Things I learned in the past days:

1. Filming a video presentation of something makes me extra-super-duper nervous. Part of this is the thought in the back of my mind that every "erm..." and every silly facial expression and every little imperfection in speech will be recorded and thus preserved FOREVER, and thus I should be absolutely perfect, and that is hard to do.
2. Writing subtitles in English underneath a German spoken text is hard, not only because I can (duh) talk much faster than I can type. There's also the temptation to deviate (too) much from the things I actually say, to make it more clearer to the reader, or to cram more info into the text... which I as a viewer would find confusing, and not ideal.
3. There was very, very, very little twist in the threads used to weave the Albecunde belt. My tests done with my (only very slightly twisted) embroidery silk look like this:

While the original belt looks like this:



You cannot see the pattern as clearly on my test piece as you can on the original - it looks very pronouncedly diagonally structured in one twist direction, but more like a mushy solid surface in the other. On the original, there's a diagonal structure visible in both directions, and it's only a very little more pronounced in one compared to the other.

Here's closeups to make things even more clear:



You can see that the diagonals with an S-slant are much more defined than those with a Z-slant. That's because my thread is slightly s-twisted. It's not much, but enough to make quite a visible difference in the outcome; enough of the z-twist the tablets introduce is levelled out by the yarn twist to show. The twist is visible, if you look closely, in the areas where I changed tablet twist direction.



This is a detail, closeup, of the original. Here, too, you can observe the individual thread twist in the places where tablet turn direction changes - but it is so slight that it's almost impossible to detect. The best indication of it being a hint of an s-twist is that the S-cords in the tablet weave are a little bit more defined than the Z-cords.

Here's a microscope picture, going even closer to the threads:



This shows how important even a little bit more or less of twist can be when you are weaving a pattern that relies, for its effect, exclusively on the shine and the light refraction of the silk used - and how much knowledge and skill went into this band.

You can hear more about the Albecunde band on Sunday in the presentation at Virtual Lauresham (and see my video thingie...)!

Thank you to the Diözesanmuseum Augsburg for letting us study the belt in detail for our reconstruction project!

Today was a bit hectic, but in a good way - there was an urgent request for a little tablet-weaving something, which had to be finished as soon as possible so it could go into the post.

[caption id="attachment_5153" align="alignnone" width="576"] If you can't see the threads running through the tablets, that's because they are thin. Very thin. Not the thinnest I've worked with, but still. Trust me if I say that they are there, though, and they are quite colourful as well...


Even though I'd have liked to spend a little more time on this, and take a few breaks to let all the impressions from working with this very lovely stuff settle, and explore some more how best to handle the different details - I'm happy that I was able to get things done quickly, and hopefully the post will deliver in time, and all will be well, and I will be able to send you a link to a little video you can watch soon-ish.

Speaking of the post: The pandemic has its effect on postal services, too. German post is still running close to normal, with a few little things in effect to protect the posties (such as not needing a signature anymore, and putting the parcel down on the ground instead of handing it over). Outside of Germany, though, the picture is different - in some countries, there's issues with customs, or postal delivery is currently not done for quarantined areas. Sending things to the US is still possible for now, but larger parcels now cost a surcharge of 16 € due to the crisis... so I've put a note on my shop page (which will hopefully appear in all the right places), and I hope that things will not go worse. (Though I do suspect they will.)

Stay home, stay safe, and do some fun things!

After being happy about figuring out the setup and sequence for my twill tablet weaving demo for NESAT, using up the last of my playband, I set out to warp a new band. Logically, that band also needs two colours, ones that play well together as in "give good contrast".

Well. Let's say my brain was probably not fully online when I was making the new warp... I looked at the colours, thought "they look nice together", found that the two colours were rather different from each other, then thought for a split second "but they are both rather light..." and then proceeded to warp anyways.

Which was, in retrospective, not a good choice. That quickly became clear when weaving the first few picks.



Yes, the two colours do look nice together. Yes, you can see the lines. However, contrast is not very high after all, and high contrast in every imaginable lighting (including not-so-good lighting) would be a very smart thing to have for a demo band.

The reason for the not-so-good contrast is the difference, or better the lack of difference, in the grey value of the colours... which becomes very obvious if you use one of the convenient quick filters that will turn your image into grey-scale or, in this case, because I like it, sepia:



Nice, isn't it? You can see the structure of the band, and you might be able to guess where one or the other colours are, because of teeny tiny differences in darkness - but then that might just be an effect of the slight irregularity of the colours.

So this warp is not what I need for my demo. But. The effect of "everything the same colour" is just what you get in so, so many cases of archaeological textile finds - which, of course, includes tablet weaves. In these bands, there's sometimes a hint of pattern weaving because of changes in twist direction in the band.

I've had this idea of trying out how a band with a few different pattern types would look if everything turned the same colour for a while now, and this oopsie warp now means I have something to do exactly that. It's just 10 tablets, and not very long, so it will not result in spectacular stuff, but I'm planning to do some "threaded-in patterns" using tablet threading direction and alignment, a bit of "4 forward, 4 back" patterning, and then some Egyptian Diagonals and twilly stuff to round things off. Make photos of the band in colour, turn them into sepia, and see.

I think this sounds like fun - it just remains to see when I'll find the time for said fun, as there is still the "real" NESAT demo prep work to do. (Also there's a queue of fun stuff waiting for their turn... which, yes, is a luxury problem.)

To my great delight, I have the permission to share some of my pictures from the Albecunde tablet weave with you... so here you go:



This is a close-up of a detail from the Albecunde weave. You can see that the weft threads are pressed in very, very closely. You can also admire the beautiful colour (after so many hundreds of years!)

At about the middle of the image, there's a general reversal of turn direction of all the tablets, including the 6 selvedge tablets (there's some damage at the selvedge in that spot as well).

And here it is in blurry comparison to one of my bands, woven from the embroidery silk:



The individual tablet cords really are tiny... my band is about 4 mm wide with 9 tablets, and the original about 38 mm with 92 tablets.

You can visit the original in the Museum St. Afra in Augsburg, it is well worth a visit!

I've reported about the museum trip to see the Albecunde band... and of course, I had to do a little bit of testing. I used the Texel Stocking silk, which is 4-ply and only partly de-gummed; the individual strands are about 110 den in thickness, so I split up the yarn and pulled one of the strands through each of the tablet holes of one tablet.

That was fiddly, but not too bad; for my sanity, I only did 12 tablets anyways.

So... the result: The partly de-gummed silk is very, very pleasant to weave with. I'm getting a nice and tight structure as well; the silk is also still quite shiny even though there's some of the sericin still in. I also have the impression that the manipulation sort of splits the individual filaments apart, adding to the shine.

It's fine. It's tiny. It's relatively shiny. I probably don't need to mention that it is slow work, because it is so fine and the individual picks add very little to the length of the band. And of course there's not the bang effect the original gives, with its large width, but even white on white, the pattern is visible in a very subtle way:



I'm not sure yet why some of the patterning seems clearer than some other bits...



but as you can see, hopefully, there's a threading direction mistake (as, by the way, there was in the original for a bit) in one of the tablets. I'll probably play some more with this, and take some more macro pictures, and will hopefully figure out where the issues are. Might also be that the pattern will be easier to read on a coloured band. (I think I have some silk paint somewhere in a box in the basement...)

 
Also - this silk is too thin. If I calculate from the 4 mm the dozen tablets give me, I'd end up at 30 mm instead of  38 with 92 tablets (which is what the original has). So... about 150 den should do the trick, if mathematics don't mislead me here.

 

It's 2020... which means it is three years since the last NESAT conference. Which means that it's time for the next one. I already wrote about trying to get things done early this time around, and testing my demo. The conference is in May, so there's still a good bit of time until things get seriously deadline-y, but nevertheless I'm quite relieved that I have figured it out now.

I played around with the demo setup a bit more, cutting the number of tablets down from 12 to ten (which is just, juuuust enough to show the twill pattern rhythm, and the block that forms when a diagonal is cruising its way across the stack of tablets). I've also changed the sequence a bit, including a tiny strip of double face now, then diagonals, then diagonal patterning, and finally a little bit of patterning on 3/1 broken twill (which includes the crux of the thing, the direction change in twill background).

Cutting down to only ten tablets did make a difference. The larger difference was probably made by me abandoning my lovely, trusty weaving knife in favour of just the finger, and not bothering about the fact that my band width is not so even, and the wefts are sloppily tightened.

30 minutes is still a very, very short amount of time. It also still results in a very short bit of weaving:



However, the new sequence means I can explain things better as I go along, and that I can, miraculously, squeeze all the important bits into my time slot. Hooray!

Now I only have to make a suitable warp for the conference demo (as I've used up the one on the picture), make sufficient notes of what to do and what to explain at which stage, and then do another practice run or three shortly before the conference.

Which means that I'm now free to work on the other NESAT presentation - also about tablet weaving, but entirely different bands in an entirely different structure. Fun things!

 

As you know from yesterday's post, I spent Monday on a museum visit. Monday.

In case you're not familiar with German museums: They usually are all closed on Mondays, and there are very, very few exceptions to that rule. That means when you're in there on that day, it is either a special occasion (such as a public holiday, or a special event in the museum) or you have an appointment for something that happens best when there is no public around.

In my case, I had the wonderful opportunity to meet with two fellow textile people and see a few early medieval tablet weaves that are in the exhibition of the Diözesanmuseum St. Afra: The Witgarius-Belt and the Albecunde-Belt. The latter also has a piece of the so-called Mary's Belt attached to it. (Unfortunately, there are almost no pictures of these belts on the internet - you can see a tiny one of Witgarius here, and a tiny one of Albecunde's belt (usually called Ailbecunde's belt) here.

All three are tablet-woven, and all of them are done in different variations of the technique: The Albecunde-Belt is woven all in one colour, with letters made by turn direction changes to form a subtle pattern that will be visible in certain angles and almost invisible in others. The threads are very, very fine, and the weave is incredibly dense. The start of the inscription, which also gives the belt its name, is "N NOMINE DOMINI ALBECUND" ... and while the first missing letter clearly has to be an I, I'm not quite sure about how it all goes on - it looks like a letter Q to me after the D, followed by an E, which is sort of weird. Anyways, the sure weirdness is that there is definitely no I in the name Albecund... - but there is a swap of the tablet turn direction between the A and the L, which might have led to the interpretation of a letter I. That was a first very interesting thing; the other, for me, was the density of the weave, which results in very pleasant angles of the letter serifs. You might know the syndrome of stretched-out, elongated patterns in tablet weaving? Well, this has clearly not happened here. It has not happened in a way that has deeply, thoroughly impressed me, and I now am convinced that I have to work on my weft-pressing technique, as there's obviously room for improvement.

The Witgarius-Belt has a similar ground weave - wine-red silk, with edge tablets in yellowish silk and red silk - and a similar density, but is brocaded. The gold thread brocading does, again, form letters; they show up in red on gold background on one side and in gold on red background on the other side.

The third of the pieces is only preserved as two small fragments, and one of them is on the back of the Albecunde-Belt, and thus not really visible. The larger fragment, though, can be seen on the belt front; it shows animals woven in 3/1 broken twill technique, alternatingly white on a background of coloured stripes and coloured on a white background. That was, of course, very interesting for me as well, and I hope to weave one or two of the animals in the near-ish future. My count comes to 41 tablets for the pattern zone, which fits in nicely for my play-band with the 42 tablets... and one of the motifs is a rather nice-looking duck-like animal. I haven't done a duck yet, so...

It was amazing to see these things close up (the case was opened for us, so we could take a closer look). Especially the Albecunde-Belt was a delight to look at. The technique itself, in which this is woven, is really simple - but the fineness of the threads, the evenness of the weave, and especially how densely the wefts are packed in reveals the true mastery of the weaver. It seems like the ultimate impressive understatement status symbol, something simple brought to utter perfection.

As you can see, my brain is still rather full of the impressions. Also, I have a good number of photographs, and quite a few things to try out once I get to string up my tablet weaves again, and altogether I'm very, very happy.

Museum Mondays? They are wonderful. Won.der.ful.