After all the computery shenanigans, it's high time for a proper textile post again. And fortunately, I have just the topic!

When I was at the Textile Forum, one of the presentations was about old knitting, more specifically what can be called "compound knitting". These really early knitting finds (from Egypt, dated to about the 5th to 7th century, to give you a rough timeframe) are not showing the same knit structure as we are used to. Modern knitting goes through the stitches in the last row to add the next row to the top. These finds done in compound knitting go through the last two stitches to add the next row. Are you confused yet?

The pieces presented at the Forum are all tubular, usually rather narrow, and sometimes striped across or worked in colour sections. They might have been worked on a knitting dolly, or worked on needles - it is hard to tell. We can look a bit at the different methods, though.

Compound knitting is very, very easy to do on a knitting dolly (or however you call these gadgets with pins to loop your yarn over) - you set up as usual, with base loops, and then you wrap the working yarn around the dolly twice instead of just once. Now when you are working your first round, lift the bottom loop over both the strands above it.

Here's how it looks when you are a few rounds in:

[caption id="attachment_1920" align="aligncenter" width="428"] Lifting the lowest of the loops on the dolly over the one on top of it and the working thread.


The white thread is there for better orientation. You can see the red (lowest) thread being lifted up over the white thread (which has been on the dolly for one round now) and the blue working thread. (The dolly, by the way, is a very crude homemade version that sports some nails left over from my active digging days.)

As a result, you get the compound stockinette fabric.

[caption id="attachment_1917" align="aligncenter" width="437"] Compound knitting on the dolly, knit side.


It doesn't look much different from regular modern knitting, but you can see that the stitches go through two of the previous rows - look at the green stitch in the top middle, for instance. This is even easier to see when you use a contrasting thread and look at that:

[caption id="attachment_1919" align="aligncenter" width="386"] Compound knitting on the dolly, seen from the inside.


When you knit in a single row in a different colour in regular modern knitting, you have the little "dashes" on the purl side in one row, followed by a row of your regular colour, followed by the contrast colour row again. In compound knitting, the dashes are one extra row apart, as you can see in the picture.

Working this on a dolly takes no extra effort to do (it might be a tiny bit more fiddly to pick the loop to pull over, but it doesn't make much of a difference). The resulting fabric, though, is a different creature from regular modern knitting: it is much thicker while still very stretchy.

It gets really interesting when we try to take this to the needles, though... which is something for the next post.

Time again to clear out some of those open tabs and pelt you with links!

Here's a comic explaining how the desperate situation in Syria developed.

PhD Scholar blogs about finding answers to questions she didn't have through research - oh, how I know that effect!

Viveka Hansen writes about Nordic Iron Age clothing and dyes on her blog TEXTILIS.

If you are interested in textile conservation, check out the online workbook "Clothes tell Stories", intended to make aware of conservation issues and help with choices in museums and collections where there's no access to a professional conservator to help.

Andrea Phillips has a lovely and thoughtful post about Equal-Opportunity Objectification.

And one last women-/gender-related link: Doug posts about a conference session regarding professional women in archaeology, with links. Highly recommended!

I spent this Saturday giving a long workshop, so today is destined to be non-busy, making up for the half-weekend. The cat, as usual, is happy to help relaxing by snoozing right at my feet (and also making it nearly impossible to move the chair).

For you who are busy, though, I have some links!

Apart from the famous Herjolfsnaes garments, there's another site with textile remains in Greenland, called Garden under Sandet. The fur finds from there have recently been analysed, and what was thought to be bison, muskox and bears have turned out to be horse and goat. The full article is up at Elsevier (paywall).

A video on Youtube shows several historic egg preservation techniques.

Finally, if you read German, Mathis from Schauhuette has posted a thoughtful piece about the payment and situation of private archaeology businesses in Germany.

Mervi Pasanen has finished her masterpiece in handcrafting - a reconstruction of a medieval dress, based on an archaeological fragment found in Turku, Finland. Since part of her project was sharing information, she has posted pictures of the dress and a description of its making, together with plenty of photos, in a blog.

If you are at all interested in medieval garments, you will want to click here and take a good look. There are also nice pictures of the original fragment on the blog, also worth checking out. (Textile porn, anyone?)
Don't be scared if you see a lot of Finnish text first - there is English text below, so keep calm and scroll on.

After yesterday's blogpost, I had some more of a look around the internet - and lo and behold, there is one of Dagmar Drinkler's presentations online.

You can download it, as a pdf file, here. It's in German, but even if you do not read the language, it might well be worth a look, since it contains a huge number of pictures of tight-fitting legwear, plus a number of pictures of sprang with diverse patterns.

And with that, I shall leave you to the weekend : ) which I am planning to enjoy thoroughly!

They have accumulated again, those pesky links. Or are they pesky? You might want to decide for yourself. Here they are:

Cathy posts a review of Marianne Vedeler's book "Silk for the Vikings".

Jonathan Jarrett has put together a resources page you'll definitely want to check out.

There's a German article about silk relics (tunic pieces) from the fourth century.

King Richard III has undergone multi-element isotope analysis, and seems to have liked his booze, judging from that.

That's it for today - now I'll go back to my presentation writing.

Yesterday I received an e-mail telling me about a free e-book from one of my lovely colleagues... and that did make my day.