Well, well, well. There has been some more stitching, and as soon as I have typed this blog entry and pulled my arm out from underneath Madame the Cat, I will stitch on some more... but here's a bit of interesting stuff for you.

There's the One Big Linen Garment find from archaeology - the Viborg shirt. That piece has been analysed and reconstructed very nicely, with a result of finding a lot of different whipstitch seam variations, all cunningly and neatly adapted to a) what was available in terms of how many pieces of fabric to join, b) whether these were cut edges or selvedges, and c) how the seam was supposed to look (hint: most times, the answer to that was "flat").

Imagine my delight when I found out that the braies I'm looking at currently seem to employ similarly creative and very smart uses of whipstitch seams. Also my puzzlement when I realised that the seams I'd taken for the normal, common, household variety of a felled seam was something else.

I'm not a hundred percent sure yet whether my attempt has cracked it, but at least you can enjoy these images of crazy seams in comparison. First of all, the "normal" felled seam variety:

You can see that there's a clearly visible stitch line from the first seam, then the whip stitches from the felled seam allowances. Now here's the variation: 

I hope you can also see (and appreciate) how crazy tiny these are. It's about 3 mm seam width on the original, and I tried hard to match this, with more or less success, depending. At some point I'll need to see the back of these seams to find out whether my solution matches the original, but whether it does or not, it's a fun variation that makes use of the selvedge - it's not a normal seam through the two layers, with the edges staggered apart by one final seamwidth, but a fold of the fabric with the cut edge (two seamwidth wide) whipped to the selvedge of the other fabric, and then the allowance folded and whipped down. It's much nicer to work than the fiddly very narrow normal version, and makes smart use of the selvedge, in a way that (at least to my way of thinking) fits in very well with the general tendency to make use of the very useful selvedge when making clothes.

So. What do you think? Or have you even seen something like that before?

I'm still working on this underpants reconstruction project, and it's alternatingly breathtakingly delightful and slightly frustrating. There was maths involved of which I thought it would be simple, but it's not quite as simple as my first idea.

Some pieces of it really fit well together in my brain and are genius, and then I try to do the same stuff with my large, freshly-washed cloud of fine linen fabric (because this type of underwear is, well, reeeeaaaaally large), and of course it's still making sense but not quite as easy to do as one would hope for.

Actually, that has been the case so, so many times when I was doing reconstruction work: Stuff you look at and then get quite apprehensive because you are convinced it will be really difficult and a huge problem and you have no idea beforehand on how to do it just... happens, everything falls into place, and it's a total breeze. On the other hand, things that you glance at and your brain goes "ah, okeydokey, that's clear as crystal and will be no problem whatsoever, it's obviously easy-peasy to do" will stump you, frustrate you, and be obnoxiously difficult in at least five unexpected ways.

Really. This happened so often that now a part of my brain goes "uh-oh" when the other part goes "ah, okey-dokey, easy-peasy", and I sort of brace myself for "issues, multiple, unexpected" in any and all cases. It's still somehow weird to see it happen.

So... please excuse me while I go handle a little bit of shop stuff, and then return to my cloud of delightful fine linen fabric that tries to thwart my attempts at turning it into a near-perfect recreation of these medieval underpants...

In connection with the sprang cap I made for a museum exhibition, there will also be a sprang workshop - at Burg Trausnitz near Landshut, on June 27. The day starts with a guided tour through the exhibition, and then there's a lunch break, and then there's the workshop. I'm already looking forward to this, it's far too rarely that I get to teach sprang... and maybe I can manage to get the for-fun piece that I currently have on the frame done until then.

(Actually, I should, as it's on one of the workshop frames...)

If you are interested, you can go here to find out more about the (German language) workshop! 

For a nice change, here's some really lovely news for those of you involved in braiding! If you've done research about historical braids, especially regarding their structures, you will surely have come across the name "Noémi Speiser". Sadly, Noémi died last year, but she has left as her legacy, among other things, four books about loop braiding.

Thanks to the efforts of several other people, among them braiding specialists Joy Boutrup and Carol James, The European LoopManipulation Braiding books are now available for free on Carol James' website www.SprangLady.com. You will find them under store, then educational materials, then books by others. Their titles are European Loop Braiding Vol I, II, III, and IV. The direct link to the books is https://www.spranglady.com/store/c10/Other_Books.html.

You will have to put the books into your cart and then go through the checkout procedure; you will then get to a page with direct download links, plus receive an email with the download links.

I hope you'll enjoy them - and a big, big thank you to Carol, Joy, and the others involved who made this possible!

While it's snowing hard outside (still - we've had 27 to 30 cm since yesterday evening, and it's still building up) I spent some cozy time fiddling with pins. Or, to be more precise, making new ones.

This time, I used a different method for grinding the tips into shape, and it was much nicer to work and got better results, so I'm very happy with the new process. They're already marked as back in stock, and waiting to go to new homes and new adventures.

Now the only thing I need to tweak is how to wind the spiral for the heads, as there's still a rather large chance that the start will slip out of its holding place, and then everything turns around the core instead of adding new bits. 

I've finally gotten around to taking out the backstrap loom thingie that I set up a few years (already!) ago. There are plenty of mistakes (starting at the very start when all of us in that session just left the warp slung around the sticks instead of sewing them onto the stick... well), and there's a lot of "trying to remember stuff" wonkyness, but I think I have now understood a few of the things I was going after.  

There's a stack of things that fascinate me here. One, it's such a simple setup - basically you need six sticks and a weaving sword, and you're good to go. However, you can still weave beautiful simple fabrics or intricately patterned ones. The basic sequence, even with a pattern weft, is very simple as well, but there's still plenty of possibilities to mess up. It will also teach you about symmetry (one of my selvedges is always much worse than the other, and I'm still working on finding out exactly what I am doing differently), about how much of an influence practice has, and about the difficulties of counting (when picking out the threads for the pattern part). Well, maybe the counting thing is a special "me" issue, but still. I'm also still working on a better understanding on when to let up on the tension, and when to up it a little, but I think that's something that might be for later.

The six sticks, by the way, are three for the ends of the warp (two at each end, a third one for the transfer when stitching the warp to a free one, and later for rolling up the fabric as you progress); one for the natural shed; one to hold the heddles; and one to serve as a stick shuttle. If you do patterns, you might want to add two additional sticks, one to sort out the extras in the natural shed and one to sort out the extras for the heddle shed. (That, by the way, is what was the thing I was puzzling about, and where I managed to miscount several times. In the number range from zero to four.) 

Tomorrow, though, and the day after, I will not be weaving - I will be off to learn more about making goldbeater's skin. Consequently, there will be no blogging the next two days!

Sometimes you run across the saying "publish or perish" in regards to academic settings. I have my issues with that phrase, but I am always delighted when colleagues publish their work - because then it's out there, and accessible, and that is a very, very good thing.

So, putting my money where my mouth is, or rather trying to live up to my own ideals, I do try to publish my stuff as well. It's not always worked out, and sometimes it turns out a little different than expected, but one of the important bits is that it's there somewhere and people can look for it and read it and then, most important thing in my opinion, they can get into contact and start a discourse if they so like.

All this is mainly the preamble to let you know that I've published an article together with my dyer colleague Micky Schoelzke, and it's out now in an anthology published by Springer, and they even sent me fancy pictures and instructions on how to promote it. I will, in fact, use one of them here: 

Of course, I will also give you the link to the book page that they provided me with. I would have preferred, actually, to provide you with a kind of affiliate link that would earn me 30% provision of the book price in case you'd buy that book via the link provided, but alas, the marketing company they are working with has decided that my website is irrelevant to the advertising needs of Springer, and so I cannot get a link, and cannot get money from it.

This is, in one perspective, not a big deal, as chances that people would go off and buy that book en masse are, well, slim, so I'm not having the feeling that I will be missing out on a lot of money here. I'm a little miffed still. (Mostly, probably, because I got dismissed as irrelevant.) Springer (just like Brill, and DeGruyter, and so many other notable academic publishers) is not best known for their cheap books, whether print or ebook. I'm all for books that are fairly priced, which is rarely really cheap, as there's a lot of people and a lot of work involved in making and selling a book. However, Springer does not pay any of their academic authors (at least not to my knowledge) and also not their editors. Basically, writing and editing for them is done for free, for the pleasure of having a book published. There may or may not be payment to the publishing house involved in some cases; I know that I have heard about at least one of the bigger German publishing house names taking quite a sum for publishing a PhD thesis about a decade ago, so I might be outdated, and things may be different there and now.

But the thing that remains is: These houses depend on the writers handing their work in for free, on peer reviewers working for free, on editors working for free. Then they do sell the books at a price that's not, well, very low, and while they do offer that 30% provision (that's not more than a bookshop would get as their cut, by the way) it is, as I have found out, not so easy to access it.

The whole system depends on people either being paid for their writing, editing, proofreading, and reviewing work by their academic employer, so a university or other place of work; or they depend on these people doing the stuff on their own time, unpaid. In both cases, I think it's not entirely fair (but especially not in the second one). 

Books are not a get-rich-scheme anyways, and no author that I know (who has done authoring work and is not just dreaming of becoming the next Rowling, income-by-books-wise) is expecting to get lots of money from their work per book. It would be nice, though, to get at least a little, not just because money is nice and, well, rather useful if you want to keep on living, but also to have more of a feeling of being paid and appreciated, and not just... useful. Even if you're irrelevant (to the publishing house, like me). 

Rant over. If you get your hands on the book, any which way, I hope you'll enjoy it!