins, though - with the difference being that my previous ones were corkable only, and the current version has a screw-on top.



Which is, obviously, very much non-medieval. However, it is also a good bit safer against spillage than a cork. So after a good bit of thinking, and looking for an alternative bottle version that resembles medieval forms and is suitably small (which I did not find), I did order the modern twin of my old bottle.

I'd prefer selling the perfect ink bottle - but that is not possible unless I'd get a glassmaker to make the bottles to order, turning one of my lower-price items into something rather expensive. In addition, most images of scribes show the ink being held in horns for writing, and only some show bottles with more ink supply, those being considerably larger than the amounts needed by today's users. So these small bottles are a compromise from the very start.

Which means that in the future, if you buy ink from me, you will get a small bottle with a travel- and transport-safe, modern screw-on lid.



You will also, along with this, get a small cork stopper that you can use instead of the screw-on lid, if you want - because you like corks better, or because you will be using the ink in an environment where things should not be obviously modern.



And now I hope that this is a good enough compromise not only for me, but for my customers, too...

I've run out of iron gall ink now, so it's time to get some more... or, to put it better, to make some more. Last time, I had a colleague make my batch, but as she's not working anymore, I have decided to do it myself this time. And obviously, the goal is to use an original medieval recipe...

...which poses a slight problem. Not because there are no recipes, no - quite the opposite. There are quite a lot, and though they are similar in regard to the ingredients, the details - and the amounts of the main ingredients that are given - can vary quite a lot. Some of them mention that one should be able to tell, from experience, how much exactly of one of the ingredients should go in.

Yeah. Only problem is that if you have no experience... well, you get the picture.

My search for recipes (which I have collected, and I will soon just pick one and go with it), though, has also brought me across an interesting database project: Colour Context, a database on colour practice and knowledge. It features transcribed recipes from a number of (mainly late-medieval) sources - so if you are interested in medieval colour, or artwork, this may be of interest for you.