You're getting a late blogpost today because I had slow internet today, and it even ate a half-written post... but you are getting one, and it is one with free stuff! (Very fitting for the season...)

First of all, as a reminder - free ebook in Aarhus Uni Press this month is Woven into the Earth. Go download it if you haven't done so yet, and tell your friends who are interested in archaeological textiles. This is a wonderful book, and it is definitely good to have.

You already downloaded it? You would like more books? Here you go.

On a completely different, and very much non-archaeological note - there is a free e-book about working with MS Word, "Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals" by Jack M. Lyon. A few years ago, the author's newsletter "Editorium" helped me a lot when prodding my thesis text into shape, as well as later when I had typesetting to do. If you're working with Word (as so many people in the social/historical/archaeological sciences do), you might want to give it a look.

And now on to the juicy bits.

I had the opportunity to visit Estonia for a few days, and I didn't only meet lovely fellow textile people and fellow archaeologists and got to see exciting finds in several museums and a good number of the Estonian textile finds, I also brought home some books (about, who would have guessed it, Estonian textile finds). Two of them are about the finds from Siksälä, which is a burial site used continuously from the 11th to the 15th century - the Estonian Iron Age and Middle Ages. Siksälä has yielded exceptionally rich finds, including textiles wonderfully decorated with bronze spirals. There's a publication in two parts, a text part and a catalogue part; both are in Estonian*, but anyone can look at the pictures and construction drawings. And if I say anyone, I do mean it - both the first volume and the second volume are available online, free of charge, thanks to the University of Tartu.

Another absolutely amazing Estonian find is the craft box from Lohavere (which should be written with a little ~ sitting on top of the o), which comes from the hillfort of the same name, dated to the 12th and early 13th century. If you know the Mästermyr find and have always dreamt of something similar, but related to textiles? Here it is. The craft box, made from birch bark, contained textile remains, prefabricated and half-finished products, bronze ornaments and tools, some of them neatly stored in smaller boxes or little pouches. It is an absolutely fascinating find and gives so much information about how the spiral decorations were worked... and it, too, is published in a little book, and that, too, is available online free of charge.

These finds absolutely deserve to be better-known - so feel free to spread the word, and of course enjoy the publications of these gorgeous finds!

*Estonian is a language belonging to the Finno-Ugric group, and more or less related to Finnish. A few fun facts: Estonian has fourteen cases. Yes, fourteen - because there are no words to signal direction (like "into" or "from"), and a case is used instead. More fun facts? Estonian has no genders, so there's no problem with being politically correct. Because there were a lot of Germans in Estonia in the Middle Ages (Hanseatic League was a reason for that, for instance) there are quite a few German words still around, which makes not understanding most of the rest even more peculiar. Final fun fact for today: as I'm easily amused, it diverted me no end that the greeting "Tere" sounds much like the southern German colloquial "Dere" (which is very short for "Habe die Ehre", I have the honour). If you're intrigued now, here are a few useful Estonian phrases, and here is a very interesting pdf with facts about Estonian.

Just when I was starting to feel all seasonally-appropriately fuzzy and soft and warm inside, a Bad News (TM) email dropped into my inbox... the Musée des Tissus in Lyon is in danger of being closed.

This museum holds an immense collection of historical textiles from all over the world and is one of the most important, if not the most important textile museum that we have. (You can search a part of their collection online here. It's all in French, unfortunately, but you could try "tricot" for knitting (which includes a Coptic sock) or "laine" for wool or "soie" for silk or "broderie" for embroidery. Just to get an impression of what treasures they hold.)

You'd think that an important, large, critically-acclaimed museum would be safe from closure, right? However, things look truly dire. There's a long article (in French) here, and I'll try to give you the gist of it in English, but make sure to have a look at the article itself for the pictures. It's very long though, so the TL;DR: the Chamber of Commerce of Lyon, who ran the museum up to now, is undergoing budget cuts and restructures that prevent it from holding on to the museum. The city, the Louvre and the French state department of culture all want nothing to do with the museum, using a number of paltry excuses.

There's a petition on change.org to save the museum, started on Monday, and it's already collected a lot of signatures. Please help - sign the petition and spread the word wherever you can, however you can. This museum is huge for historical textiles, and its closure would be a real catastrophe.

-- (This is not a complete translation, just a rough one, shortened in places. Should you find a mistake, please let me know - my French has become very rusty and creaky over the years.)

The danger of closure of the museums des Tissus and the sister museum for decoreative arts in Lyon is not a new thing; it's been in the air for more than a year now. A bit of background: the two museums (which are in effect one museum only) are not very well known to the public, but it's essential to know a little about their history to understand how the current situation came about.

The museum goes back to the 19th century; it was established to show off the superiority of the silks produced in Lyon (which had not been appreciated enough at the first World Exhibition), so it was basically a marketing scheme. The museum opened its doors in 1864. The Chamber of Commerce ran an ambitious acquirement policy, with well-known experts as evaluators, and it resulted in several donations. The Chamber of Commerce funded the acquisitions. Since 1843, a mission was abroad in China to buy outstanding silks; as the commission consisted of real experts, they brought only actual masterpieces back to France.

The ambitious programme of acquisition of decorative arts objects was tuned back to favour textile acquisitions in the 1870s. In 1891, the museum became le musée historique des Tissus, and the decorative arts collections were placed in other museums or put into the archives. In 1925, the Musée des Arts décoratifs part of the museum was reinstated at the hôtel de Lacroix-Laval, right next to the hôtel de Villeroy where the Musée des Tissus is located.

Though the silks from Lyon are at the basis of the collection, the museum holds documentation of 4500 years of textile history, from Antiquity to today, and from all the continents - the only weak point being Black Africa. There are about 2.5 millions of pieces (though they are counting each textile sampler catalogue as one item only, even if they hold hundreds more fabrics each). It is the most important textile collection of the world, only rivalled by those from the Metropolitan Museum, the V&A and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Experts from museums and textile research institutions from all over the world are all in agreement that the collections in Lyon are incredible and incredibly important. For instance, Lesley Miller from the V&A in London says «The Musee des Tissus is one of the most important collections worldwide in terms of its size and range, geographical and chronological coverage. It is also unique in the scope of its holdings of products of the local silk industry, which was – and still is – international in its impact. It contributes to international scholarship through its reserve collections, library, permanent displays and temporary exhibitions.»

Apart from textiles, the museum holds fabric designs in the tens of thousands range. In 1999, the museum was offered the archives of the house Bianchini Ferrier, working for ten years with Raoul Dufy, so it has hundreds of designs made by that artist. The museum holds no less than 200 designs by Antoine Berjon, the world's biggest collection of velvets Grégoire, ... The Decorative Arts part also has about ten thousand designs of old masters, of which only a small part has been studied to this day. There are drawings from Rosso Fiorentino, Philippe de Champaigne, Inrges and many more. There are artworks from wood, ceramics, emaile, ivory, glass, ... and all this are only a few examples of the riches this museum holds.

So why does the Chamber of Commerce, so proud of their history, now happy to think about closing the museum today? It looks like the state is to blame. It has sucked the Chamber dry in two ways: between 2015 and 2017, they are going to lose about 40% of their income from taxes. And in 2015, the state has taken wway a lot of money from their short-term assets. In Lyon, that was a cheque of about 15 millions of Euros, cutting their capital down a lot and making functioning difficult. In January 2015, the staff has been cut down by 15%, which did not affect the museum yet. In 2016, a new plan is foreseen, and it can be understood very well why the Chamber of Commerce, when its core is heavily affected by the cuttings, cannot go on to protect the museum. In addition, there are restructurings going on in the CoC, as there are new regions being established, and Lyon is going to fusion with Roanne and Saint-Etienne on January 1, 2016. And if the Chamber of Lyon is very attached to its museum, there's no guarantee that the two other areas will appreciate the history and support the museum. The CoC Lyon wants to preserve the museum very much, and they are willing to transfer the custodianship of the museum, including the two houses where it is in, to prevent it from being closed. The only question is - to whom?

The city is not interested, and the mayor, Gérard Collomb, seems to not realise the importance of the topic. It does not look like the city is working on finding a solution, and the meetings that were held until now have not procured any results. It is true that it's not easy for the city of Lyon, as they are also having the Musée des Confluences and the Musée Gallo-Romain as a handicap, putting 15 millions into the budget of the Musée des Confluences. However, the numbers of the Musee des Tissus are infinitely more modest.

Contrary to what a report done on demand of the Inspection Generale des Affaires Cultures might make one think, the museums (Tissus & Arts) are not spending much money especially compared to their level of activity, and they are largely self-financed. Their financial status is rather healthy. The current budget (which is not enough, but allows the museums to survive) is about 2.7 millions of Euros. The museums make about 800 000 to 1 million euros per year themselves. That means they generate almost half of their budget themselves, which is very remarkable.

The two museums have an extraordinary level of activity. Since the arrival of Maximilien Durend as director five years ago, not less than 24 exhibitions have been organised. There is an acquisition policy, there have been important donations made, there are conferences and concerts. An example of the activity is the current exhibition le Génie de la Fabrique. In spite of a budget in 2015 of about zero for exhibitions, this is certainly one of the most beautiful and fascinating exhibitions that are currently available. It retraces the history of silk in Lyon, relying entirely on the collections of the museum. It was not possible to edit and print a paper catalogue, so there is a freely available online catalogue. A visit to this exhibition is recommendet to understand the richness of items in the museum. All the specialists from France and abroad that we interviewed have underlined the great competence of Maximilien Durand and his team. In short, we stand before a museum with collections of international importance, with a small but highly competent and motivated team. And it is not only a museum: since its creation in 1954, the CIETA (Centre International d’Étude des Textiles Anciens) is based at the museum in Lyon. The CIETA is an organisation that is working to regroup textile museums, bringing them together and establishing common terminologies and strategies to catalogue and research historical textiles. They are also teaching and training specialists, and evaluate the current research being done. This makes the museum at Lyon to a centre of studies, probably the most important one in Europe, that all the world knows and where all Europe goes.

To save the museum, the director Maximilien Durand has had a very genius idea, that the CoC does approve of. While several of the world's greatest museums have important textile collections (like the ones mentioned above), those of the Louvre are basically non-existant. The Louvre does stress its universal character, and thus the idea is to let the Louvre annex the two museums, with the Musee des Tissus forming a new department and its sister house joining a remarkable collection to the Louvre, complementing the pieces already in their possession. A first meeting looked like the Louvre was interested, but they pulled back quickly. The benefits for the Louvre, Lyon and the museum are very evident, however - the Louvre would gain a textiles collection, rendering it truly universal; Lyon would win prestige at having a satellite of the Louvre; the museum would be saved and get more international visibility. A win-win-situation. And that at a very low cost, with 1.5 million euros per year to survive, 2 millions for developing.

It seems like this is too intelligent a solution. But the Louvre does see this solution as a "dead end". Why? Because only a part of the collection is coherent with that of the Louvre, and the rest (the majority) is more an "industrial art approach" that is not in sync with the Louvre's vocation. There's also the excuse that they would need to spend 1.7+ millions per year on the new parts, and the Louvre says they cannot afford this... while their yearly budget in 2015 was 199 millions of euros.

This disinterest is not only visible in the Louvre, but also in its custodian, the Direction generale des patrimoines. Their director, Marie-Christine Labourdette, is not willing to understand that the Chamber of Commerce cannot go on to hold the museum. She also insists that because of the origins of the museums as a marketing stint, they have ties to the industry and thus it's an industrial art museum and not wihtin their scope, more or less. They propose to have a meeting with everyone to find a solution... but who is to take part in this? The city does not want to hear anything about it, the CoC is not able to hold the museum anymore and the region (being restructured) is not available. The situation is dire, time is pressing, but Labourdette seems to expect that all will turn out by itself into a solution eventually.

If the museum should close, the big question is what will happen? The staff will, of course, be dismissed, and the houses taken back by the CoC. And the collections? The decorative arts could go to the Arts museum in Lyon, where they will probably stay in the vaults and archives. The textile collections would have to be transferred to a museum or a collection where the massive amount of pieces can actually be accommodated, and that would only be possible at the Louvre. Transfer and housing would have to be financed half by the state due to law, and half by the owner (the CoC). A stint like this would cost several millions of euros - money that could be used to safeguard the collection in its present place, and keep the museum alive.

Or the museum could be turned into a national museum, which would be absolutely merited by the importance of its collections. There is no French national textile museum yet, so it would be a good addition; but the director Marie-Christine Labourdette don't want to talk about this.

--

Thanks for reading this far! I'm afraid I've run out of steam, and I'll skip the rest of this article. It's more about the financial situation, about a financial report that seems more than a little dodgy, and how the staff is afraid and becoming demoralised, and that something needs to be done to save the museum.

Here's the petition link again. Please help saving the museum by signing and spreading word about this issue!

Slipping stitches is nice, and can be very helpful, but it takes time. Also, it tends to annoy me when I have to do an abundance of it... so I was thinking of alternative methods to get the new stitches to go through two previous ones, but without slipping stitches. I was thinking about just knitting into the row below in addition to the current row, or about having two needles parallel in the knitting... and, as we were hanging out together, I told the most patient husband of them all about this, and explained about the necessity to slip stitches with the other method because otherwise the stitch to discard won't go over the newer ones in the proper direction.

After mulling this over and thinking a minute about it, he asked "Why don't you just align them differently?" Brilliant man. So once I had yarn and needles handy again (this might have involved buying a set of simple metal needles to live in my handbag, because you can always find a use for metal sticks, and there was yarn in the bag already) I tried both my ideas (which did utterly not work, both of them, but it was interesting to see how spectacularly they failed to work) and then the different alignment.

So here you go, courtesy of the Most Patient of All Husbands, a second method to do compound knitting, with no slipping at all as long as you work in the round.

All stitches are aligned with the right leg behind the needle. The older stitch is now always on the left side, the newer stitch on the right side of the pair.

[caption id="attachment_2062" align="alignnone" width="640"] Insert right needle straight through both stitches on the left needle and wrap yarn from back to front (so the right leg of the new stitch will lie in the back)...


[caption id="attachment_2061" align="alignnone" width="640"] ...draw through both stitches on left needle...


[caption id="attachment_2060" align="alignnone" width="640"] ...and move the first stitch on the left needle over to the right.


[caption id="attachment_2059" align="alignnone" width="640"] The new stitch lies on the right, the older stitch on the left.


[caption id="attachment_2058" align="alignnone" width="640"] View from the back - you can see how the stitches sort of cross over each other on the needle.


This is nice and relatively fast to work, and involves no slipping. There is a little danger of stitches swapping positions, though, especially in the first and last stitch of the row, mostly due to them being much looser. Knitting in the round eliminates that problem, and it also lets you work without having to deal with a return row, because that... well. That's an entirely different beast.

To get the stitches that have to be discarded to move over their new counterparts in the correct direction, there needs to be some slipping of stitches again. I tried doing a return row, similar in method to the original instructions, and lo and behold - there were twisted stitches again:

[caption id="attachment_2057" align="alignnone" width="640"] Insert left needle through both stitches on right needle.


[caption id="attachment_2056" align="alignnone" width="640"] Wrap yarn from back to front around right needle, pull through both stitches...


[caption id="attachment_2055" align="alignnone" width="640"] ... and transfer first stitch on left needle to right, dropping the second stitch off the needles.


[caption id="attachment_2054" align="alignnone" width="640"] Then transfer both stitches to the left needle.


[caption id="attachment_2053" align="alignnone" width="640"] The result after one more regular row: after the return row, the stitches that were worked in the return row are twisted...


I'm quite sure that the twisted-stitch issue can be resolved by different alignment or some other shenanigans. There remains, however, an interesting fact: no matter which method, the original or this one, working in one direction only is much easier than turning around and working knitting in the flat. So knitting with stitches through two previous rows instead of just one seems to be much better suited to working in the round, not in the flat.

Which sort of fits into the picture of early knitting being done in the round only, as far as we can tell from our evidence. So maybe there was a point in time when flat knitting, going back and forth in rows, was developed and it didn't work so well with the stitches in double depth, leading to the development of the knitting through just one previous row? Who knows - but maybe, some day, we'll have a few more knitting finds to help with these questions.

I hope you enjoyed this series about knitting - and if you find a better method, or a good way of working the return row, please let the rest of us know in the comments!

Aarhus University Press has a long list of books in their catalogue, and they include Else Oestergaard's "Woven into the Earth", the wonderful book about the garment finds from Greenland. They also have a monthly campaign of one e-book that they post on their site, downloadable for free.

Guess what this month's ebook is? Right - Woven into the Earth. Go here to download it, and feel free to spread the word. The book is absolutely wonderful and a must-have if you are interested in medieval garments. (h/t to Christa, who found this first.)

Other delightful news - the open-air museum village in Düppel, where I went to give a presentation this summer, has won a cultural award given out by Berlin. Congratulations!

Time for some more knitting stuff! In the last installment of this little series, we've identified the stitches in the row worked from the left onto the right needle as the culprit for the twisted stitches - or, to be more precise, the alignment of these stitches. The stitches worked in this row sit with the right leg in front of the needle, and when they are pulled over the newer stitches off the tip of the needle, their legs cross.

Oh, and I've taken the whole shebang over to utterly oversized demo needles - so things should be clearer visible now. The "regular" towards-the-right row is knit in blue, the return row in red. As you can see, the blue stitches are all twisted (left leg crosses over right), while the red stitches all are untwisted.

[caption id="attachment_2043" align="alignnone" width="300"] The result of the return row: the stitches are untwisted.


Remember the observation that the stitches lie differently from the first post in the series?

[caption id="attachment_2042" align="alignnone" width="300"] Stitch alignment as resulting from following the instructions correctly: red stitches with left leg in front, blue with right leg in front.


The instructions result in a different alignment of the stitches, so that the stitches of the return row (which is worked onto the left needle) are sitting with the right leg in the back. Consequently, when working only the return row, all stitches will be untwisted, resulting in the correct fabric. When working the two rows alternatingly, the towards-the-right row (blue) stitches are twisted and the return row (red) stitches aren't.

There are two possibilities to deal with this. As you are slipping stitches a lot anyways, you could just slip the two stitches individually on the towards-the-right row, re-aligning the first one (the one on the right) so that the left leg is in front.

[caption id="attachment_2041" align="alignnone" width="300"] One option: realign the stitch to be pulled over so the left leg is in front of the needle.


Or you wrap the yarn around the needle the opposite way when knitting the towards-the-right row.

[caption id="attachment_2040" align="alignnone" width="300"] Wrapping yarn the other way around, so the left leg of the stitch will lie in front.


Both options will work, and you will end up with the fabric as intended: each stitch going through two other stitches instead of just through one, as modern knitting does as a rule, and with no twisted stitches. It will still involve a lot of slipping, however, even if you work in the round.

So, to return to one of the earlier questions... is there a less slippery, possibly more efficient way to do this? Stay tuned to find out more!

As Harma pointed out yesterday in the comments, there' s an issue with crossed stitches in the knitting method I've shown. Well. Let' s tackle this issue right away, shall we?

I took very good care to follow the instructions exactly, including the direction the yarn wraps around the needle. Which, indeed, results in twisted stitches (the legs crossing) every other row... why? Because of the stitch alignment. Remember that I mentioned how the stitches lie on the needle in that method, partly with the right leg in front and partly with the right leg in the back?

Having twisted stitches every other row points to there being an issue in only one of the rows - either when working on to the left needle, or when working on to the right needle. So let's make things easier to sort it out by restricting ourselves to one direction only. This is done by working in the round (all the extant pieces I know of, by the way, were worked in the round). Or, if you are a lazy person like me who just wants to do a few test stitches and not fiddle too much, on a pair of double-pointed needles. (The trick is to just move the knitting over to the other end of the needle, let the yarn go right across the back of the fabric, and knit the next row in the one and only working direction.)

I'll be sticking with the first row for now... here we go:

[caption id="attachment_2025" align="alignnone" width="300"] After a few rows of working on to the right needle.


This is what it looks like after a few rows, always working from the left needle on to the right needle (following the instructions). All stitches are aligned in the same way: with the right leg in front of the needle, as customary in modern Western European knitting. And you can hopefully see that all the stitches are twisted - the left leg crosses over the right leg in every stitch. So this is the row, obviously, where something happens that should not happen.

Where does the twisting occur? Here' s what happens:

[caption id="attachment_1935" align="alignnone" width="300"] ... and pull through.


The right stitch, with its right leg in front of the needle, is drawn over the two newer stitches. The right leg is thus drawn to the left of the two stitches - resulting in a twisted stitch.

Sometimes it can be hard to see whether stitches are twisted or not - if in doubt (and the fabric can take it, obviously that' s not possible with archaeological knitting) just stretch the thing out.

If the stitches are untwisted, it opens up completely:

[caption id="attachment_2029" align="alignnone" width="300"] Knitting from the dolly, in its normal state...


[caption id="attachment_2030" align="alignnone" width="300"] ... and stretched horizontally. Stitches and ladders between stitches both open up.


When you stretch out the knitting with twisted stitches, the ladders between the stitches open up, but the stitches themselves are pulled tighter, forming firm little columns between the ladders:

[caption id="attachment_2031" align="alignnone" width="300"] The knitting stretched out - you can see that the stitches are pulled tighter together. 


So. Our twisty issue lies with the stitches in the row working onto the right needle, and it' s related to the alignment of the stitch on the needle when pulling the stitch over. There you go. Next time, we'll take a look at the other row...

So... as seen yesterday, working compound knitting (or double-depth knitting) on a dolly or similar thing is very easy. Let's add some challenge - off to the needles with this!

Ruth Gilbert (who is one of the reasons I started knitting a few years back) brought instructions with her to the Textile Forum, taken from Marianne Erikson's book Textiles in Egypt 200-1500 A.D. in Swedish Museum Collections, Gothenburg: Rohsska Museet. You can find them on p. 235, fig. 23. Or look at the following knitting pictures, where I'm following her instructions.

You're always working with a pair of stitches (so cast on double the amount you want to work).

Transfer both stitches to the right needle.

[caption id="attachment_1929" align="alignnone" width="422"] Unworked stitches on the right needle...


Insert left needle into the right stitch, loop yarn around right needle, and pull yarn and stitch through.

[caption id="attachment_1928" align="alignnone" width="420"] Insert left needle into the right stitch...


[caption id="attachment_1936" align="alignnone" width="420"] ...loop yarn around...


[caption id="attachment_1935" align="alignnone" width="422"] ... and pull through.


Note the alignment of the stitches: The older stitch lies to the right, its right leg behind the needle; the new stitch lies to the left, its right leg in front of the needle (as is the customary orientation in Western European knitting).

[caption id="attachment_1934" align="alignnone" width="300"] Stitch alignment.


For the return row (if you are knitting flat), you insert the left needle into the second stitch on the right needle,

[caption id="attachment_1933" align="alignnone" width="300"] Insert left needle into right stitch on right needle...


loop the yarn around the right needle, and draw yarn and the stitch on the right needle through.

[caption id="attachment_1932" align="alignnone" width="300"] ... loop yarn around...


[caption id="attachment_1931" align="alignnone" width="300"] ...and draw through.


The older stitch now lies again to the right of the pair, with its right leg in the back; the old stitch on the right has its right leg in the front.

[caption id="attachment_1930" align="alignnone" width="300"] Stitch alignment. New stitch to the left, old to the right.


Now transfer both stitches to the left needle and continue.

These instructions totally work - and they are a lot of slipping stitches. It gets less slippery if you work in the round (where you only use the instructions for the first row, working from left to right), but it still feels... awkward.

Is there a better way to do it? One more efficient, and involving less slipping? We'll see. Later this week.