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Katrin Hieroglyphs.
23. Februar 2024
Yes, that would sort of fit that aspect - but you can also go from bits of woods to sticks if you ar...
Bruce Hieroglyphs.
23. Februar 2024
I think the closest English equivalent would be 'Down the rabbit hole'. It has one entrance (No, not...
Harma Spring is Coming.
20. Februar 2024
I'm definitely jealous! Mine disapeared except for one pathetic little flower. But the first daffodi...
Gudrun Rallies All Over Germany.
23. Januar 2024
Vielen Dank für den Beitrag. Ja, wir müssen darüber reden, gegen das Vergessen. Zum Glück haben mein...
Anne Decker Aargh.
17. Januar 2024
This is less likely to have an effect on your personal samples as you likely wrap the same way for a...
OKT.
27
2

The Things You Learn.

Sometimes it really is amazing what you learn as a, well, let's call it "collateral" when looking for something, or researching stuff.

For instance... one thing I learned today is that it's amazingly hard and time-consuming to taper down a 0.5 mm diameter beech rod at both ends. Why would I want to do this, you ask? The answer is, of course, related to the Textile Forum - it's to fake an old Peruanian spindle (which you can find described on this page, scroll down a bit), with the laughable weight of up to 5 grams. I have glass beads to serve as whorls which fit perfectly, but of course the spindle itself needs to be the right shape. 

So I went at it with an electrical drill, sand paper, and various sharp wood-working instruments. Combined with my very mediocre skills at wood-working, it went... tediously. I have to finish tapering down my first try, as one end is still way too thick, and depending on how that goes, I might have another go at it with a different tool, and a different process, but let's say that it is by far not as easy as I had assumed. (Nothing new here, though. My experience, which I am of course not always taking hints from, is that most things that you'd guess to be straight-forward, easy, and quick to do, aren't.)

Another thing I learned yesterday is that goldbeater's skin, which is a bovine membrane, is the outer layer of the bovine appendix. (I knew it came from the appendix, but not that it was the outer layer only. I had wondered, since the bovine appendices you can buy for use in making sausage products make for a very thick casing, but goldbeater's skin is very thin.) The membranes, for gold-beating purposes, are dried and probably treated similarly to parchment (sources vary on that). For use in gold-beating, they are then covered with a special kind of plaster, which is beaten in, and then they are used for about 70 times - afterwards, they are too brittle for gold-beating and get discarded, or re-used for other purposes.

Among those is the use in musical instruments, as in a kind of "bird-flute", I've been told. Might making gold thread also be one of them? That is on the list of things to possibly find out. It would at least be a very fitting second use of the skins, and if you're going to buy your leaf gold or leaf silver or leaf gilt-silver (the most common type, saving some on the pricey gold), you could pick up the membrane at the same time. Provided, of course, that it has not become too brittle, or that the plaster inhibits use for gilding the membrane, or that the pieces are too small for getting gilded and then cut up into strips and then wound around a thread core. Ah. So many things that are lost to the passage of time.

By the way, if you're buying the skin today, it's quite pricey. Which is not new, because back in 1952, when a gold-beater got paid 65 Pfennig for an hour's worth of work, a skin cost 1 Mark (which is 100 Pfennig, for those of you not familiar with the old German currency units). There's fewer sources for the skin these days, though, as the modern variation is a kind of plastic.

Fascinating, all that stuff, right? 

0
JUNI
07
0

Gender Ponderings on Spinning, Part II.

I've mentioned the Bible as one of the gender-spinning-question related items in the last post (before the long weekend of Pentecost - just in case you wondered about yesterday's blog silence). 

There are a few mentions of spinning in the Bible. Finding them is made relatively easy by the helpful BibleHub site, where you can look for keywords and then get information about them, and related terms as well. 

One of the mentions of "spinning" is in Exodus 25:35, and it goes:

And every skillful woman spun with her hands, and they all brought what they had spun in blue and purple and scarlet yarns and fine twined linen.

Exodus 25:35, English Standard Version

The BibleHub site also lists the different translations, another very helpful feature. 

So. Here it's "woman" in all versions. Another interesting bit, for our intents and purposes, is Proverbs 31:19, which is from a passage about the virtues of a noble woman: 

In her hand she holds the distaff and grasps the spindle with her fingers.

Proverbs 31:19, New International Version

In this part, spinning is closely linked to women, and especially virtuous (as in good) women. The making of yarn, and cloth, and further on in the passage clothing the family, is something mentioned as a positive aspect. 

If that connection was seen as a strong one (which would be sort of standing to reason, given the importance of textiles and textile manufacture), it is not a great jump to using it as a kind of symbol in artworks to signal that a specific woman would be one that is virtuous/good/productive.

Spinning can also be seen as negative, though - it depends on the context. You can read more about the topic in "Equally in God's Image: Women in the Middle Ages"

However, in both cases it's very much associated with the female gender.

The question remains: How much of the women-only impression that we get from our sources is due to representation bias? Were there men spinning in the Middle Ages, in relevant numbers? How about children - male and female? It would be really, really interesting to know more about this - also because finding out whether there's a strong representation bias in this case might give an insight in possible other representation biases.

0
APR.
08
2

More About Riding in Dresses.

 So - there was discussion already about the riding slits, and how folds fall in dresses with and without a middle gore, and then I got a question via Instagram about women on horses. The examples given are taken from the Codex Manesse, which is the very splendid, very famous illuminated manuscript in the Uni Heidelberg (here's the full digitised MS).

There are three women on horses in the book's images: on fol. 69, fol. 183v,  fol. 251, and fol. 316v. The last is the easiest, because the lady in question is not sitting astride, but sideways, and she's held by a man sitting in the saddle as you'd expect him to:

Cod. Pal. germ. 848, fol. 316 v. This lady is clearly seated sideways, and the dress looks too narrow to accommodate sitting astride without riding up a huge lot.

Now, the others are more difficult to gauge. First of all, for comparison, a man dressed in a riding coat (Reisekappe), sitting on a horse, from the same MS: 

Cod. Pal. germ. 848, fol. 73.

That is a rather typical garment for travelling, and it - like the tunic worn beneath it - definitely has a riding slit cut in here. Both fall very smoothly, with almost no folds, and certainly no bunch-up folds to be visible.

For the women sitting on the horses, it looks different.

Cod. Pal. germ. 848, fol. 251.

This is actually the only one of the three women where I'd be sure that she is sitting astride. There is one foot definitely visible, and it's in the correct position for medieval riding. She's also looking straight ahead with a straight body position.

Note how the fabric drapes over her leg, and how a fold comes down from under her butt behind her knee towards her ankle. My suspicion is that the bunch-up problem was solved here by having a really generous amount of fabric in the dress - so there's enough both in width and length of the dress to make it work.

For the next two women, there's also folds draping around their legs, and a cascade of folds going down under the butt towards the knee.  

Cod. Pal. germ. 848, fol. 183v.

She's either sitting astride and turning backwards towards the man, or she is sitting sideways in the saddle. I lean towards astride, but I'm not completely sure. Unfortunately, all her feet are hidden.

Cod. Pal. germ. 848, fol. 69.

This lady is sitting even more sideways, with really curious folds of the garment. They might be intended to show bunching up - but the rest of the folding actually looks a bit more like sitting sideways to me. 

There's an image in a British Library MS that shows, very clearly, an un-slitted dress, with the wearer sitting astride, as it drapes over the horse. 

As far as I can tell, there's thus two possible solutions to the bunch-up problem: Either having garments with sufficient width and length to cover everything that is supposed to be covered even when adding part of a horse to the equation, or sitting sideways. Another thing that would be interesting to test with reconstructed garments - and some horses with reconstructed saddles...

2
FEB.
09
11

Gummy or Not Gummy...

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?

 
0
DEZ.
14
2

Hah! or not Hah!, that is the question.

I may or may not have found a way to consistently and quickly measure both the diameter of hand-spun yarns and their thickness variance. With no highly specialised tools for textile analysis.

Actually, with very few tools at all.

I will know whether I can go "Hah!" in joy about that once I have bent my mind around the working functions of one or a few picture analysis programmes... and then I'll tell you all about it.
0
JULI
05
3

I almost forgot.

A while ago, I wrote a teaser post about a plying technique that I wanted to write about - and then I almost forgot I promised you a follow-up post. ZM15

While most of the ladies on medieval images have a long distaff that clearly holds fibres, like this:


Psalter of Fecamp. Ca. 1180. From Petzold, Andreas. Romanische Kunst, art in context. Köln: Dumont, 1995, p. 97.

and some fewer ones have a short distaff that also clearly holds fibres, like this:

Detail from Giotto: Annunciation to St. Anna. Scrovegni-Chapel, Padua. 1300-1320. From Flores d'Arcais, Francesca. Giotto. New York: Abbeville, 1995, p. 150.

something about this picture has always sort of tickled the back of my brain.

Young woman, Pseudo-Apuleius, 13th century. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. Vind. 93. From Kotzur, Hans-Jürgen. Hildegard von Bingen 1098-1179. Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1998, p. 336.

It's not the usual what she's holding; it's clearly a shorter distaff than usual, and the form of the stuff on the distaff is very clearly defined, very spindle-shaped and not fibery-looking at all.

Let's jump to another topic: the problem of plying. I don't know how well you manage to spin the same amount of length on two spindles or spools - I don't manage so very well; there's always some of the yarn left on one side when the other side has already run out. There's a theoretically very easy way to avoid this, though: To fold the yarn spun in half (from one single spindle, spool, or cop) and ply it with itself. When there isn't a foulup, you end up with a neat two-ply with no singles left.

There are different instructions on the 'Net on how to ply from a center-pull ball, and there's also the Andean Plying Bracelet which both are means to achieve the desired end-result: a skein of single folded in half and plied up. Both involve re-winding the spun yarn from the bobbin of a spinning wheel (where it's an absolute necessity) or from a spindle.

Me, I'm lazy. I like to be lazy. I promote winding spindles in a special way so that I can, after spinning, just slide that cop of yarn off the spindle onto a slim bit or stick of wood or so for storage. (Chopsticks, by the way, work fine.) And the way that I wind my yarn results in a stable, spindle-shaped cop of yarn that is essentially something not too unlike a center-pull ball. So I tested plying directly from the  cop (transferred to a slim stick) onto the spindle... and it works, and very very well too.

There's me doing it...

... and a close-up with a slightly different hand position that occurs quite frequently during the process.


So... here's a method that is efficient, easy to use, will result in no waste of yarn singles, and does not require extra tools (you can use a spindle stick to ply from). And I'm hooked on this new technique.
0
JAN.
20
0

Good reasons. (I think.)

When people ask me whether I would have liked to live in the Middle Ages, I usually answer the same: I have four very good reasons to not want to live back then - coffee, tea, chocolate and contact lenses. Those four are quite known not to exist in premodern times, so they (as reasons) are obvious to visitors, and most of the Living History folks get a laugh out of those Fabulous Four.

Have you ever been to a historical fair, market or something where there was no tea or coffee to be had? In my experience, that doesn't exist - or will only when hell freezes over. For every hardcore (and non-caffeine-addicted-in-modern-life) person that will forego tea and coffee while doing LH, you will probably find a hundred that do very much enjoy that cuppa in the morning and maybe also the afternoon, and a few of those might not function at all without their hot beverage starter.

Usually, that's it - I make my joke about The Four Reasons, people laugh or smile, and we move on. But sometimes, there is more behind the question. Sometimes people are trying to figure out whether the Middle Ages (or another given time in history) would have been a better place to live, or maybe a worse one, than our time here and now. And then, this question of "would you like to live back then" gets another answer.

If there actually were a time machine that could go backwards and you would stuff me into it and throw me back into the Middle Ages, it would be very interesting for me - but also very different from what I'm used to, and very difficult as well. I do not drink alcohol, and (low-alcohol) beer was a standard drink if not the standard drink back then. Though I do like my coffee and chocolate, I can do without - but I'm severely short-sighted, and once my lenses are worn out, I would be stuck with an eyesight that might enable me to do fine embroidery or paint miniatures or do something similarly tiny and detailed, but would be a noticeable handicap in day-to-day business. I don't have very resistant tooth material, and I might end up with cariouse or missing teeth quite fast. I would at least have some basic understanding of how to build and control a hearth fire, how to work with textiles, and how to get along on a medieval technology level, but I'd have to learn the language before communicating properly with people, and I'm pretty sure that my way of thinking is thoroughly modern.

It would probably be comparable to somebody from our modern world thrown into a so-called "primitive society" in the rainforest or a djungle somewhere, with a totally different cultural structure, other conventions, another language and a widely different way of thinking and technological level. In short, if you'd pop me back with that time machine, I'd be happy if you would also fetch me back after a few days or weeks.

But that's my modern person we are talking about, rooted firmly in the twentieth century. Like I just did, I can speculate on how I, personally, would feel if thrown back in time.
But the people born into their time naturally did not have these problems because they never knew our modern life and society - which means that life felt for medieval folks just like ours feels to us, normal with maybe an occasional dash of the not-so-normal. If there is no coffee in the world, nobody can miss it. If there is no other way to heat up a pot than to make a fire, that's just the way. And if short-sighted people just have to cope, they will. Daily life is the unspectacular thing, in any time, in any society; it has its ups and downs, but it's business as usual overall. And because we are so far away from living in the Middle Ages, we might look back on an aspect of life then and shudder because we, from our experience and expectations of living here and now, think it unbearable - but so will people frown and shudder in the future when they look back on our life. And if we want to know how daily life felt in any part in history, it's probably just like our daily life feels - with different structures, technologies and conventions, but that is just on the outside.

On the inside, it's all normal. Daily life. Comfort and boredom, linking us to everybody else that ever lived... isn't that a nice thought?
0

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