I'm back from my trip to Lübeck, and it was wonderful! If you're in the area, make sure to visit the Europäisches Hansemuseum (where you can read everything in German or English or Danish (if I remember correctly)...)

The two days planned for workshops and constructive sessions in the museum were full, and intense, and a lot of fun, just as they should be. There was a bit of time for me, before travelling home again, to take a stroll through the city and visit some of the important sights. Such as the Holstentor.

Much more thrilling for me, though, was walking down the Hundestraße - one of the many places in Lübeck where archaeological textiles were found...



There's a lot of other places which I did not go to, due to lack of time - but I'm hoping there will be a next time, and then I will go to the Schrangen, and visit some other museums, and enjoy some more of that lovely city.

Speaking of archaeology in Lübeck - there's been another find of something that usually easily decays: a layer cake has been found in an excavation! It was retrieved from a house that collapsed during the Second World War, in 1942, and it is something of a miracle. There's been analyses of the cake, and it was a nut cake. It's kind of nuts that it survived, so I find that very fitting! You can see a picture of the cake and read a bit about it (in German) here.

Medieval manuscripts are beautiful things, and they are and always were precious things. We cannot be entirely sure about how many people back in the Middle Ages were able to read, or write, or both - but we do know that at least some women were able to do so, and there's manuscripts written by women's hands.

The Schnütgen Museum in Cologne currently runs an exhibition about such manuscripts. It is titled "By Women's Hands" and will run until end of January 2022. If you're in the area, the museum is very much worth a visit anyways.

Following up on the cording and cording tool use discussion - here's a few thoughts about modern tool use for reproducing ancient or old things.

In an ideal world, if you're doing a reconstruction, everything would be as it was in the original - same materials, same processes, same tools. However, that is usually not possible - due to a number of reasons.

Sometimes, getting materials that correspond to the original material is not possible. That is especially the case when working with plant or animal materials that have been undergoing selective breeding for a few hundreds, or thousands, of years since the original item was made. You don't get the medieval varieties of food crops these days anymore (maybe with a few very rare exceptions), and if we're looking at animal materials, whether bone from cattle or wool from sheep, there's been a huge lot of change as well. So compromises may be necessary starting with the material, which will, of course, have an influence on the finished piece.

Using the original tools and processes is the next part that can turn out to be more difficult than one thinks at first. First obstacle is that we often don't know how, exactly, something was made. With a lot of textile work it's possible to use different processes and different tools to arrive at the exact same outcome. You will not be able to tell whether a yarn was spun on a spindle or on a more modern spinning wheel if the spinner takes care to match the properties of the original thread, for example. Same thing applies for a woven fabric - if there's no tell-tale things like a starting border, how could a bit of fabric let you know what loom type it was woven on?

For purposes of research and experiential archaeology (and in some cases, if there's a question to answer and the setup is done accordingly, even experimental archaeology), it would of course be preferable to use tools and processes that are known for the period the original item comes from. However... when a reproduction is commissioned, there is often a limit to the amount of time available before the thing has to be finished, and - even more important - there is also a limit to the amount of money that can be spent on a single item. Both these constraints will make speeding the whole thing up a very attractive, or very necessary, thing.

So while I enjoy working with old methods and reconstructed tools, personally, I have no problem whatsoever with using modern gadgets for my reproduction work if there will be no perceivable difference in the end product. Using an e-spinner for making yarns, or a modern cording tool for making cords, or a treadle loom instead of a warp-weighted one for weaving plain fabrics, these are all things that can still result in a reproduction that is as close as possible to the original while cutting down on costs a lot. And I personally do prefer to make these compromises in the process to make repros more affordable, thus getting more of them out into the world, for people to see and touch and experience, than having a "perfect" replica made once in a blue moon.

Though if you should know of someone wanting to have something made using all old reconstructed methods only - do send them my way, I'd be happy to be part of such a project, too!

 

You probably know about my fascination with medieval pins - which is logical, in a way, since they play a part in two of my regions of interest: tailoring and sewing (where they come in very handy, even though I only need very few of them for working), and fastening dress items when wearing them (my headdress, for instance, relies on three pins to make it just so, and it is very comfy and nice to wear that way).

They are humble, and small, and often overlooked. I find them very, very beautiful though, especially close-up. I'm also fascinated by the question of how they were made - there's several different types, and accordingly different methods to make them.

If you also enjoy looking at these little helpers, head over to the Textile Research Centre Leiden's blog, where there's some wonderful digital microscope photos of early modern pin heads!

... and that is a very nice thing.

It's been a quite busy week; I've been preparing for some workshops in the Hansemuseum in Lübeck, to give the staff a bit of textile (spinning!) experience. It will be my first in-person workshop for quite a while (I'm not counting the European Textile Forum here...) and I am really looking forward to it. Online courses are nice, and they have their own advantages, but some things are still much easier to handle when everyone is actually in the same spot.

This week there's also, of course, been some work done on the Egtved project, and an online course today in the morning, and the usual shop-related things to handle. I certainly cannot complain about boredom!

In case your weeks are not busy enough, and you're interested in medieval manuscripts, you might want to join the livestream for a lecture next Wednesday - the Courtauld Institute is streaming "Fragmented Illuminations: Medieval and Renaissance Manuscript Cuttings at the Victoria and Albert Museum". The event starts at 17:00 London time, and it's free to attend; you can book your spot on the livestream (or actual tickets for the event in the Lecture Hall, if you're in London) via a link there.

 

Both Beatrix and Harma have posted comments about the Egtved cording and the efficiency of the method, or how to make it faster. (Thank you, both of you, for your input! It's much appreciated.)

Cording by hand is always a relatively slow procedure. It can be made a bit quicker with several methods; one way is like Beatrix suggested, using both hands to insert twist.

In some cases, it's even possible to use the hands and leg to roll the two elements into one direction on the leg, then hold them together and ply them by rolling in the opposite direction. Whether that is possible or not depends on the material, the dexterity of the maker, and - last but not at all least - on the required or desired amount of twist to be inserted.

I find that the more twist is needed, the slower the whole process will be, and simultaneously it becomes harder to speed it up with these small changes to procedure. With more twist inserted, the elements get more "lively" and will untwist much easier than with less twist. That is the reason why my fingers are so close to the fell in the video, and why I only insert a little bit of twist before each cross. I have tried to work further away from the fell, inserting more twist at a time, but the probability of losing much of that when doing the crossing (or plying) then is quite high, which makes that method less efficient than the one shown in the video. At least for me - it may be different for someone else. These making things are, after all, very individual.

Regarding the use of both hands to insert said twist: I actually do this, though it is very hard to see in the video. There's only a rather small motion of the left hand fingers before the cross, but it is there. What does take time is the crossing over, and I can't see myself going much faster on that than I am doing already. The elements have to be transferred carefully, or they will lose the necessary twist for the density of the cording. There's probably a bit of speed-up possibility left with more practise, but I don't see much improvement lingering close by. The elements are quite thin which means a lot of crossings, and as stated, those are what takes time. It takes me about 6 minutes to make one cord with this method.

That all said, Harma's suggestion was the use of a modern tool to speed up things...  which is what I actually do for production. (My cord twisting tool is different from the Ashford tool mentioned, though, and more suitable for the specific requirements of the skirt cords.) The estimate of about 1/10th of the time is, unfortunately, not true - that would be wonderful, and extremely fast. That might be the case for a very long cord with a relatively soft twist, but for mine, the speed difference is much less - though still considerable, which is exactly why I use the tool.

The Egtved Skirt is surprisingly short, with only about 40 cm overall length. Subtract about 2 cm for the waistband, and another c 2 cm for the felted rings on the bottom, and you end up with approximately 36 cm of cords for the actual skirt part.

That does not sound like a lot, right? Well, it quickly adds up, however - after all, there's about 350 or so cords in the complete skirt. These cords are very hard twisted, and one way to make this type of cord is to use the twist-and-cross method that was also employed for making bast proto-fabrics, like the mat Ötzi had with him.

Twist-and-cross means you twist each of your elements in one direction, then cross it over the other in the opposite direction. This gives you very good control and enables you to make a very hard cord with lots of twist and countertwist. Accordingly, the ply angle can be very high. The downside is that it takes a rather long time...

You can see how I do the twist-and-cross on one cord of my skirt in this video:


I've come a bit further than when I filmed this, but there's still about one metre to go... with the cords. That is a lot of twisting left to do!