A while ago I wrote about dyeing silk and different outcomes, depending on whether it had been degummed or not. My degumming try that I referenced back in that post ended up being not completely successful, as some of the gum had still stayed in. 

I finally got around to doing it again, with a fresh sample, and this time I made sure to steep it to death, or something very close - it stayed in the hot soapy bath for a full hour, and I used de-ionised water to avoid any hindrance by our rather hard tap water. 

And here's the result:

As you can see, there's four samples now. The one on the bottom is the silk dyed in the gum, the one on top is untwisted degummed embroidery silk dyed together with the gummy silk. On the small roll in the middle, the bottom one is the outcome of my last trial, partly degummed, and on top is the completely degummed silk. 

It's become very light in colour, even lighter than the silk that was degummed before dyeing. I had expected something like that - either a bit lighter, or somewhere around the colour of the embroidery silk. 

There is definitely more shine now, but it is also much more delicate; I've had several snaggy bits even though it's a twisted silk. 

So my current conclusions are:

If you want to work with silk that has next to no twist at all, leaving it gummy or partly gummy might be a good idea to up the stability. The sericin also seems to take natural dyes much better, so if you want to have really deep, vivid colours... leaving it gummy or partly gummy is, again, your friend. In case you want it to be utterly shiny, though, degumming is the way to go.

Though I had the impression that the thin strands of gummy silk, with about 20 den, are also looking quite shiny. More exploration might be necessary...

By pure chance, I found out this weekend that there is something called "World Naked Gardening Day". There's really nothing that does not exist, right?

Apparently the aim of this day is to make people feel connected with nature, and get out (or do inside) gardening feeling the breeze on every spot of the body, and making the world a better and a bit greener place. It's always on the first Saturday in May, so it might still be rather cool outside... 

If you want to learn more, you can find out about it on the official website https://wngd.org/

For me, I can tell you that this is definitely not a World's X Day that I will participate in - I am quite fond of coverage by clothing, especially when outside in the sun, where sunburn at this time of year can also be an issue...

Here's a little bit more about the Egtved project - which is sort-of-half finished now. Sort-of-half because there are the men's garments to be finished, and they might be more than half the complete work time altogether. I strongly suspect that, actually. (I also should probably get them their own tag, as it's not Egtved but Trindhøj, and it would be a little weird to list them under Egtved.)

So... the blouse is finished, and with that, the whole set of garments is ready to be photographed for a final documentation, then packed up and sent off to the museum. It's been very interesting to sew that blouse, and it's also interesting to wear (because of course I tried it on...)

I had gotten all ready to cut the piece, with the measurements taken off the Egtved documentation, and then that nagging feeling got the better of me, and I cut and sewed a mock-up first, using the original measurements. Turns out it was a good thing I did, because the Egtved girl was just that: a girl, aged 16 to 18 years according to estimates from her dental status. Meaning that she was not so tall, and also must have been quite slender, appropriate to her age. 

She's estimated to have been 160 cm tall, and I am 163 cm. I can just fit into the mock-up blouse, though it takes a bit of wiggling to get in, and it's not wide enough to comfortably fit me, especially since my breast circumference is a bit more than the approximately 86 or so cm the original has. (It will squeeze in, as breasts are squishy to a good extent, but it's not really fitting well that way.)

That means the piece would not be wearable or try-on-able for a lot of people... and comparing it to the two other finds of similar blouses, the one from Egtved is by far the smallest. The other two have about 98 cm circumference in the torso part. So after checking back with the museum, we decided on using the Skrydstrup measurements as basis for the piece, making it large enough to fit a German size 42, approximately. I stayed with the slit-like neck opening, though.

The wool is somewhere between soft and scratchy to me, and that is also how the fabric feels when worn on the skin. When I was younger, I used to wear wool sweaters from Iceland on bare skin, though I might be somewhat, um, hardened against scratchy stuff. I'm also quite able to ignore a bit of scratchy feeling. What I'm not able to ignore is a neck opening that is close to the front of my neck, I find that really uncomfortable and irritating, so that would be one reason for me, personally, to not wanting to wear the blouse for an extended amount of time. (Or, if it were mine, I'd just make the neck opening a little bit deeper in the front.)

Sewing the garment was an interesting experience. The seams, according to documentation by Hald and Broholm, were about 1 cm wide, with the two layers of fabric simply overlapping and whip-stitched together from both sides. Now we only have a few threads per cm here, about 3 to maybe 4... which is not much to anchor stitching. 

I solved this problem by stitching through the threads of the fabric instead of between them, which was easy to do with these large and relatively soft yarns. Made like this, the seams feel reliably sturdy. 

Sewing the blouse was overall also the part that took least time - spinning the yarns, weaving the fabric, weaving the skirt, these all took a lot longer than the actual cutting (not much) and stitching.

Overall, I'm rather happy with all of this - even though, like always, there are quite a few compromises that had to be made...

I may or I may not be sitting here dressed in the Bronze Age women's clothing - trying it out (or on) before it goes on its happy journey to its final work place. I may also have taken a quick mirror-selfie before sitting down here to write this blog...

I may also have managed to resurrect the Textile Forum website, and wait for all the mails to go out (there's a restriction on how many mails can be sent in a given time, to avoid spamming and hogging of resources that you have not paid for, so sending out a few hundred mails takes a bit of time). 

  Just in case you're wondering, by the way: I managed to kill the Forum website by clicking the wrong button at the most inopportune moment ppossible to do so. Which removed the database (not good!) and some of the files. Resurrection was mostly a question of finding the correct set of files (that matched the re-uploaded database) and getting them back into their proper place.

Now things are running again, though it still does not look pretty - the site still suffers from template issues, which have been unresolved due to the need of getting a new one anyways, with the switch to Joomla 4. Which is on my schedule to do once the mails are all sent out, and then, hopefully, things will be easier to look at again, and the photos will also come back.

For now, though, the most important, and most urgent, bit was to get the date and time for the next Forum online. Which will be November 7-13, and we'll be in Mayen, Germany, at the Laboratory for Experimental Archaeology again. Our focus topic will be making yarns and threads: "Simple, Special, Spun or Spliced: Yarns, Threads, and Their Making". You can find out more about it on the website of the Forum.

I've been trying to get the Textile Forum website up to speed, and I was working along happily, and everything was looking good, and then I managed to seriously botch up. So, at some point in the process of getting the site updated and back to functional, I managed to kill it. Whether that is a fixable kill or a really bad one will have to be seen. 

Possibly tomorrow, as it might just be that I'll run out of brain juice pretty soon. Even though Madame the Cat is warming my arm as I type, and purring along. At the moment, I'm extracting a backup and hope that uploading the relevant files will fix it - if not, I'll have to do things to the database as well. Sigh. 

Ah, for those IT things to once work really smoothly. At least, though, I should be able to relatively quickly re-write the texts I wrote today, and that of course got eaten up by the botch. They were written in my quest to prepare for the next Forum... which will happen in November, and take place in Mayen, and I'm already looking forward to it.

So. Keeping my fingers crossed that things will not be too badly killed...

You're due an update on the Egtved skirt, I think - this has been finished a bit ago, but I haven't gotten around to posting a picture of it for you. So, finally, here you go: 

It is a really, really interesting garment. Where the skirt is double-layered (which is most of the way around), it's covering everything rather well. Especially close to the waistband, where the strings are fixed, there's not much see-through effect even when moving, so if worn on the hips (as is usually postulated for this find), the relevant bits of the female anatomy would be covered well and quite securely. When moving, as in lifting the legs, the front is still covered well, but you can see the leg at the sides, where the strings then fall apart - quite similar to a skirt with a high leg slit.

This kind of garment thus does play with the concepts of covered and uncovered, but it's not necessarily very see-through, or very daring. Also - this was a bog find, and there may have been additional linen clothing items worn that did not survive due to soil conditions. 

There's one last knot for me to make, and then hide the ends of that string (it's the one keeping the rings at the bottom together, and I wanted to be able to adjust that just in case it should be necessary), and then it's completely finished. I haven't added up the work hours yet, but it was a lot, even using more modern tools as a shortcut at some places.

Also, even though I tried very hard to match the thread type and thicknesses of the original, I ended up with more cords than the original garment had. Textile reconstructions are bitches!

Making the twisted cords and finishing them off with the rings are definitely the most time-consuming parts in making such a garment. The weaving itself was, in comparison, rather quick once I had established a workflow. A simple tool for measuring off and temporarily holding the wefts/cord threads was all that was needed in addition to the heddles for opening and closing the shed. Oh, and one of my feet to hold the tool and hold one of the loops from the previous shed on a toe. That was making it extra fun to weave.

I'm back home, and back at work. There's tea, there's the very helpful cat (who has now moved to her cat bed again and stopped putting her paw onto the touchpad at the most inopportune moments), there's things with deadline to take care of. 

But first - let me tell you that Vienna was glorious, and wonderful, and really exhausting. It was so good to meet with colleagues again and discuss things in person, with hands-on materials to try out what cannot just be described, and to mingle and chat and have all the extra networking opportunities that you just cannot get over online get-togethers or online conferences.

The organising team did an utterly splendid job at filling our three days with exciting and stimulating tasks. There was discussion of the papers and articles that we all had read in preparation; there were presentations putting those theoretical aspects into context of our own research and projects; there were clothing reconstructions that we looked at (and tried on) from different aspects, and two excursions to see garments - some secular ones preserved in a crypt underneath St. Michael's church, and some very spectacular old ecclesiastical garments still in use in St. Stephen's Cathedral.

There was also an entirely adequate number of coffee breaks, with coffee and tea and biscuits and chocolate and cake. Plus the continued discussions, and extra discussions, in those breaks. There might also have been some hanging out together in the evening, getting food and some drinks.

On the last morning, I felt like there's not enough coffee in the world anymore to get my brain up to the wakefulness and speed that I'd have liked it to be at. There was enough, though, to get me through the day and thoroughly enjoy it up to the last minute, when all those of us who were dead tired did do the adult and reasonable and sensible thing and went home, or into the hotel room, and to bed.

I spent my last morning in the beautiful city having a relaxed breakfast, buying food for the journey home, and getting a bit of bouldering in (there's a gym very close to the main train station) before sitting on my butt for several hours on the train. Where there was wi-fi, and theoretically the possibility to catch up on work, but - see above - there just wasn't enough coffee in the world anymore.

So let's see if I can catch up today, and actually get all the things on my list done...