Well, after a very nice day off yesterday, today was eaten up by doing this small thing and that one and another one, all good and necessary, but somehow it led to me not getting done what I wanted to do today. Mind you, my brain was quite scattery anyways, so the flitting from one small task to another suited the day's mood, but still - the main task for today did not get dealt with. (Yet. I am planning to squeeze in a little bit more time to at least get it pre-organised.)

Part of today's planned and not-yet-done task involved calculations on the costs of fabric reconstructions. Only approximate ones at the moment, but they are still complex to do, and need some brain power and checking of lists (of previous similar, or sometimes not-so-similar tasks), and checking of material availability and costs.

On a similar vein -  I've been asked if the membrane thread will eventually make its way into the online shop. Ah. Well. Theoretically... it could. But practically... I'm not convinced it will be a well-selling item. It will, however, definitely be a very, very pricey item.

If you're following me on Instagram, you may have seen some pictures of this on-going project already. It is, so to say, a left-over from last year's European Textile Forum, where we tried to explore the making of membrane gold threads.

Membrane gold threads are the cheaper version of real gold threads - it's a gilt animal membrane wrapped around a fibrous core. In our case, we built on the analysis results of some Italian threads that Cristina Scibé is researching.

There's a lot of unknowns or insecure things in the reconstruction of the process, and we were (and mostly still are) unfamiliar with most of the materials involved, so there was a really steep learning curve and there were plenty of "d'oh" moments.

But we have arrived at a process that is working, and that would be plausible also for production.

The photo shows the two spindles I am working with for wrapping strips of stuff around the core - one with the two linen single yarns, and the other with the wrapped yarns. These are not membrane strips, but modern metal and metallised plastic strips, done for practise purposes, as the membrane is a little too much work and too much of a resource to use as training material.

It's an utterly fascinating project... and I will give a little presentation about it on the EAA in Belfast this year. I'm already very excited about that!

One of the goals of EuroWeb is making it easier to research textile heritage, and one of the steps for this was the development of a Digital Atlas. This has been launched recently, and you can now take a look at the Atlas here. 

It's of course a work in progress - and contributions are welcome.

And here is the launch, as the recording of the livestream:

I've been looking, again, at headwear in medieval women - a thing I already did what feels like ages ago. Back then, I ended up with a reconstruction on how to do a barbe and fillet that I found satisfactory. I also looked at headscarves or kerchiefs or however you want to call them.

There's so, so many of these images in manuscripts that it's probably impossible to look at them all. Many of them show similar styles, with some rather typical arrangements of the ends of the headwear, and typical arrangements of the folds - so it seems like there were a few more or less common types, or common (or similar) ways to arrange the cloth on the head.

In some cases, you can see very nice regular folds on the forehead and at the sides. My interpretation of this is sewn-in folds - which will form a rectangular piece of fabric into something more bowl-shaped so it will fit (and sit) nicely. I've sewn folds into my headcloth for a long time now, and it really works very well.

But then, there's also images like this:

The image is from the Evangeliar Heinrichs d. Löwen und Mathildes von England (Cod. Guelf. 105 Noviss. 2°), and there's a lot of similar headdresses in there. Which makes me wonder... what material was used? How would you get folds like this? How are they fixed? Is that cloth tucked behind one ear, or is it just coincidence? So many questions.

Some trials may have been going on here... I've not arrived at a good solution yet, though.

Every year, there's the International Museum Day around May 18 - and the German version takes place on Sunday, May 21. So if you have nothing planned for the day after tomorrow, you might consider going to see a museum or two. A lot of them offer specials, such as free entry, or there's special exhibition openings, or events taking place.

In case of the Stadtmuseum Erlangen, there's the opening of the new special exhibition about Stone Age - and I will be doing demonstrations about early textile techniques. Demos start at about 11:45, when the official opening ceremony and speeches are done. I'm already looking forward to it!

So if you're in the area, stop by and say hello, and enjoy the newly opened exhibition! 

Staying with the topic of membrane threads - one of the steps is, of course, to apply leaf metal to the organic substrate. In the original finds, this was very often gilt silver leaf, making the layer of gold even thinner and thus the whole thing even cheaper.

There's several different methods for gilding, and we used a modified form of water gilding for most of our tests. And because that is a very interesting thing unto itself, here's a nice video from the V&A about how water gilding is done: 

I came across this video looking for the English version of some gilding terms, as I only knew the German ones - and I learned that for the last step, the application of the gold leaf, different liquids are used. I learned to do it with a mix of alcohol and water (and the German term for that is "Netze"), but I've found instructions now mentioning fish glue and just pure water. 

The methods to transfer the gold leaf to the cushion vary as well. It's really, really fascinating! 

There's a bit of research happening here right now - not only for some work projects, but also for a little bit of extra. There was, you see, this project at the last Textile Forum to try and find out about how membrane threads were made.

Membrane threads are, to explain it very quickly, the cheap version of gold (or silver) threads. Instead of wrapping a strip of gold or gilt silver around a fibrous core, organic material is gilded or silvered with leaf metal and then cut into strips and wound around a core. Usually, that core is made of cheaper material as well, and not of silk like usual for the proper gold threads. 

In our case, we used bovine gut membrane and linen thread as core, plus leaf silver for the silvering. There was a stack of questions when we started the project, and then there were more and more questions, and now there is still a lot, but also mostly new ones - which is nice, as it means we found answers for many of the questions from the first batch.

I will present our results in August at the EAA conference, and I'm already looking forward to that a lot. The next steps will be a comparison between the originals and our results (where one of the outcomes will, very obviously, be that ours are not very well crafted...) and then we will know more about how our process compares with the original one.

For now, though, I am very happy with what we did.

Even though we lack proficiency in all the relevant steps (mixing the appropriate glue, gilding the membrane, cutting it and winding it around the core), we have arrived at a workable solution for all the process steps that feels like it would be suitable for actual production. It's still a complex, time-consuming process, but then that's the case with so many texile-related tasks that it fits right in. 

And I can't tell you how nice and satisfying it felt to actually produce silver thread in our last go at this reconstruction process!