As I'm preparing the weaving workshop for bow loom weaving that I'll be doing on the weekend, one of the points is "preparing your weft yarn". Now, for a small piece like a band, there's several ways to do this, depending on what you want and how much you mind adding in a new bit of weft. You can just take a length of yarn and use that, no winding, no nothing. 

If you want a lot of yarn for use in one go, you can wind a shuttle. The simplest of these is the humble, but glorious, stick shuttle. Any stick in a length and thickness that suits you and your weaving will do, and you wind the yarn around it, and that's it.

Third option, somewhere inbetween: The yarn butterfly. There are several ways to wind yarn into a butterfly, and the simplest one is wrapping some yarn around your fingers and then wrapping the end around the middle of that mini-skein. That, however, tends to come undone. With a tiny little different way of winding, however, you can have a butterfly bobbin that you can pull more yarn from, which does not come undone, and which will serve beautifully in a lot of instances (not only when weaving). 

Nancy explains this very nicely on YouTube:

Fibre processing and spinning always takes a long time - and it can be done with simple tools, as a rule. A Czech Centre for Traditional Technology has a very nice video on Youtube showing several steps from the dried flax plant to winding a shuttle bobbin for weaving - with a delightful mix of old and new items (watch out for the modern plastic-handled scissors!) 

The video is in Czech with English subtitles, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. 

I'm home again after the absolutely wonderful weekend at the Archäotechnica. It was lovely to have a museum event again after such a long pause due to the pandemic. I got to meet old friends and get to know new people, and realised how much I missed all this.

My work space was in the cloister, where I had very good light, but not too much of it - at least most of the time; on Sunday around noon, I had a bit of direct sun, and it was very hot and very bright and hard to see what I was doing.

I also realised that I have a very, very hard time stitching and speaking at the same time. So even though there were very few and very short breaks only, the amount of stitching that got done was... well, let's say that there was no danger at all that I'd run out of embroidery work.

The gold in the picture is the result at the end of 7 hours of demonstration time - not at all to be confused as the result of 7 hours of embroidery time! 

A demo situation is always different from a proper work situation, even if the technique you demonstrate is one that needs very little attention. Your main focus, as a good demonstrator, will always be on the people coming and asking questions, or watching, and not on your work piece. So you stop things to explain, you work slower if necessary, you demonstrate mistakes or point out possible problems (in some cases making them happen on purpose), and your main aim is explaining things and not having a perfect piece at the end. (The gold embroidery quality is also not what I'd reasonably expect from myself as the result of a normal stitching session.)

Even when I'm doing a very low-demand technique such as combing wool, or spinning, I can feel a difference in how the work goes that I'm doing on a demo as opposed to doing it as work. (It's fascinating, really.) In my experience, there's techniques and things that need little or no brain, and little or no attention, and they are best suited for demonstration purposes. With these techniques, I can look at the people passing by, make eye contact, and talk to them without interrupting the work. Spinning would be one of these; netting also works very well in my experience. 

Techniques that need no brain, but focus on the work and attention are the other group of techniques where a demo is possible. These, which include anything involving stitching, are more difficult - as soon as you look like you are concentrating on something, quite a lot of people have qualms to ask something. I've had a lot of "may I ask you something" questions this weekend, and I am actually considering putting up a sign next time that says some thing like "do ask me things, that's what I am here for". I do try to stop and look up at my surroundings when I am demo-ing a high-focus technique, but it takes more effort from my end to demo this successfully and with similar amounts of interaction than a low-focus technique. 

The third group are techniques that need attention and focus as well as brain power. These are right out for demo purposes in my opinion. I just cannot give a proper impression of how something demanding is done and concentrate on getting the hows and whys across to visitors at the same time. So I'd never do a demo on complicated tablet-woven patterns, for instance. That requires all my attention, and I'd either not talk to people or weave with lots of errors and very badly.

This is also something that I explain to museums and event organisers when we're discussing possibilities for demonstrations. Usually we then find a technique that fits the event and that is suitable for a good demo. After all, a demo of the coolest and most astonishingly complicated technique serves nobody if it's just not working properly for the public.

Have you done demonstrations? Are your experiences similar?

It's slow going here. Slow going part one: The resurrection of my data. The backups lie on a RAID, to make extra sure that everything is safe - but unfortunately I'm having connection troubles to said RAID, which means every copying action takes ages and then some. That is annoying, and slow going, and sometimes the connection trouble leads to the interruption of the copying process which means that some stuff is there, and some isn't, and I can't tell what is and what isn't. So things will take more time than expected. Which, to be frank, was to be expected, because just as the X never marks the spot, when has anything computer trouble related ever taken only as much time as expected?

(And just in case you are not thinking about that anyways right now: Do yourself a favour and check your backup solution. Make sure that it is current, and that everything important is covered, and that you can recover and restore your data if something dire happens. If you've been following this blog for a while, you've read me go on about this before, but, well, obviously it bears repeating. In the case you don't have a backup solution and regular backup plan yet... well. Do yourself a favour and change that.)

Slow going part two: Getting sorted (and packed) for the weekend in Brandenburg. That, though, was actually not as slow as I had feared! I have sorted my bits and bobs and odd ends of dyed embroidery silk and re-wound most of them onto better suited cores (reed cores, which I absolutely love). The gold thread is also sorted and packed, and now I am in the stage where I ponder what else I could need and put it all on the giant heap on the bed, from where it will be transferred into my rolling suitcase and, if necessary, an additional bag.

The main part of the preparation, though (and what I had expected to be slower and more gruesome) was making sure I can go ahead with gold embroidery right from Saturday morning. That meant inking my motif and doing the contour stitching as a minimum. Because gold and silk would be paired in such an embroidery, and because I wanted to be able to show at least a little bit of the silk part as well, I had planned to also do some split stitching.

This is stitched on fabric with about 20 threads per centimeter, which means that the stitches are fairly small. As you can see, there's a start made on the crow's wing feathers, and one of the corners of the frame is almost filled completely.  I'll do the last few missing stitches before the event starts, and this will give an impression of how the colour parts will look. The appropriate silks will also travel north with me so I can show that part of the work, too, if people are interested - just like I'll take some extra linen and the things to make pre-drawings or ink in motifs.

Because the thread is thin and the stitches are small, it does take a bit to get one of the corners filled, but it was enormously pleasant work - and in contrast to the computer stuff, progress was noticeable and there was no constant apprehension that there would be an error message.

Enter your text here ...

I'm absolutely delighted to be part of the Archaeotechnika this year, and doubly so to get to do some embroidery demonstration there. I really like to embroider, but I seem to get around to it way, way too rarely - but this demonstration means I get to do it for two days straight.

Plus a little extra time to prep, because obviously if the goal is to show gold embroidery, it's no use to spend the first few hours of demo time checking the frame, inking the contours and stitching the contour lines... so that is what I've been doing here as prep.

First step, however, was to choose appropriate motifs. Something that is appropriately medieval, from the time of around 1200 (because the dress reconstruction I'll be wearing is from about that time), that has gold, and that is adequately easy to stitch. 

I ended up looking at the Ashmolean Bestiary, half by chance (because I was browsing the Bodleian Library catalogue for MSS from the timespan), and I've picked the image from fol. 47r, which is a crow.

There's two gold parts, the frame and the circular background, so plenty of space for couched work and the opportunity to do both linear and circular gold; I'll be doing the silk parts in split stitch and the contours in stem stitch. 

To show how the un-stitched thing looks, I might ink in another motif on the side, but haven't decided yet what it is going to be. Another bird? Maybe the delightfully weird neck-bird from fol. 82r? 

If you're interested in the complex weaves Taqueté and samite, there's a workshop at the Haus der Seidenkultur in Krefeld coming up in September. It's held by a lovely colleague of mine, Barbara Thomas, and she's doing it once in German and once in English.

The project "Ancient Silk Splendour – recreated" led to the development of a weaving class, designed by experts from the German Textile Museum and the House of Silk Culture from Krefeld. The class teaches the theoretical basics of ancient patterned weaves, but also how to practically recreate them.

The dates are 19.–23. September 2022 (for the class in german) and 26.–30. September 2022 (for the class in english). The fee is 635,- € per participant, with a maximum of 8 participants per class.

If this sounds interesting for you, you can find out more about the workshop and how to register at the Haus of Seidenkultur website. 

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.