I've encountered a few bonus technical problems while editing, so you're getting this picture of our current guest in the wintergarden:



She seems to like it there... apparently both the nasturtium leaves and the mexican mini-cucumbers are to her taste. At least that's what we assume from the holes in them!

...due to stuff just refusing to work...

...there's no blogpost until late, and then only a gratuitous cat picture:



I hope the last take did take. And I've definitely not done twill weaving for way too long!

I wrote a while ago about the Albecunde belt, which is one of the tablet-woven bands in the museum St. Afra in Augsburg. It has survived in two parts, a longer and a shorter one. Onto the smaller part of the Albecunde belt, another smaller piece of tablet-woven band is sewn. Its date is not clear, but it has been revered as the belt of St. Mary for a long while - and thus is called Mariengürtel.

It's a twill weave, with animal patterns in colour on an off-white background or in off-white on coloured background; and said background is green, red, and light bluegreen.

This is the overview picture from the museum:



...and here are some detailed pictures that I took, with kind permission from the museum.







It's a beautiful piece, and I am definitely itching to try and weave some of these little animals. According to my count, it's 2+41+2 tablets, so I can try them on my 42 tablet playground band. Once I have the current things done and finished, that is...

 

I've spent the day weaving, and preparing things for my little presentation about tablet-weaving due on June 14 - as part of the digital event at Lauresham:



Preparing for this meant I finally got around to do a few things that I've been planning to do or try out for a while - among them brocading over diagonals (as it was done on the Ulrichsmanipel) and warping a new explanation-/demo-band that's not as narrow, ratty, and worn out als my old four-tablet one was.

Tomorrow will be more video-taking for this, and then I will get to do some cutting, and editing, and things like that. Exciting work, and I have finally found an editing programme that I seem to be able to work with... which is a very, very good thing indeed.

 

Addition to clarify things, June 4 2020:

Silvia very correctly points out in the comments that she knows of no tablet-woven bands that appear in just one colour, but have a twist direction turn pattern that points to an original patterning. This is true - I don't know of any either (though my overview is not as good, or current, as Silvia's).
Knowing a little bit about how many textile finds are not published, and how decisions are made on what to publish with the very limited time and resources available... my suspicion is that at least a few bands exist that lie somewhere in an archive or a freezer, which would carry a hint of original patterning in form of twist direction changes. Or none at all, if the pattern was formed while only turning the tablets in one direction. They are, however, too unspectacular to be looked at in detail, or published. The same is probably true for bands that still do have a visible (maybe just faintly visible) simple pattern. Since tablet-woven patterns come out best when contrast is high, the chance of the pattern staying visible even in discoloured bands is relatively high.
So - I am not trying to say that there are lots of simple bands published who originally had a colour pattern, which has disappeared now. I'm trying to point out that there is a possibility of simple patterned bands discolouring in a way that would make it harder or impossible to see what the original pattern was. How likely that is, exactly, and how many of these might be in archives or storage boxes, is another very interesting question, but unfortunately not one I'm able to answer. I just think it's something worth to be aware of.

End of addition.

 
A while ago, I botched when setting up a warp for a tablet weaving demo band - I took two colours I liked, held the balls of yarn next to each other, went "yeah, that looks good", and warped the band in a setup for diagonals or twill.

Just to find, a few wefts in, that the contrast wasn't as good as I had thought it to be. A quick check, and yes - the grey value of the two colours is identical. So while the pattern is visible in normal lighting, the contrast isn't high enough to use this as a demo band for showing how to weave twill.

It is, however, perfect to show something else: What can happen to a tablet-woven band when it's buried in the soil for a few hundred years and turns all brown all over. Because then, all you might be able to see is that there must have been a pattern of some kind.

Case in point?
Let's take one of the most simple patterns you can weave with a diagonals setup: diamonds. It looks like this on my band:



Now let's put it into virtual soil to turn all brown - or, in this case, convert the picture to greyscale.



You can see the turning points across the whole band, coming in at more or less regular intervals - so you can assume that some pattern must have been happening here. You won't be able to tell which one, though.

Let's spice it up a bit. Imagine you're the archaeologist and find this:

[caption id="attachment_5317" align="alignnone" width="640"] Click on this link to find out.


Are you able to guess what it looks like in colour? Click on the link to find out.

So there we are. A band like this would probably not get published prominently - and I think that we might have found many more simple patterned bands in the Middle Ages than our finds show today. No metal (as in the brocaded bands) will mean worse chances at surviving in the soil, and small bits and pieces of uniformly coloured bands will give scant hints at the patterns that might once have been visible...

Germany has a bank holiday on Monday, so I'm looking forward to a long weekend (though weather predictions are rather mediocre...).

Just in case the weather in your place will also be less than inviting to spend time outside, maybe you'll enjoy this offer of the British Library to leaf through digitised versions of some old books - about Renaissance to Early Modern festivals, or the 21 plays by Shakespeare, printed in quarto format.

Or maybe you can get inspired to invent your own boardgame to play on a board like that found in Slovakia, dated back to Roman times?

Or make a toy mouse from leather, like the one from Vindolanda?

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="428"] Image from The Vindolanda Trust, www.vindolanda.com


Whatever you do - I hope you'll have fun!

While there are plenty of medieval images showing spinning with spindle and distaff, usually with the spinner shown in a position with the spindle hand/arm almost fully or fully extended, there's very little pictorial evidence for plying.

I've come across one image recently, though - this one:

[caption id="attachment_5309" align="alignnone" width="390"] Bibliothèque Nationale de la France, Manuscript Latin 7330, liber astrologiae Georgii Zapari Zothori Fenduli, c 1301-1400. Fol. 30r, if I've interpreted things correctly. Permalink to the page in the digital BNF.


That lady is not using a distaff, but instead she's holding two filled spindles in her left hand, and plies the threads together with the spindle hanging below her right hand.

Now that's definitely a rare picture, and a method I do have to try! Anyone here ever tried plying this way already? Or do you know more pictures like this? (Or, while I'm already blegging, images of spinners not in the classical one-arm-fully-extended position?)