At last year's Textile Forum, one of our topics was exploring how membrane gold threads may have been made. That is, in theory, a simple process - you take bovine membrane, gild it with silver-gilt leaf metal, then wind it around a fibrous core consisting of two spun vegetable fibre threads.

Simple, right? Well. As was to be expected, it's of course not so simple. First of all, how is the leaf metal attached to the membrane? There are a number of possibilities to do so. We tried using both oil and gelatin glue, and both worked. None of us was very proficient at gilding, but well, it was good enough for our purposes. 

Next step: Cutting the silvered skin into strips. The original strips were less than one millimetre wide, and that caused problems as well - both with the cutting (which could be done with scissors, or with knives, we don't really know) and with the strips afterwards. Because it turned out that if you cut very thin strips, they start to curl up. Which is not very helpful for the following steps. There's also the question of how long the strips were... and there are no analyses that I know of which look at the length of the strips used to wind around cores. Or, in the case of flat strips, the length of these.

 We found it much, much easier to wind a very long strip around the core than to use shorter ones, as the start and end always caused us problems. So we tried glueing the individual strips together... which basically worked very well, but we had issues with the glue: it was too brittle once dried.

So one of our next steps will be to try a different glue. There's also the possibility to modify animal glues with different additives to change their properties, including their elasticity, but we lack recipes for that, so we'll probably go with just the pure glues for now. (If you happen to know of any good, reliable recipes for making parchment glue or modifying it... they'd be very welcome!)

Things like that are the main reason why it's so important to do tests, and experiments, and try to recreate or reconstruct the actual working processes. Even if you're the best of researchers, it's just impossible to find out about all these small pitfalls by reconstructing a process on paper only. I'd never have considered how important the right choice of glue might be, or that the glue might be a crucial factor in how the membrane behaves - even though I've worked with glues a lot through my hobby bookbinding, and know from there that things will happen if you use the wrong glues, or too much or too little of them, or cover something on one side only. Which means I should have known, and as soon as the problem popped up, I went "oh yes, of course, that's an influence factor" - but before that... well. There's just too many things going on in any complex process (and most craft processes are complex processes) to consider them all without having the actual feedback from actual things being done.

And that all said, I will return to my preparation of some more tests in the project. It's guaranteed we will find some more questions, but I am hoping that we will find a few more answers too!

I'm back home from a wonderful workshop - and the title "Making, Wearing, Displaying: Textiles and the Body" really fit all the contents of the workshop.

We had a lovely mixture of papers and practical sessions, one of them involving modeling of various reconstructions of old garments. There was Iron Age and Bronze Age things, there were a few galloroman garments, and pieces from Xianjing - of which I got to model one. It was the earliest piece, put together from a lot of fabric that was mostly uncut, and a very interesting experience to wear. The two other garments from the same project were much more tailored and looked elegant from the get-go, while my gown felt more like hanging out on the couch and have chocolate and watch Netflix. (Or read a book, maybe.) While I've worn a good number of historical garments and garment reconstruction over the years, and most of them not just for half an hour or an hour, but for actual working and living in them, it was the first time I had something as loose-fitting and flowy, with no body shaping whatsoever. Very curious feeling for me.

There was also a workshop on Greek dancing (ancient Greek, of course), in the wonderfully warm sun, so it felt quite fitting. And then, of course, lots of papers about a huge number of aspects regarding textile and the body - from dental abrasions probably caused by textile work to a project looking at brain activity when doing textile work. The programme was really long and packed, but the organisers did an absolutely splendid job in how they arranged papers, breaks, and practical sessions to make it still easy to follow along and take in all the information.

We also got treated to a tour of the Ethnographical Museum in Lisboa, who graciously hosted us for the first two days, and to copious amounts of typical food and sweets (coffee breaks!) plus, of course, coffee.

Portuguese coffee is lovely, and I probably had too much of it - but did I mention it was delicious? 

After the conference, I had a bit of time left to explore the city. I spent most of the two days I had walking up and down the streets, looking at things at a flea market, seeing the loom weights (and the museum mascot cat) in the Museo Archqueologico do Carmo, plus the Natural Science Museum and the Botanical Gardens as well as many, many streets in different quarters. There would have been much more to explore, but there's only so much you can do in two days, especially if you also have to take breaks to sample the local delicacies. There had to be an adequate sample size for determining coffee quality, for instance, and since there is not only the signature "pastel de nata", but a plethora of sweet baked goods in Portugal, these had to be sampled too. 

Finally there were visits to a few supermarkets, because I always find it very interesting to see how goods differ from country to country, and on Sunday I spent some time doing what a lot of the locals did: Hang out in one of the parks, sitting on the grass and enjoying the day (in my case, with a bit of knitting). 

And then it was already time to go home... with a few delays along the way, which meant I arrived a bit later than planned, but not castastrophically late. Now it's time to get back to work - with new insights about displaying dress and the body. 

Today was a day where I tried to finally take care of a stack of small tasks, some of which had already been on the to-do-list for a good while, and some that had just come up quite recently. It feels nice, somehow, to do those maintenance tasks! Some of it was writing mails, some was sorting through files, some was trying to figure out new software. There's been a change in my newsletter thingie not-so-recently, and I was looking to acquaint myself with some of the features of the new version, but when it was time to send the last few newsletters... well, I didn't get around to do it. Today, I finally managed to sit down with it and we had some quality time, so to say. 

Now I think I might test it with the current newsletter - and if it works well, I will switch over to the new version. Hopefully it will! 

Apart from all this, there's also been some conference preparation and pre-packing prep today. I'll be off to a EuroWeb workshop on Tuesday, where I will be meeting a number of my lovely colleagues for discussions about making, wearing, and displaying textiles and the body. I will also try very hard to stay within the 15 minutes timeslot for my presentation - talking (shortly) about subtle movements in crafts, especially in relation to teaching things. It's a fascinating topic for this meeting, and I am so much looking forward to it.

My going there, however, means that you'll be treated, again, to a few days of blog silence while I am off. Starting on Monday, as that is a public holiday - I'll be back on the blog on Wednesday, May 10. I hope you'll be able to enjoy a few lovely spring days until then, too!

My blog thingie is, it seems, trying to make me look like a bit of a fool - I used one of the post drafts that had not gotten through, but the progamme then obligingly posted it under a different date. Very nice of you, blog thingie, thank you so much. Not.

On to nicer things than wayward software, though! There is a large Experimental Archaeology Conference coming up, running May 1-3. It's in Torun in Poland, but will be a hybrid event, so if you'd like to join in on short notice, you can.

13The full programme is here: https://exarc.net/meetings/eac13 and there is a session with focus on textiles on Monday, May 1, starting at 14:30 (Session 3.B).

You can follow the presentations online via https://www.youtube.com/@exarc. Links will also be included in the website. For extra chats and discussion there's a Discord server you can join. For more information on the conference, go here: https://exarc.net/meetings/eac13/how-attend.

So I hope there's something interesting on the programme for you, and that you will have fun participating!

In the last years, I had the pleasure of doing demonstrations and having museum cooperations that involved quite a bit of travel. There was work to be done in Brandenburg, Lübeck, Emden, Berlin, just to name a few of them. It's lovely to travel there, get to see those places, meet the people and (important part of any travelling I do) sample the local delicacies. 

I'm just as delighted, though, to have a museum cooperation just in front of my own doorstep for a change, though. 

So I am very happy to share with you the  news about an exhibition coming up in my local museum, the Stadtmuseum Erlangen:

I will be doing demonstrations of early textile techniques on the vernissage of the exhibition on May 21, starting after the official opening. There will be additional demonstrations on September 10 and on October 22, starting at 14:00 - plus one for the "Long Night of Science" on October 21, starting at 20:00.

I'm very, very much looking forward to this already. Almost no travel time! (There might still be sampling of the local delicacies, though. I will take any excuse for having delicious food of both the sweet and the savoury type... and Erlangen does offer nice specimens of both. Bonus: No exploring and luck necessary, I already know places to go to for the good stuff!)

Apparently the planned blog post for both Friday and yesterday never got through - if you can rely on anything, it's modern technology doing weird things once in a while.

To make it up for you, I have something very special today: A mystery! This piece of bone was found in a dig in Austria. It's rib bone of either horse or cow, with sawed-off sides (not polished or smoothed). Both lengthwise edges are worn smooth or wear-polished.

If you've seen anything like this before, or have an idea for what it could have been used, please let me know!  

I've been thinking about teaching again recently - because of teaching some more again, in different settings, and because of an upcoming conference where I will do and give a short presentation about the topic.

Teaching is fun, and fascinating, and has its own special challenges and rewards. There are some things that are easier to teach and some that are harder. Personally, I find that the hardest technique to teach from the many textile techniques that I have on offer is filet netting. The knot, once you have it in your muscle memory, is not hard to do. It's a nice, fluid set of motions resulting in a nice tight knot that has the correct size every time.

However... there is no good way to split up that set of motions, at least I have not found any way to do that yet. To form the knot, you have to do all the motions and all the passes over and under the different threads, and you have to do all of them correctly. So learning that knot requires you to memorise the whole sequence in one go, which, according to my experience teaching this, is a significant challenge.

I remember learning how to do that knot myself; I used the instructions provided by Therèse de Dillmont in her book, the Encyclopaedia of Needlework, and I read them bit by bit following the sequence for many, many times until the whole process had settled in my brain. 

So - teaching long, complex (sort of) sequences that have to be done in one block is definitely a challenge - but it is something that can be taught. Other things just cannot be taught (as in directly giving instructions or passing on sequences of movements) at all. In some cases, the difference between individual bodies means that every body needs an appropriate solution for a given problem; one may work for many or most of them, but not for all. In these cases, you can only assist. 

My favourite example for this is tensioning the yarn when knitting Continental style. For most knitters (according to my own anecdotal evidence of looking on hands), wrapping the yarn around the left forefinger works very well. Many knitters wrap twice, some once, some even three times, and the number of wraps may also depend on the yarn. So this is the way how to tension yarn that most people get shown and taught when they start out knitting. 

However... for some people, it does not work. That includes me - if I wrap the yarn around my forefinger, it just won't slide at all, and I get higher tension all the time, or if I jerk more of the thread loose, uneven tension. For me, it works wonderfully to just weave the working yarn through the fingers of my left hand: over the ring finger, under the middle finger, and over the forefinger. When I was learning how to knit, finding my personal way for tensioning the working yarn was actually one of the biggest challenges, because nobody showed me that method; I stumbled across it when trying out different possibilities.

So as a teacher, you can be aware of the possibility that a given method or process might not work for everybody because of physical reasons - and then you can, if you know of alternatives and options, tell about the other possibilities that the student could try. But of course you cannot slip into their skin and try out the options yourself to see which one feels best, and you might not be able to demonstrate the other options well as they might not work well, or at all, for you. In the end, they will have to find their own solution by trying out things. 

Have you come across similar things - in learning a skill, or in teaching? I'd love to know!