If you'd like to watch the presentation I gave in Syke - here you go! It's all in German (sorry English-only speaking readers).

It wasn't possible to do a livestream, but I'm delighted that there was the possibility to make a recording, and put that online. I hope you'll enjoy it - I certainly did!

I'm still working (of course) on the presentation for Syke, and it's really nice to revisit all the things that went on in that project. As usual, I'll have to cut some (or what feels like a lot, actually) of the things I'm putting into the draft of the presentation. There's so much that I could probably speak about it for half a day...

One nice thing about looking back on a project like this is that it's easy to remember all the fun bits and sort-of-forget about the annoying ones. At some stages, things just felt like they would never ever end... it was a lot of cords, and a lot of rings for the ends of the cords, and a lot of loops to sew onto the cloak. But it did end, eventually.

And because I've been revisiting pictures, here's one for you from the selection going into the presentation.

This is the end of the belt reproduction from the Egtved find. It has a tassel at the end, formed by cords finished in (you guessed it) rings. These rings are then gathered together so the whole thing forms a cone shape - surprisingly stiff, and quite stunning. The puny number of just 20 warp threads would, of course, not be enough for a nicely sized tassel like that, so the weaver solved the problem by adding in some more cords at the end of the belt weave. That's exactly what can be seen in this photo: The extra threads inserted, and there's already a few more wefts done to keep them in place.

After finishing the belt weaving, they were then corded, and then the belt provided me with the opportunity to get into ring-wrapping... but that's another story.

I think I may have blogged about this before, but I can't really remember - and that means it's not a bad idea to revisit the "Projekt Tafelmalerei" of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg. 

The GNM has a very large collection of late medieval paintings on wood, and there's a project to research these paintings and make the information about them accessible on the Internet. The whole thing can be found at tafelmalerei.gnm.de and features 148 paintings, starting in 1260 and ending in 1520. So if you're interested in late medieval artwork, you might want to check it out.

The platform is German only; you find the paintings under "Objekte", and then there's preview images for all the items.

Especially interesting: There's a painting by the Meister von Uttenheim showing the Birth of Mary, and there's a lady dressed in a green gown that has a similar cut to one of the Lengberg dress fragments. Plus she's wearing a headdress with a geometrically ornamented inset - maybe something similar to a cap like that also found in Lengberg?

I don't know about your email inbox, but mine contained today several mails informing me about advent calendars. Most of those are not really interesting to me, as they're telling me to buy things at a discount every day.

There's one advent calendar I'm really looking forward to every year, though, and that is the one made by Maria and Amica from Historical Textiles. The two (self-declaimed) textile nerds show some of their favourite textiles every year, often with links to more pictures on the corresponding museum page. It's a true gem, and every year I admire them for all the time and effort they invest in that count-down.

Here's the link to their December 1 calendar blogpost. Enjoy, and I hope you will enjoy the following posts as well!

With all the many things going on, I never got around to posting a photo of the Trindhoj cloak after sewing on the many, many, MANY loops of thread.

Did I mention there were a lot of them? There were a lot of them. The cloak is rather large, with about 3 m width along the straight edge, and it is all over covered with these loops. Oops. (Sorry. I still get a little silly when I am reminded of all the loopy stitiching.)

The original cloak shows the remainder of stitched- on threads, spaced apart but not very widely spaced. There's not too much left, and it's not described in detail in Hald's publication, so I mostly went by the image available from the Danish National Museum website and some photos I was sent by a colleague. 

Because there's only bits of the threads next to the stitches left, we don't know if they were loops, or individual threads, and we also don't know how long they were. I wound the thread around my hand when stitching to have a similar length for all of them, and to have the loops long enough to overlap the next row below.

A test piece that I made, with loops cut open and loops left closed, looked quite differently after washing in the two parts. The opened loops had acted like you could expect of single yarns and fluffed up considerably, but also lost a good bit of their twist, so they seem quite vulnerable to wear and tear to me. The loops that had remained closed had mostly plied together, keeping the individual loops stable.

The photo above shows the cloak after finishing the sewing work, but before its final bath. It looks a bit like one of those shaggy carpets that were in fashion a few decades ago... 

It's also, not-really-surprisingly-but-still-surprisingly heavy. Unfortunately I completely forgot that it might be interesting to weigh it before and after stitching all those loops, but I used up almost all of the extra yarn that I had spun, which was a generous amount, and it's quite heavy now. It will settle nicely on shoulders, though, and I can absolutely imagine somebody showing off his (or her, maybe, though this item was found in a male grave) riches.

It is a lot of spinning time and a lot of weaving time that went into this piece, and then a lot of stitching time as well. We know from weft crossings in the original that several weavers worked on this together, and I can well imagine that several spinners worked on the yarn for this (or one spinner for quite a good bit of time).

Sometimes, when chatting about work in historical/medieval/prehistoric times, especially the very time-consuming textile work, somebody says "ah, well, but they did have more time back then". 

Did they, though? 

My usual answer to this comment is that back in history, days also only had 24 hours each. Not all of these hours were light, and there was less artificial lighting available than we're used to today, both in quality and in quantity. Some of the dark hours were, of course, spent sleeping - so let's just say, for simplicity's sake, that after 8 hours of sleep, there's 16 hours of time left to do things.

To do... all kinds of things. Especially those that were directly connected to sustaining yourself in some way, either by farming directly or by doing some other work to earn money to buy the things you'd need, or a mixture of both. Sounds familiar? Because that is, basically, what we're still doing today.

So depending on what your work is and how long it takes, you might have resources left over to spend on luxury goods in the wider sense, or you might not. That, again, is something that remains the same no matter what era we're in. There's people who have more resources and people who have less, and those with more resources can invest them in stuff that serves as status symbol, and those who don't... they have to make choices.

Time-consuming manufacture of things means that you either have the surplus time yourself and can spend it on making something fancy, or you have the money (or bartering means) to buy somebody else's time. If the rest of your social environment knows the worth of the item made, it can serve as a status symbol. (That won't work if you get something very pricey and fancy but nobody can appreciate it, because it's not common knowledge. A very fine hand-knit sweater would take a lot of time, but most people won't realise that when you pass them on the street - something like a fancy designer hand-bag, though, would be more widely recognisable.)

I am a firm believer that "back then", people did not have so much more time than we do have now. They'd also have had distractions, and days when things did not go as planned, and they'd have hung out with friends and family in their leisure time and not worked all the time on something. (Well, not more than modern people do.) That is also what I try to explain when the comment comes up.

Sometimes, though, I feel like going "oh my goodness, someone had waaaay too much time", too. Like now, when I am doing the stitching for the pile on the reconstruction of the Trindhøj cloak.

That is a lot of stitching. A LOT. 

Don't get me wrong, it's a quite nice task, and each single stitch goes rather quickly, but a lot of quick actions will still take a long time. I also hope that the yarn I spun will be enough, and I won't run out before I finish the loops.

Maybe it helps to work faster? So I'm finished before the yarn realises that it's not enough?  

There is still some Bronze Age stuff going on - stitching, to be precise.

Because, well, after the Egtved things have been all wrapped up (and literally wrapped up and sent off to the museum), work went on with the men's garments, modeled after the find from Trindhøj. 

One of the pieces is a cloak, shaped like a half-oval. That, by itself, does not sound very spectacular. However, what makes it spectacular is both the size of the woven fabric. The cloak is approximately 126 cm long and 243 cm wide, and it's cut out, so the minimum size of the woven fabric must have been larger still.

The other thing making it special and rather spectacular? It was finished with a sewn-on pile made from yarns. And this is what I'm working on right now:

It's rather pleasant work and each stitch does not take very long, but it's a large piece, and I am not yet at the thirdway point, according to my estimates. So... more stitching to do.

Also, there's several things that itch me in this: Because there's not much left of the pile, it's hard to tell how dense it was, how long the individual pile threads were, and if they were loops or cut open after being sewn on. There's also no good documentation or analysis of the stitch used to apply them that I could find. Which means I'm sort of making it up as I go along - or, in other words, I've tried around a bit after orienting myself after the reconstruction attempts done before, and analysis of another stitch used for pile, and found a process that feels good to me. Which I'm now sticking with.

All this is, again, a nice example of how one may have the impression that everything is known about a given textile... but once you start to re-create it, all the small and large gaps in our knowledge emerge. It's fascinating, and it's humbling, and it's always, always the case.