Yesterday's post and Cathy's link to little thread winders make me think about all the different ways to store and organise different threads.
There's flat thread winders; there's round or differently-shaped bobbins, there are bobbins with or without "stoppers" at the ends. Some modern embroiderers store their threads by hanging them from a ring or into a hole in a card with lark's head knot, pulling out one piece at a time.

Myself, I have a wild mixture of things - brown paper rolls as spools, a few spindles with the thread still on them, some lathe-turned bobbins, a couple of thread winders from wood or cardboard, and even some totally non-historical plastic bobbins (those the thread came on when I bought it). I store most of this odd assortment in a cloth-covered box to keep the individual thread keepers from jumbling about too much; since the box does get tilted from time to time, though, of course they get disordered after a while. (My rummaging around in the quite-full box probably does not help with keeping it orderly either.) Neither this box nor the assortment of threads and thread holders in it are really very historical, so I tend to keep the box closed and out of sight - I only take out the bobbin or so that I need and either display it (if it is on a historically acceptable bobbin/winder) or hide it somewhere so I can get at it easily.

It would be nice to have all threads on historically accurate holders - but I can't see this coming up soon; there are too many other, more important and urgent projects for me than re-winding many, many metres of thread onto different holders.

Those of you doing Living History - how do you handle your threads?

This weekend, an e-mail with a research-related question fluttered into my inbox:

Some months ago, I was doing websearch on nalbinding and ran across a blog entry about ancient scrivner tools that actually may have been misidentified nalbinding needles.

Unfortunately, the author of the mail can't find it anymore and thus asked if it might have been on my blog. Where it is not (or at least I can't remember writing it at all, which usually means I never did write it). But the Internet is large and full of knowledge - any of you know this article and maybe even where it is?

And while I'm blegging: Recently, historical spools and bobbins for thread have come up again and again as a topic, and I remember that I had already taken one foray into the library to look for some more examples - but these little buggers seem to be hard to find. The one that is cited (and reproduced) most often is the spool from London, and I know that there are some thread spools, including simple reed cutoffs, in the finds from Kempten. But apart from that? There's only little mention of "possible bobbins" or so in most of the publications that readily come to mind. Have I missed the compendium of thread spools and bobbins? Or is there really so little of these small helpful things out there?

At least I get the feeling that awareness of the techniques that are in danger of extinction is growing, and I think that is the first step to do something against that extinction.

Why I have that feeling? I'm finding more and more mentions of "plant-dyed" or "naturally dyed" fabrics and yarns when I'm looking around. And just yesterday, I stumbled over this beautiful video on the Internet:



Go Natural Colours!

I am fully occupied with sorting through some stuff here, trying to stow tools and materials in a better way than before, getting my textile technique demonstration projects maintenanced and ready to show things again, plus planning for and working on some stealth projects.

And I have one non-stealth project to blog about, too: My "Fehlerschautafeln" have arrived! These are rectangular black cardstock boards with slits punched into each of the long sides. Using these slits, thread can be wound onto the card and then sits in exactly parallel lines. And then it's very easy to get an impression of how evenly spun the thread is, if it is smooth or rather fluffy on its surface, if there are any thick blobs of fibre or badly twisted bits, and so on. Now I just have to decide how to handle all the thread samples with their vastly different lengths - should I start winding about five metres in, where possible? And if yes, from the beginning or from the end? Or should I try to get the middle section of each thread? Going "x metres in" would be much easier to accomplish, but I am willing to do the "more work" approach if there is a good reason for it; however, the method has to be the same for all the samples (except the utterly short ones where I'll use an alternative method of determining where to start).
I can wind about 3,5 metres on each of the boards; most of the spinners made between 30 and 40 metres of thread during the one hour spinnng time. 3,5 metres would thus correspond to about 6 minutes of spinning time.

Now, if you spin for two hours, and there's a sample from hour one and from hour two - when in each hour would you suspect are the most representative six minutes to pick?

A new book about embroidery is scheduled to come out in October this year. The German-language book is called "Europäische Stickereien 1250-1650" and shows the pieces of the Textile Museum Krefeld's collection from said time. Going from these as base, the author is giving a cultural history of embroidery and looks at production tools, materials, workshops and trade of embroidered textiles. With 49,90 Euro, the book is very fairly priced - and I will be sure to get myself a copy!

For more info about the book, you can find it in this title database (I found it on page 3 of 3), or you can have a look at it on the publisher's homepage, where you can also order it already, with free shipping inside Germany.

During the weekend, we had one really strong gust of wind that lifted a few of the tents on the place slightly off the ground. Now an A-frame tent is not so very light, so it does take a strong wind to set it flying, and usually  our tents are securely anchored to the ground in addition to their structural weight. However, in Hanau, the tents we had were not fastened to the ground properly.

Why? Because the little town square where we had set up is paved with cobblestones - but the spaces between the stones are sealed with concrete. And that means most of our normal tent constructions, relying on pegs to keep the structure up, will not stand or stand badly there. Just like we had done last year, we wondered again why anybody would want to seal cobblestone paving like that, and like last year there was a lot of adjustment and make-it-work-somehow and shifting the places to set up tents because things would not work out as planned, and accordingly lots of swearwords. But this year, a nice lady that was born in Hanau told me why exactly we had all those problems: because of fashion.

In the 1950s and 60s, modern shoes for ladies featured stiletto heels. And on that cobblestone pavement of the town square, necessarily also crossed by fashionable ladies, that led to broken-off heels galore - because the heels, not fatter than the tent pegs or thick nails that we would have loved to use, would fit into the gaps between the stones. And if you wedge a stiletto heel into pavement well and tight, it will most probably break off.

The solution? Seal the gaps with concrete. Problem solved. Fashion influences even city architecture.

I came back late from the weekend in Hanau, which was nice weatherwise - spots of windy weather and rain broke the sunny weekend weather, but nothing too bad except for one really bad gust of wind that sent stuff flying all over our little market space.

Public interest in the market was, sadly, not as good as last year - at least not in the corner that I was in. Still, I had some very nice and interesting chats with visitors and inbetween nice and fun chats with the colleagues.

And of course I did not get a new hairnet started. Not because I wasn't trying - but because I used a not so suitable thread for the foundation loop; together with the extremely fine silk that I am using for the netting, that led to problems when working the second row, since the knots on the foundation loop were not sliding easily enough. In the end, I abandoned the started net after about an hour or so of work and will start again with a different thread as foundation loop - and this time, inside in quiet and most importantly without wind...

Instead, I worked on all kinds of other stuff after abandoning the net project - a little bit of goldwork, a little bit of sewing, some finishing work on weaving tablets, a bit of mending of a broken seam and a little fingerloop braiding. So altogether, I had a very nice weekend with lots of little odds and ends done!