To my great delight, I have the permission to share some of my pictures from the Albecunde tablet weave with you... so here you go:



This is a close-up of a detail from the Albecunde weave. You can see that the weft threads are pressed in very, very closely. You can also admire the beautiful colour (after so many hundreds of years!)

At about the middle of the image, there's a general reversal of turn direction of all the tablets, including the 6 selvedge tablets (there's some damage at the selvedge in that spot as well).

And here it is in blurry comparison to one of my bands, woven from the embroidery silk:



The individual tablet cords really are tiny... my band is about 4 mm wide with 9 tablets, and the original about 38 mm with 92 tablets.

You can visit the original in the Museum St. Afra in Augsburg, it is well worth a visit!

As you know from yesterday's post, I spent Monday on a museum visit. Monday.

In case you're not familiar with German museums: They usually are all closed on Mondays, and there are very, very few exceptions to that rule. That means when you're in there on that day, it is either a special occasion (such as a public holiday, or a special event in the museum) or you have an appointment for something that happens best when there is no public around.

In my case, I had the wonderful opportunity to meet with two fellow textile people and see a few early medieval tablet weaves that are in the exhibition of the Diözesanmuseum St. Afra: The Witgarius-Belt and the Albecunde-Belt. The latter also has a piece of the so-called Mary's Belt attached to it. (Unfortunately, there are almost no pictures of these belts on the internet - you can see a tiny one of Witgarius here, and a tiny one of Albecunde's belt (usually called Ailbecunde's belt) here.

All three are tablet-woven, and all of them are done in different variations of the technique: The Albecunde-Belt is woven all in one colour, with letters made by turn direction changes to form a subtle pattern that will be visible in certain angles and almost invisible in others. The threads are very, very fine, and the weave is incredibly dense. The start of the inscription, which also gives the belt its name, is "N NOMINE DOMINI ALBECUND" ... and while the first missing letter clearly has to be an I, I'm not quite sure about how it all goes on - it looks like a letter Q to me after the D, followed by an E, which is sort of weird. Anyways, the sure weirdness is that there is definitely no I in the name Albecund... - but there is a swap of the tablet turn direction between the A and the L, which might have led to the interpretation of a letter I. That was a first very interesting thing; the other, for me, was the density of the weave, which results in very pleasant angles of the letter serifs. You might know the syndrome of stretched-out, elongated patterns in tablet weaving? Well, this has clearly not happened here. It has not happened in a way that has deeply, thoroughly impressed me, and I now am convinced that I have to work on my weft-pressing technique, as there's obviously room for improvement.

The Witgarius-Belt has a similar ground weave - wine-red silk, with edge tablets in yellowish silk and red silk - and a similar density, but is brocaded. The gold thread brocading does, again, form letters; they show up in red on gold background on one side and in gold on red background on the other side.

The third of the pieces is only preserved as two small fragments, and one of them is on the back of the Albecunde-Belt, and thus not really visible. The larger fragment, though, can be seen on the belt front; it shows animals woven in 3/1 broken twill technique, alternatingly white on a background of coloured stripes and coloured on a white background. That was, of course, very interesting for me as well, and I hope to weave one or two of the animals in the near-ish future. My count comes to 41 tablets for the pattern zone, which fits in nicely for my play-band with the 42 tablets... and one of the motifs is a rather nice-looking duck-like animal. I haven't done a duck yet, so...

It was amazing to see these things close up (the case was opened for us, so we could take a closer look). Especially the Albecunde-Belt was a delight to look at. The technique itself, in which this is woven, is really simple - but the fineness of the threads, the evenness of the weave, and especially how densely the wefts are packed in reveals the true mastery of the weaver. It seems like the ultimate impressive understatement status symbol, something simple brought to utter perfection.

As you can see, my brain is still rather full of the impressions. Also, I have a good number of photographs, and quite a few things to try out once I get to string up my tablet weaves again, and altogether I'm very, very happy.

Museum Mondays? They are wonderful. Won.der.ful.

While doing my prep for the weekend (so many fascinating things trying to side-track me! So many things I'd like to do more research about! So many questions remaining!), I stumbled across an open access online journal about Archaeology of the Low Countries. Sadly, this lovely little journal only had a few issues before coming to a stall, but the Journal for Archaeology in the Low Countries website might still be worth a visit for you - especially since vol. 2, published in 2010, includes an article by Chrystel Brandenburgh about early medieval textile remains.

 

I've mentioned working on the fabric info thing - and one of the things I really want to include is lesser-known weaves. Well, weaves lesser known today, I should say, because back in their hey-day, things like samite and Rippenköper definitely were well-known.

Rippenköper is something that I wasn't really familiar with either; it only had a relatively short time where it was the Thing (or at least one of the things). It's a twill variation, made by changing over from 2/1 twill to 1/2 twill after a few wefts, which results in narrow stripes giving a pleated effect. Since this is a weave where you will see more of the warp or more of the weft depending on which side you're looking at, if you have warp and weft threads in different colours, it will also give you a colour stripe effect.

If you're curious about that weave now, Carolyn Priest-Dorman has written a blogpost about it a while ago, including a pretty picture of a Rippenköper she wove in the background of the page - you can go check it out here.

More of the things-going-on-here info: I am sitting here working on an overview about fabrics in the Middle Ages. This is a large topic, and a complicated one, with many facets and many aspects and rather bad sources. Fortunately I'm "only" going for a two-hour talk, so the bad sources don't matter too much, as there's too little time anyways to go into detail of such a kind that I'd need much better sources. (Though, of course, things would be easier with better source material, which means a) more textile finds that are b) published in an easily accessible way...)

At the moment, I'm still in assembly mode. I usually start presentation outlines with a more or less rough idea of the things I want to cover, then gather all the necessary info for this, stick in a lot of pictures, think of even more things that are definitely relevant, thus stick in more stuff, then do a test run and discover I have to cut things down by about two thirds... which I then do and manage more or less, only to find things during that process that have to be added in for things to make sense, which usually makes things interesting again.

Right now, though, more things get added, and a bit later, I'll do a run-through where I babble to myself to find out how long the monster will take, to consequently enter the next stage. While I am working on that, here are two potentially time-consuming links for you - enjoy!

The Archaeological Textiles Newsletter (now the Archaeological Textiles Review) has been around for quite a while, and they have published a lot of very interesting articles, most of them short but informative.
Because the ATR people are very nice indeed, you can download the back issues up to issue 59 (which is from 2017) from their website, for free. Of course you can also subscribe to the Review, which will then bring you the more recent ones.

If that's not enough to keep you occupied, you can head over to the website of the Bamberger Staatsbibliothek and leaf your way through the digitised Bamberger Apokalypse, dating to the early 11th century. (If you're in the area, there will also be an exhibition, starting soon, about the manuscript.)

 

As every year, Amica and Maria, the two wonderful textile nerds (that is according to their own description, mind you) behind the blog Historical Textiles are making a textile advent calendar. As every year, I'm only catching on halfway, and then have to catch up.

Do pay them a visit - there's some wonderful photo of an old bit of fibery goodness every single day!

It's time for a link roundup again - here you go:

In German: Why a bicycle manufacturer sends his bicycles in cartons with a TV printed on them.

There's a knitting card game on Kickstarter - where you can knit (virtually, and thus much faster than in real life) objects based on actual existing patterns, with actual existing yarns. The video doesn't show much about how the game is played, but if you are into knitting and card games, it might be interesting for you.

Medieval Histories has an article about Viking dress, more specifically: about royal Viking dress.

BBC has an article about women explorers in the 19th century craze for getting mummies and related artefacts out of Egypt and into museums and collections... and modern researchers as well.

Anne Marie Decker has put her presentation about "Charting the Nalbinding of the Nile" online. If you're interested at all in nalbinding, do take a look at this - if only for the pictures!