I have long ago come to the conclusion that whether good or bad, things have a  tendency to come in bunches. Take the weather here, for example: The first half of June has been rather cool and wet, and people were complaining about the temperature and the amount of rain. Now it has been so sunny and dry for several days in a row that I actually had to take out the watering can and save a few of the plants from dying of thirst. (Now people probably complain about the heat.)
The garden, by the way, is coming along slowly. There are still plenty of empty spots in the beds, but there are also a good number of plants that are resilient and perennial or at least very efficient when it comes to producing seeds. We got a present of some Amsterdam tulips last winter from a dear friend, and those have now finished their vegetation period and producing new bulbs for the next year. There are even a few raspberry canes left scattered over a part of the garden, and I hope to re-plant these somewhere better suited in the autumn or next spring. The few plants that we bought and set into the garden - three different species of mint, lavender, sage, and Sideritis (mountain tea) - also seem to do mostly well, and I hope for a good crop of mint next year.

Work-related, it seems that I'll be able to wrap things up nicely today and tomorrow (unless a heap of new things comes in today). Then it's time to relax, and wow, I'm so looking forward to taking a breather!

Somehow, as I try to tie up all the odds and ends left to tie up before our holidays, my brain has gone pretty empty in regards to blog inspiration.

So I do just as any other blogger lacking inspiration does: I post a video.



Have some medieval helpdesk!

I was asked recently about my electricity needs for my market stall - for lighting in the evening hours. My electricity needs are described in a single word: None.

I have a very easy policy for late-night market hours. Evening or even night market hours are a phenomenon that seems to become quite common these days on events, especially on events connected to a town anniversary festival.
My policy is that when dusk comes upon the market area, I am slowly packing up the small stuff, and when dusk is fully come, I close my shop. Nobody is going to see anything in my market stall anyways in the dark hours, except if I install a floodlight contraption (which will not fit into my tiny little TGV and aside from this is not really historical). There's just no sense to shop for plant-dyed threads in the darkness, and there's no way anyone will be able to appreciate the gossamer-fine hairnets and the delicately manufactured needles and needle-cases in the evening hours.

And my shop is not the only one thus affected - which is why evening- and night-hour markets are one of my (albeit lighter) pet peeves. Would you shop for something at night? When you can't discern its details, or properly search for flaws? I cannot believe that back in the Middle Ages somebody would have shopped for something in the evening hours unless driven by dire need. And in all the years that I visited markets, I have never bought anything after dusk (except food or drink, of course). I have looked around and chatted with people, and I have said things like "oh, that's where his/her stall is, I'll have to come back tomorrow and have a look".

I can just see no reason at all to shop at night, and I think that it doesn't fit in with a "historical market" scheme. A few oil-lamps or lanterns are nice and add to the atmosphere, but will never give off enough light to properly shop by.  With lighting by oil lamps or lanterns also come the problems with fuel spills and other, flame-related, hazards. Thus, a lot of the late-hour stalls have electrical light installed. That is more or less hidden and more or less made to look like lantern light, but it is still electrical lighting and thus out of place in an otherwise historical stall. I refuse to buy something under electrical lighting in both cases: When it looks like lantern-light (because then it's too dark for my taste to see and properly appreciate the wares) and when it looks like a floodlight installation gone astray (because this just glaringly stands out of the historical setting so much it hurts).

I'm fine with food and drinks stalls, I like to sit somewhere and see people walk by, or perform something, or listen to some musician on the square and have a little chat with friends. And I can understand if incense or lanterns are sold after dark. But all the rest? Even if it is a merchant or craftsperson I know and trust, I want to see the things I'm about to buy in daylight to fully appreciate them. So why do we need to transfer our modern late shopping hours to a historical market anyway? Is it our modern taste for convenience? Is there anybody really shopping at night, spending money enough to make it worth opening shop for so long? Or do the merchants just stand around and look decoratively with their stalls open and lit?

Soon (read: at the end of this week) this blog will go on a several-week summer-induced break - we are having a bit of a holiday, and then I'm off to do some yummy and exciting textile-y things. And I'm looking forward to both parts of this summer blog break very much!

As to the work part after the relaxing part, first there's the workshop and "Spectaculum" in Friesach, and afterwards I'm travelling to Vienna for an exhilarating project: A reproduction of some of the Hallstatt woven bands. For that, the team doing the reconstruction is actually starting from scratch, with the raw wool, and everything will be prepared and spun using proper historical implements. That means several kilometres spun on handspindles all together, and in really fine quality: The thread used in one of the bands is plied yarn with a thickness of about 0,2-0,3 mm. I am very excited about this and looking forward to doing a lot of ultra-thin spinning and then some plying - it's wonderful to be part of that work!

The whole reconstruction work is itself part of a large project called DressID, by the way - with the aim (beside others) to show the key position of dress for identity. DressID is also another try to get researchers from all over Europe together and give them the opportunity to exchange knowledge and network a bit.

In the discussion about thread storage and the bobbin find from London, Suse said

Tony said the end maybe looks a little bit like any technical adapter, but that´s really speculative ;-)

And this made me remember again a post on the Medieval Silkwork blog, where there are two pictures showing some sort of spooling/thread winding concoction. I have been idly speculating about this in relation to the London bobbin before, but now it makes even more sense to me.

In a normal household, even where a lot of sewing is done, the amount of thread needed is not too huge to wind by hand. Yes, of course it is faster to use a bobbin-winder or a ball-winder, but you could also wind your threads in the evening when it's too dark for other work or hand it to one of the household children to wind. For some techniques, it might not be necessary at all to re-wind your thread from the skein into some other form first, but you can take what you need from the skein directly and then re-store the rest. Even knitting is possible from an unwound skein.

But there are situations when this is just not practicable, and where some faster method of winding is needed - like in readying thread for the shuttles while weaving. And that is also the context in which the winding gadgets (which these things clearly are) are shown, in a weaver's workshop.

And this leads me to thinking that maybe the ends of the London find thing might be an adapter of some sort after all - and not a residue from turning it on a lathe (an interpretation I heard from a wood-turner once) or a whim of the maker. Maybe it was used on a winding contraption in the context of a weaving workshop?

First of all, thank you to all you commenters who shared their method of storing thread!
Seems that I am not uncommon in my approach to re-wind only some of the threads, and on different things.

One fact that I have found is that some threads are better suited to being wound on a simple stick or paper roll or similar item with no flanges at the ends, while other threads still have a lot of "spring" in them (usually because they were overtwisted slightly during the manufacturing process) and tend to spring off the smooth thread holders. Flat thread winders or bobbins/spools with flanges are definitely the better choice for such pieces.

If speculation is allowed, I can imagine thread winders made from parchment, too (and I am planning to make some to try): parchment is light-weight, smaller bits of it will accumulate anyways when cutting parchment sheets for book pages out of the whole parchment skin, and it should be very well suited for making thread-winders. Small bones might also have been used, with the thicker joint ends making for a more secure storage of threads even of the "springier" sort. Storing threads on the spindle (especially just until the second batch for plying has been spun) also makes a lot of sense to me.

So maybe lathe-turned bobbins are that rarely found because there really weren't many of them in use - people preferring to use stuff that was handy, or less hard to get and less expensive. Scraps of parchment, slivers of wood, short bits of smooth twigs, small bones, bits of reed, spindle sticks, or simply little balls of thread with or without something as a core. I know that if I need to wind some thread on something today, I'll just use whatever useable thing I can grab at once, so I've torn off some paper from chocolate wrappers, folded that and used it as a winding core more than once. Seen this way, it sort of makes sense to me to just use cheap, available things that do not scream "thread storage item" to the archaeologist and save the money available for textile tools to invest in things not found or substituted as easily. And as far as I see, the habit of using precious, shiny and expensive matching sets of needlework items only comes up much later - so representation of personal affluence by having precious thread storage items was probably not done in the middle ages.

Hm. Maybe I should have some nice roasted chicken soon and keep those practical little bones...

I had a collossal lot of fun during the last two days - so much fun that I enjoyed a sleep-in this morning, because laughing a lot in between work means very, very exhausting days. And all that because - can you believe it? - I am going to be on TV.

On Monday morning, four people came: The reporter, the camerawoman, the sound-and-light technician and the assistant. They came and brought a mini-bus full of equipment and a general plan on what to shoot and how to proceed; these were mostly things the reporter and I had talked about and pre-planned on the phone during the weeks before.

I think about everybody knows that shooting for a film production will always take much, much longer than the finished film as it runs on the screen. And everybody who has ever tried to do something like a mini film or documentary will have an even better insight into this. But the amateur video and a full-fledged TV report are two very different creatures.
It starts with having the eye for selecting, carefully, a spot as background for the bit to be filmed. We've been living here for a few months, but I would not have thought of choosing the spots that the film team chose - and chose very, very well!  Then everything needs to be arranged and adjusted: the camera on its tripod, the lighting, the chair is placed just so. Then the fine-tuning begins, where all the lights are adjusted again and again to tweak lighting and colour - until everybody is satisfied. And then the little bit for the film is shot, and depending on how it went, shot again (and maybe again, until it went well enough). And then selecting and arranging and fine-tuning for the next bit begins.

I had the feeling that it all went quite smoothly and very well altogether, and it took us one and a half days to film a good hour and a half's worth of material. The finished bit in the film will be about ten minutes, if everything goes as planned. One and a half days of work for ten minutes of film... I find that quite impressive. Gives you another insight into why a film is so expensive, too - after all, you need four people just for a little documentary shoot.

I was happy that the things I had to do were not far out of the usual demonstrations and explanations I do at any medieval event or at a conference. I got to explain the spinning experiment, which meant a lot to me; show some textile work and talk about the Textile Forum, and all those topics I have already shown and done so often that it felt almost just like telling another colleague or showing another visitor.
And loading the car with equipment for a market to show that side aspect of the job? It was so easy for me to fall into "packing mode", carrying all the things and meanwhile planning about what to get next and where to stow it in the car that it was possible to really mostly ignore the camera. So between joking with the team and doing things that I have done so often in public, I soon felt quite at ease.


But the best part of the experience for me was working together with the crew. The team was very, very nice and seemed to be as fond of weird jokes and bad puns as I am, so we laughed a lot, and I was quite sad to see them pack up and go once we had finished. And I did enjoy a lot to see the team at work, since obviously they did like each other, love their job, were happy to get the pictures right and best they could be, and they worked very well together with lots of friendly banter - I'd call it craftspersonship at its best.*
And this is always wonderful to see, and even better if you can feel like a part of such a team for a short while, which was my pleasure and privilege during the last two days.



* I know that strictly and technically speaking, neither artists nor camerafolk are craftspersons - but for me, craftspersonship is closely collected to a special kind of joy and pride in your own work, and joy and pride in doing it well. And to me personally, this attitude is more important for the definition of craftsperson than whether the finished piece is a very good show, a bit of film or an actual tangible object.