Textiles sometimes survive in the weirdest circumstances - the Viborg shirt was pulled from a posthole, where it had carbonised (thus the linen fabric has survived). There's textiles that were used as tarring brushes, textiles used as toilet "paper", or those used as wrapping for metal items; in all cases, the coating led to them being preserved better.

Even better when the fabrics are not coated or permeated with something... but are preserved in good conditions. Dry and away from light, and protected from moths and mice and other critters that might have a use for them. Like... pressed between the pages of a book. Such as manuscript curtains.

If you go "huh?" now, that is exactly what I did. A friend pointed this possible source of medieval textile knowledge out to me, as she had heard a talk on the topic in one of the (digital) conferences she attended. And here's one of the little bits of good things the pandemic brought: Because the conference was digital, the talk is available online, on Youtube, and you can get a glimpse of this fascinating practice and, even better, a glimpse of some of the preserved textiles!

If you're reading Middle High German texts, there's occasionally the mention of peacock feathers in clothing - quite often it's a "peacock hat", but sometimes there's also a reference to other garments in a kind of peacock-y style.

Nobody really knows what this kind of fabric was (or if there's several variations)... but I have now actually stumbled across a real piece of extant fabric that includes peacock feathers!

It was found in a relic case in St. Rumbold Cathedral, Mechelen, Belgium. The fabric has been radiocarbon dated to the 13th century, and it is a red cut velvet (silk pile on linen ground weave); applied across it, in a kind of cross-hatch pattern, are peacock feathers and gold threads (gilt silver around a silk core). Unfortunately the text doesn't say how exactly they were attached - but I'm utterly thrilled anyways.

It has been published in an article aptly named "A Box Full of Surprises" (available on academia.edu).

This is... way cool!

The eye, the nose, the neck. Ah well.



First, let me tell you about the main difference, for me, in weaving ass-first versus nose-first: When starting with the nose, I will very easily end up with a baboon ass on the dog because of getting the timing of leg slope start and back slope start not quite right. When starting with the tail, I have a high probability of ending up with a too-thick neck because of somehow fuddling things up in the middle, and then getting the timing for the neck not quite right. I suspect that if woven cleanly, the thick-neck-problem might evaporate. (It's on my list to manage that the next time.)

The nose area, however, is a different beast.

[caption id="attachment_5364" align="alignnone" width="328"] Photo from UNIMUS.no


[caption id="attachment_5365" align="alignnone" width="441"] Photo from UNIMUS.no




If you compare the look of the back of the band in the tail and leg region, you can see that there is a characteristic look of broken narrow lines - that's the back of the regular diagonals structure, which is exactly what we have on the front for a while: white, purple, white, purple.



The noses on my dogs are all one of these regular stripes as well - white, purple, white; a single (two-thread) line on top of the band, and the regular broken line on the back. Except in the very first dog, where I did a wide nose.



Now, the rules of normal twill dictate that a line you "draw" on the background is either one line (two thread's worth) wide, or three lines (in order to go out with a nice clean line again). Three lines because you have, in the diagonal base setup, a white line coming out of the twill, then your pattern dark line, a light line, a dark line, and then a white line going back into twill again. For a wider line, you cover up the light between the two dark lines by change of tablet turn direction, but you still have to weave into the regular dark line to get a clean shape. So. Two or six is the choice you have.

The original animal's nose is wider than a single line (of two threads) and much more narrow than a regular wide line, though, and that is technically not possible without doing Strange Things (TM).

I suspect the sneaky and ingenious use of some double-turns here, to get the effect. I'm not sure yet how and where they need to get started, though. This is one of the cases where I'll actually sit down with pen and paper and start drafting this to see where lines meet normally, and where lines have to start, or change, to get the desired effect.

And then I can see another dog-weaving stint in my future...

(By the way, in case it interests you: If I don't make silly mistakes and have to weave back, weaving a doggie takes me about one and a half hours. Do try this at home, but not late in the evening when tired, especially not late in the evening when tired plus distracted by other stuff going on in the room that you feel the need to participate in while making silly mistakes in your weaving.)

The Evebø band... oh, source of joy and questions. For me, at least.

The Evebø band is a find from Norway and dated to the 6th century; it's a tablet-woven band with twill technique patterning, and very good, very detailed pictures of the band can be found at the Fotoportalen Unimus. Including, to my great joy and delight, photos of the back of the band... because, as simple as the band might look at first glance, there are some strange things happening with the animal that might be a dog (though the Most Patient Husband of Them All says it looks more like an ant-eater to him, and I sort of agree).

[caption id="attachment_5364" align="alignnone" width="368"] Photo from UNIMUS.no


The original band happens to have a 20 tablet pattern zone, which coincidentally is the width of one of my playbands... so of course, at some point, I had to weave the Evebø ant-eater doggie. And as we all know, dogs are pack animals.

So. Let me introduce you to my Evebø dog collection:



The first one, in the upper band part on the image, was woven starting from the nose, after just a sketch of the original animal. Though I was sort of aiming to reproduce it, I wasn't going for the "have to match it exactly" approach, but more for the general direction. As you can see, it has a wider nose than the original, a much thicker neck, and a baboon butt.

The rest followed a considerable amount of time later - they grow younger from right to left. First (rightmost) was woven from the tail onwards; then, because the first one had been so long ago and that made it hard to compare what the differences were, I did another one starting from the nose (you can easily tell that by the baboon butt). Finally, I did a third one, trying to a) weave less mistakes than in the first ass-starter, and b) matching it as closely as possible to the original. Which was... well... not completely successful in both cases. As you can see mostly in the chin and nose area. Sigh.

If you compare my versions with the original, you can find quite a few differences (even disregarding the baboon butt versions, and just looking at the ass-first doggies). A small thing is the forelegs not having the split further down than the hind legs in one case - though that is just a question of me not paying enough attention to where the split was supposed to come, and not a technical issue.

The really interesting differences, though, are in the neck, eye, and nose area... can you spot them?

I wrote a while ago about the Albecunde belt, which is one of the tablet-woven bands in the museum St. Afra in Augsburg. It has survived in two parts, a longer and a shorter one. Onto the smaller part of the Albecunde belt, another smaller piece of tablet-woven band is sewn. Its date is not clear, but it has been revered as the belt of St. Mary for a long while - and thus is called Mariengürtel.

It's a twill weave, with animal patterns in colour on an off-white background or in off-white on coloured background; and said background is green, red, and light bluegreen.

This is the overview picture from the museum:



...and here are some detailed pictures that I took, with kind permission from the museum.







It's a beautiful piece, and I am definitely itching to try and weave some of these little animals. According to my count, it's 2+41+2 tablets, so I can try them on my 42 tablet playground band. Once I have the current things done and finished, that is...

 

Hannah asked in the Ask me Anything:

I have this question which kind of follows me around since I got involved in all this medieval stuff. It is a quite common topic and I have of course discussed it with fellow fans of the Middle Ages but still I am very unsatisfied with the answers. So, here it comes: which fabrics were used for which type of garments (e.g. is it true that linen was only used for undergarments?). Or do we just not know enough about this yet?

Sometimes, sometimes you're lucky, and you manage to get your hands on something that almost does not exist anymore. Case in point: Tiny seed pearls.

There are a few surviving medieval embroideries that include seed pearls (which is the common term for small pearls). If you're trying to buy pearls today, the rule seems to be "the bigger the better", so most offers are for large pearls.

Seed pearls are still relatively large; the smallest you can usually find (especially if they're supposed to be drilled through) is c 2 mm in diameter... which looks, approximately, like this:

[caption id="attachment_5142" align="alignnone" width="501"] Seed pearls. The backdrop is paper with 1 mm squares.


This is a string of seed pearls I bought years ago; the smallest pearls I could find. They are still way, way too big to properly simulate medieval embroideries, though. Here's a picture from a pyxis in the Schnütgen Museum Köln, with corals, pearls, and glass beads of about 1-1.5 mm in diameter:

[caption id="attachment_5145" align="alignnone" width="640"] Embroidered container for the Host. Hildesheim, second half 13th century. Wooden core, covered in embroidery with glass, sweetwater seed pearls, corals and metal appliqué on parchment. Schnütgen-Museum Köln, N 42


That is the pearl size that we're looking for. That, sadly, is the pearl size not available today, usually. So imagine my delight when, after the last conversation about this, I did another internet trawl, just to see if, maybe, maybe... and was successful.



Unfortunately, this string of pearls is not a new one, but an antique one (age unknown) which I got from an auction house. It does mean, however, that I now have a string of pearls in the proper size for demonstrations, or explanations...

Here's the two sizes side by side, so you can appreciate the difference even more:



...and I will take this as a sign that if you do not give up, things eventually might come. Even if they seemed impossible at some point.

I really do wonder, by the way, how the medieval pearl-drillers managed to drill such tiny, tiny holes into such miniscule pearls. You can hardly see these things, let alone hold them. Drilling a hole? I can't imagine how that's done. But there were lots of feats of similar size (or minisculity, rather): Gold threads. Miniscule miniatures. Tiny things in goldsmithing...