At least re-use - that is, after all, what was done with the Bernuthsfeld tunic. Case in point?



Patches 35-38, our numbering. (Did I mention we gave out new numbers for the patches, as not all of them are covered in the drawing that Hahne did?)

You can hopefully see that there is a light diamond twill fabric and a darker diamond twill fabric, and the lighter one has its own seams, done in a different hand than the main tunic makers' one (which is the rather clumsy overcast stitch around the patches). There is also a proper hem at the bottom of the light fabric, which in turn is stitched to the darker fabric, which has its own proper hem at its own bottom.



So my interpretation is this one: The light diamond twill fabric was once a kind of garment, sporting said seams and hem. At some point, it was worn down so much or had gotten out of fashion so completely that it was taken apart, and the still-okay bits were used again, to make a new garment (maybe a child's tunic) out of the light fabric together with the darker fabric. The two are not the same, but rather similar, so they'd work nicely together.

The colour difference in the original today is not quite as pronounced as it is in our reconstruction, which is partly due to the difference in the base colour of the fibres in our fabrics being larger than in the original and partly due to our decision to make the fabrics a bit more different in order to clearly show that they are two different pieces with different history.

In any case, here we have a beautiful example of re-using fabric not once, not twice, but three times as part of a garment - first, the lighter fabric on its own, then together with the darker one in a garment, then as a big patch in the Bernuthsfeld tunic.

(Also it was really, really nice to sew the proper seams and hem in the light fabric, and an amazing contrast to do this sandwiched right inbetween doing some Bernuthsfeld overcast seams!)

As one of the programme points during the Textile Forum, we went on an excursion to see the special exhibition "Expedition Mittelalter" at the Schnütgen-Museum in Cologne. If you can arrange it, I heartily recommend going there, as you will get treated to a lot of beautiful things usually buried in the archives. This includes, obviously, textiles.

Among them: a puzzling (at least to me!) embroidery of a horse or unicorn on a black (yes, black) linen background, dated to the 15th century. An incredibly beautiful reliquiary bag embroidered with silk in counted stitch and with a flat gold strip (also puzzling, because I have no real idea on how that strip was stitched in, and oh what would I give to see the back of that thing!). Plus a plethora of other textiles. Oh, and the Anno chasuble - a samite cloth dyed with real mollusc purple, dating to about 1000.

As opposed to most special exhibitions in German museums, in this case all the objects are from the hosting museum's own archives, and so you are allowed to take photographs for private purposes (no flash and tripod, so come prepared with a steady hand).

The only downside is that there is no catalogue. There's a comic book that you can complete with a kind of treasure hunt during the exhibition, which is nice and fun in its own way, but nothing even remotely helpful if you're trying to learn more about the individual objects. But yes, that's the only downside, and the pieces themselves are really making a visit worth its while.

The exhibition will run until January 28, 2018, so there's still a bit of time to travel there.

If you're interested in old textiles, you might have caught the thing with the Viking tablet-woven band that, according to Annika Larsson, spells "Allah".

The Guardian and Heritage Daily, among other places, covered this "staggering" find. Then up sprang the debate on whether it really was possible that the band has Arabic script on it, and spells "Allah" - one prominent voice against it was Stephennie Mulder, an associate professor for Medieval Islamic Art and Architecture. She did it on Twitter (of all places!), in a brilliant string of tweets you can see here. (Go look at that link for pictures of medieval tablet weaves with stunning patterns!)

Apart from the Square Kufic style being significantly younger than the textile and other script issues that are covered in that tweet string, Carolyn Priest-Dorman also has a few things to say about the pattern. Especially that the square-ish things at the side, shown in the images in the articles, are... not actually in the band itself.

The Guardian's article has since been updated to include the academic debate.

The Atlantic also covers this discussion, as does The Independent.

I'm not sure what brought Mrs Larsson to go forth and invent extra bits for a band just to read something Arabic into it, but I'm not happy about it.

I'm much happier about the fact that there were quick and well-founded counter-arguments for it. It's a beautiful band, it is a stunning piece of work, and it does deserve proper study, but it's not a prop for inventing an alternate history, thankyouverymuch.

There are so, so many open questions left around the man found in the Bernuthsfeld bog. Who was he? What was his job, if he had one? He definitely wasn't rich, but how poor was he?

There's also plenty of questions regarding his tunic... one of them being the colour question, as usual when some bog-brown textile is found. There was a dye analysis done, but the results were rather sketchy, with only quercetin found as a definitive dyestuff ingredient.

Well, we have a tunic that is put together from a lot of different pieces of fabric, most if not all of them already in their second, maybe even third or fourth use. Chances are very, very high that there were not only all kinds of fabrics, but also all kinds of colours... which we don't have definitive proof of.

Quercetin is, however, found in many different plants - among them woad (isatis tinctoria) and birch leaf. So for the reconstruction, we decided to leave some of the fabrics undyed (especially those with interesting natural wool colours), and to use birch and indigo (the latter rather sparingly) on others.

The nice thing about natural dyes is that you can get so many different hues from one plant that it won't be boring at all. So we were, after a lot of discussion and brainstorming and thinking, going for two different hues of blue, one double-dye of green (birch yellow with blue), and several different colours made with birch. For that, we did a nice little test run with pieces of fabric, all mordanted with 25% alum, then dyed in 200% dried birch leaf, then nuanced with iron, copper, iron plus cream of tartar, and potash. One of the yellow bits was dipped into an indigo vat, and then all of the candidates (except the yellow bit that went into the potash right away) were rinsed, split and half of them thrown into the potash brine over night.

The results were rather spectacular:



As usual, it's very hard to give a good impression of the colours on a photograph - natural dyes look very different in reality than on a picture, and they can even change hue depending on the light angle, let alone depending on light colour and quality. So you'll have to believe me that the green achieved by iron sulfate nuancing looks really green (until you hold it next to the indigo-on-yellow green, when it looks like someone dropped it into a mud puddle), that there's beautiful soft browns to be gotten with copper and that nuancing the yellow with potash gets you an orangey colour that is utterly, utterly beautiful.

Also as usual, the actual dye run yielded slightly different results to the test run - but we were both quite happy with the outcome, and the tunic reconstruction will look colourful enough to give an impression of the many colours in medieval times, yet will only have used two dyestuffs that we have hints for in the analysis.

Also also? Dyeing is fun.

You might remember that a while ago, I posted about having a project for a reproduction of the tunic worn by the man from Bernuthsfeld.

Well, it's time to get the project into the next stage - which means I'm getting to see the original, and will be starting work on the actual tunic-making together with my colleague. So I'll be off doing exciting things to cloth for the next few days, and thus be taking a break from blogging - I will be back on October 16.

Meanwhile, I will leave you here with a picture of the fabrics that were woven for the tunic and a small mantle-like cloth:

[caption id="attachment_3429" align="alignnone" width="1632"] Fabrics woven for the Bernuthsfeld-Project - lots and lots of different ones, many of them just small patches...


And just because I have them, here are a few more pictures of some bits, close-up:



It's going to be so much fun to dye a selection of the fabrics, then cut everything up, roughen them a bit to simulate use-wear, and stitch them together into the tunic!

If you're a numbers person (as in somebody who easily remembers numbers, lucky you) and a textile archaeology nerd in addition to that, the two numbers in the blog title might ring a bell for you.

If not, let me bring you up to speed: York Archaeological Trust has been publishing a lot of very nice, very helpful shiny books about various aspects and find groups of all the digs done there - and York has a lot of history, and has had a lot of digs, and consequently there's oodles to research, and to tell. York also boasts a number of textile finds and textile tool finds, which is a delightful thing.

To make all this good stuff even better, they've decided, once they run out of the printed copies of their books, to make them freely available as pdf online. I've posted about this at least once before, but that was a good while ago. Back then, I had downloaded those of interest to me, though the really, really yummy ones - about textile production and textile finds - were still available in print and thus not as pdfs.

Just recently, though, I searched for something else, and the engine threw me a link to one of these two books on the YAT website. Off I went - and to my great delight, both 17/5 Textile, Raw Fibre and Cordage from Coppergate 16-22 and 17/11 Textile Production at 16-22 Coppergate are available now. (Direct links to the pdfs - but do go and visit their page listing the rest of the volumes of Archaeology of York, there's many more.)

The online EXARC journal has a short article about bronze spiral decoration in textiles.

Kitty Lux of the Ukulele Orchestra died about two weeks ago, here's her obituary. I'm really sad - and feel very privileged to have seen and heard her live a few times.

The major Roman roads, drawn in a subway map style.
There's a new podcast around: Ask an Archaeologist. (I have not found the time to give it a listen yet, but it's definitely on my list.)

Heritage Daily reports on a Roman bronze figurine that might leave Britain.

Gillian Polack has a post on how to peel oranges... with a fork. Which is intriguing and makes me a little sad that we are currently far from Orange Season here - but it will come, and I will definitely try that.

And that's it for today - I hope there's something of interest for you!