I'm participating in an Instagram challenge initiated by the group Hochwaldkelten - and today, they are asking about the favourite place for (or of) Living History.

Uh. That was a really hard question for me, and got me thinking very hard about all the things I did in all the places that I did them... which were many, and varied, and about all of them were utterly wonderful and I have fond memories of them. Of sitting in the train, and in the car, and even in the plane or the airport, travelling to an event or a conference or a museum or a research project, with all the anticipation involved. Of hotel rooms and hostel rooms and pensions and the homes of friends and colleagues, where I stayed for a while. Of sleeping spaces on floors in open air museum houses and of my own medieval tent and one time even in an old jail cell. Of museums, both the parts open to the public and the places behind the scenes, the depots and cellars and staircases and offices and - very important, of course - the break rooms and tea rooms. The markets and fairs, with all their hustle and bustle and the challenge of fitting everything into the space provided, which is different every time. The workshop places and demonstration places.

So, so many different places. So many wonderful meetings with colleagues, with friends, often times both. So many wonderful teaching experiences, and demonstration sessions, and getting close to actual medieval objects.

In the end, though, I ended up posting this as a picture of my favourite place:



Because this part of the floor in our place has seen so much action, and so many things, and when it gets involved, something fun is about to happen. This is where I set up work tables for larger projects that need a table, or where I sit for works like weaving the Egtved skirt.



This is also where I take photos of things for my documentation - like the Bernuthsfeld tunic reconstruction:



or the reconstruction of this late medieval fabric:



The cat, of course, was not sent off to the museum along with the cloth.

So in the end... that's my favourite place in regard to work, in some way. How about you? What's your favourite place for Living History, or for crafts, or both?

 

I had originally planned to share a Call for Submissions with you here today - for a special issue of a magazine about digital cultural heritage.

Information about this came to me via an e-mail, and so I clicked the link for the "learn more" (even though the mail seemed to have listed everything), and then I scrolled down a bit, and then I found this small note about the APC. That's the "article processing fee". Which, in that case, is the utter pittance of approximately, converted, 1550 Euro.

Ouch.

So. Here's what I think: I'm all for open access and free access to knowledge, research, and research articles. I also know that there's some things that can be done for free, and some things that can't be done for free. I do firmly believe that if someone is spending their workdays doing work, the money that comes out of said work should be enough to live on. So yes, paying for work done on editing, layouting, and (if it's a physical thing) printing and the paper - that is something that has to happen.

However... a lot of the academic journals will ask a really hefty price for reading them, which in a lot of cases can (or will) only be paid by institutions. If I'm charged 30+ € for a 30-year-old article (to download the pdf, mind you, not a physical copy) my understanding of the pricing is somewhat challenged. I would have more understanding if I knew that the paper authors and the peer reviewers would actually see some of that money... but nope. Academic articles, and academic review work, is entirely unpaid.

Some journals have started to offer Open Access publishing in the past few years. The money, in those cases, is then asked from the authors of the papers - called "open access fee" or "article processing fee" or something along those lines. Yes, there are costs to publishing, even if it's only online and there are no printing costs... but really? I'm not able, nor willing, to pay more than a thousand Euros to publish an article.

There's so much public money wasted on so many stupid things. Sigh. Some of it would be well spent on making research more accessible to everyone...

Today was mostly spent spinning - the Egtved blouse yarns want to be finished. I had, as was fitting, "help" from the little cat, who snuggled herself behind my back and snoozed.



That was comfy, and nice, and the only downside was that I had to get another sweater out of the closet afterwards, as the one I had planned to put on again was now lying underneath the cat... and no, I did not want to wake her by pulling the sweater out from under her furry butt.

So, here we are - de-gumming results:

The procedure I did yesterday resulted in colour loss and definitely loss of some, but not all sericin - the silk still has a rather firm hand and is stiffer than I'd expect it to be if completely de-gummed.

 


You can see the narrow band of lighter silk on the gummy original silk, and the completely de-gummed and then dyed silk on the left side. Maybe I should take another small sample of the gummy silk and try to get all the gum out by boiling it within an inch of its life? See what happens then?

In other news, I've been busy in the background working on the website re-launch. As usual, it eats up all the time it can and then some, and there's other things to take care of and work on (such as the Egtved Project, for which you're also due an update), too, so it's actually feeling a little like a wonder that I have made as much progress as I have. The learning curve is also rather steep - in the past few days, I've successfully dabbled in CSS, altered php scripts (do not leave an extra . in or you will get a lovely error), edited sql tables by adding columns, written an sql update thingummy to replace values in a column (it's called Abfrage in German and I don't know the English term), and used a regular expression for a search-and-replace routine. I've also cursed the inconsistency of things when an installation went wrong and pondered the pros and cons of starting over or not. (Verdict? I'll try, and if it goes wrong, I'll go with the semi-clean install that seems to work okay for now.) At least I cannot complain about lack of challenges in all kinds of fields!

 

Well, I definitely got your attention with the gummy silk thing yesterday!

First of all, here's a better picture of the two silks side by side:



Now to the answers to all the comments yesterday...

Jessica's comment was:

Sometimes, some detail in research pops up, and then it keeps haunting you, and occupying you, just a tiny bit. It's not growing into a big project, but it is always there, and occasionally, things touch it and then you try and fit the new thoughts into the current theories.

Well, that was probably a bit cryptic. So. Let me explain. About... silk.

As you probably know, most silk used in the Middle Ages was reeled, not spun - the long filaments from several cocoons wound off said cocoons together to get you a thread of silk. The more cocoons, the thicker your thread.

When the silkworm makes the cocoons, they're for its protection - so they are pretty hard. That's caused by sericin, or silk gum, which is more or less a protein-based glue sticking the filaments together and hardening them into a nice, protective shell. Hot water softens the sericin so the cocoons can be reeled off (it also kills the silkworm). The glue stays on, though, getting you... gummy silk, or raw silk.

This raw silk is stiff and can feel like a stiff nylon thread, very un-like the soft silk that we know today... because modern silk is usually completely de-gummed.

The thing about de-gummed silk? If you don't twist it, it is very fragile and prone to snagging. It's hard to handle altogether (though yes, very soft and shiny). Since talking to a conservator friend years ago who told me that usually, medieval silks have a much firmer structure than modern ones, I've been wondering about the use of gummy or partially gummy silk in history. The more recent research about the Albecund band is making me more and more convinced that gummy silk would be the solution to a few of the issues with weaving such a band.

One of the questions in that regard was - how does dyeing gummy silk work? Will it dye well? And will the dye be fast? (Side question - what happens if you de-gum it after dyeing?)

Well, I've gotten back two skeins that were test- dyed together, as in both mordanted and dyed together.



The gummy silk took on the colour much, much better... isn't that fascinating?

 

Do you do nalbinding? If yes, you could help a fellow crafter and researcher with her thesis project - Nele Nuutinen is writing about nalbinding instruction books, and is running a survey about nalbinding instructions used to learn the technique.

You can find the survey here - it is open until March 2. Please feel free to share the link with other nalbinders, too!