After the Textile Forum, there was a little bit of a breather, and then there was - NESAT! Only online, sadly. I had been looking forward so much to a trip to northern Finland with friends, and then hanging out and meeting in person all the lovely people that I only see every three years there... but due to the insecure situation with the pandemic, the conference organisers had opted for the online-only version.

Our presentations were all pre-recorded and available on the conference platform a bit before the conference proper started, and the sessions were discussion-only (with a very short summary of the papers to refresh memories). There was a large variety of topics, and it was really, really nice to at least virtually see the friendly faces of all the colleagues, and to hear about current research.

My personal conference was made so much better and more enjoyable by joining up with a friend to attend together - and we even managed to have some Finnish sweets and some snacks made after Finnish recipes, along with the obligatory too-large amounts of coffee that have to be drunk at every conference.

After the conference, some of the presentations were made public, and they are listed on the NESAT website - the presentation I did with Beatrix Nutz is among them, so feel free to enjoy some slightly weird tablet-woven bands from Early Modern mining sites. I also very much recommend watching the video about medieval seal bag textiles, which I found very, very fascinating!

(continued from part 5)

There was, of course, even more stuff about looms and weaving. Together with Florian, who works at Lauresham, I'd been pondering and planning a loom made from hardware store parts - things you'd easily get at a typical German Baumarkt. The aim was to have an affordable loom from parts you can get without having special stores, and it should of course also be easy to build.

[caption id="attachment_6419" align="alignnone" width="300"] Putting together the two uprights - since we had the luxury of a lot of clamps, we used them. The boards are glued together, and then secured additionally with a few screws.


Most of the cutting-to-length of the parts can be done in the hardware store, where there's usually a cutting service point. That greatly reduces the amount of work and time necessary for making the loom - most of the tasks that are left is assembling the bits by glueing and screwing.

There's still some details to fine-tune, but overall, our little side project was a definite success. The hardest part about this loom is squaring off the ends of the round beam - it would be possible to use another solution, but the square ends will sit very securely in the upper part of the loom, and getting the sawing done was successfully undertaken by someone who does not have a lot of practice with this.

[caption id="attachment_6418" align="alignnone" width="300"] The upper part of the loom, with the square end of the round beam sitting nice and snug in the uprights. For the first test, another beam with a weave already attached was used - for "proper" weaving, you'd attach your weave to the beam directly or via a narrow slat or rod that the starting border has been stitched to.


The loom comes in at about 80-90 € for the materials, plus the cost for the loomweights. I did manage to find something hardware-store-y for that as well, though it might need pre-ordering, as it's not an utterly common item. Curious?

It's a certain kind of pipe connector that weighs about 120 g each, is about 3 cm wide, and can be strung up easily. So for someone who prefers to buy weights instead of getting hold of some clay and forming, then drying them, this is a viable alternative. They come in at about 3-4 € per piece, which means that if you want to do a very wide weave, it will cost you quite a bit of money. On the other hand, it also means you can get them from a suitable supplier and will have no work at all with them.

The finished loom is a full-size thing, with 140 cm between the uprights, and a bit more than 2 m in height. It's heavy enough to stand securely in our first tests, and it should be possible to adjust loom position to keep the shed size large enough for easy weaving even for beginners. The prototype is still being tested.

(continued from part 4)

The special thing about the pharaoh band is that there's extra heddles and extra warps that, when lifted alternatingly with the regular warps, form a pattern in the middle of the band. It's fascinating, and beautiful, and surprisingly difficult to get everything sorted out and aligned and moving like it should and behaving. You need to have the heddles straight so they can glide down or let the other threads glide up, but they can't be really pulled because you want the other shed.



And, as usual, when somebody skilled at this does it, everything looks easy...

What I personally found much, much easier to do was weaving with goat hair on a Sudanese ground loom reconstruction. That was a very coarse weave, and there was only the natural shed, the countershed had to be picked out with a stick each time. With only a few and very thick plied threads per centimetre, though, this was relatively quick and easy to do. I had a stint of weaving on the loom early one morning, and a second bit of weaving on a sunny afternoon, and I really enjoyed the feel of the smooth, warm goat hair yarn on my hands.

 
I've been wondering about that kind of yarn ever since I read Hald's article about Bedouin spinning and weaving with goat hair for tents, and now finally I've touched it and worked with it. That was definitely one of the many, many "hooray!" moments I had at this Forum.

 

(continued from part 2)

I did hop into the car for a long drive to Belgium - because the next thing that happened was the European Textile Forum. To my utter delight!

The Textile Forum is my week of sheer and utter textile madness, and I missed it so much last year when it had to be cancelled due to the pandemic. It was a chance to take and plan for this year, but the stars lined up favourably, with a wonderful venue in Belgium that would have enabled us to cancel everything up to about two weeks before the Forum, if things should explode.

Fortunately, they did not.

First of all, let me introduce you to the house where we had our conference, called "Merveille de Méry". It's utterly beautiful, and spacious, and situated a bit above Tilff-Méry in the woods, so it's quite quiet and with lovely green surroundings.


Unfortunately, I didn't take any decent photos of the house itself - but you can have a look at it on its own website (where you can also book it as a vacation home for up to 18 persons).

There was ample space in the garden for working, there was the multi-purpose room in the basement prepared with looms and tables for more weaving, and of course we spread out over the rest of the venue as well - the main room, where we had the presentations, and the balcony. At one point, there was a little abandoned bow loom sitting on the stairs late at night:



The topic of the week was "Sticks and Stones May Make a Loom", and being a non-weaver, I think this was the Forum where I did learn the most. It was absolutely amazing, and my weaving skills have increased a lot. They are still rather puny, I'm afraid - getting a lot better at something you have no real experience with is easily done while it may still let you end up in the "not very good at it yet" section.

I had a lot of fun, too.

Weaving included several weaver-tensioned trials, and I have finally understood, during that week, why you'd want to tie yourself to your piece of work. That had always been a mystery to me before. I will still use two fixed points for my tablet weaving in the future, but for bands or other types of weaving? Weaver-tensioned is definitely an option.

Basically, what weaver-tension weaving does for you is give you a lot of flexibility in your tension - and if you have mastered it, in a good way. You can reduce tension for some steps of the process, such as when you are changing sheds, and increase it for others, such as pressing in your weft, and this becomes an intricate and subtle dance with your tools and materials. It is absolutely fascinating to watch when someone does this well. It also means you can lessen the abrasion on your threads by only using as much tension as necessary for each step, and since that can differ, weaver-tensioning gives you the ability to use less tension overall.

Me, I'm still struggling with this intricate dance. I know, in theory, when I want to do what, but the movements are too big, too jerky, and my tension is usually either way too low or way too high. It is a question of fine-tuning the whole body fine motor skills, so to say... so maybe it's a good thing I have a full three items to practise on.

I'm very much looking forward to Sunday - which is when I will do the first online version of my workshop about medieval seams and stitches. It is an intro workshop resulting in a nice little sampler cloth, showing the most usual stitches and some seam and hem variations. It can serve, later, as a help to decide which seam to use, or which kind of hem or neatening will work best.

In the previous courses, I always brought along a few write-on-cloth pens and some extra linen fabric or bands for labels with the stitch names. But since that is not an option for an online class, there's been an upgrade:



Properly woven, nice neat labels for the stitch types.

These were done in a German manufacture on band looms, and they are in organic cotton. If you are looking for labels for something - maybe "handmade by ..." or with your name woven in, or with whatever other text, I can absolutely recommend Bandetikettenweberei Max Windrath, with their absolutely fabulous customer service. (Some of my labels got lost in the post, and the replacement arrived here lightning-fast.)

Today was prep for the online workshop on medieval seams and stitches - cutting pieces of cloth for the material kits. Of course I was supervised by Madam the Cat while doing this, before she hopped up onto the sofa, there to nap, followed by some light snoozing and some dozing. Ah, the life of a cat...

I have tweaked the place where the individual bits will go in comparison to my first sampler, which was made just to show the different stitches to people, and got some additions over time.



So it's more orderly now, and a bit better structured, and covers the usual suspects regarding stitches and seams and hems.

The kit will also include labels with the stitch names, which are currently being woven - to my great delight, I was able to find a small bandweaving company who does offer bands in organic cotton in addition to the regular ones. Since I vowed years ago to not support the conventional cotton industry, with its enormous use of water and pesticides, with the accompanying harm to the environment and the workers, that made me very happy.

As soon as the labels arrive, the kits will be finished, packed up and sent off to the workshop participants. And then I'm really looking forward to teaching the seams and stitches again, it's been way too long!

Reconstructions of textile finds are always including a bit of interpretation - the more fragmented the finds, the more interpretation is necessary. That is just normal, but something that is not always mentioned straight out in exhibitions.

So I'm always quite delighted when this is made clear - as is the case in this article about "Fashioning the Viking Age", which shows dress reconstructions based on two spectacular finds. There's also an instagram account with a lot more pretty pictures. Absolutely worth a look!