The tablet weaving workshop is in March in the Fränkische Schweiz-Museum Tüchersfeld, on Friday 3 to Sunday 5. We'll cover tablet weaving from the basics to free pattern weaving with diagonals - and in some cases, participants in this course even proceeded on to the basics of 3:1 broken twill weaving, also without a pattern.  

The workshop can be booked via the museum website; the price includes materials and lunch on Saturday and Sunday.

If you're looking at medieval embroideries, you will, sooner or later, stumble across one that has been embellished with pearls. Seed pearls. As in tiny, miniscule specimens of pearls, smaller than anything you will easily get today. (Or get at all, in some cases.)

A while ago, I was looking for a source for pearls to do embroidery medieval style, but to no avail. The company that I found which in theory offered small pearls (with a diameter of 1 to 1.5 mm, as that's the size we're talking about) told me, on my inquiry, that they don't have pearls that small at all, and if they had, nobody would be able to drill a hole into them.

That was done, however. I'm wondering, together with a lot of other people, how medieval and early modern and modern people managed to drill holes into pearls so small that it seems you can hardly see them. With techniques possible in the Middle Ages...

To give you an idea of the tinyness of these things, compare the size of these seed pearls to the size of the modern glass-headed pin:

They are utterly, utterly tiny, and if anyone has an idea of how the holes might have gotten into these pearls, or how they may have been strung up, or sewn to a textile (these haven't, of course, but others did) they would be more than welcome! 

The year is winding down, and while there's a list of things still to do before 2022 ends, there's only one larger and hard-deadlined item left on the list, with a "finish before winter break" tag on it. That is a really, really nice thing... and I very much enjoy the feeling of winding down and slowing down a bit too.

The one item? I have (not too foolishly, I hope) agreed to write a little article about tablet weaving. It's actually two, but one is finished, and there's only one left to do... so I've made some photos, and something vaguely resembling a plan, and there's an outline, and hopefully there's an article soon.

The really fascinating thing about this is that every time I look at the topic, there's another little aspect that I can see. Especially when I try to explain something, or describe something. This sharpens the eye in a way that nothing else does. There's a German idiom that more or less says "you learn when you teach", and that is really true. (Well, provided that when you teach, you try to explain things so that the audience understands them, and not just teach the motions and rules to be learned by heart and followed... because then, you will learn nothing.)

For the tablet weavers among you: The two middle images show the same setup and were woven the same way - only on top, the tablets are threaded alternatingly s and z, and on the bottom, all are threaded the same way. Like all of you, I know that the s and z are important and will change how the black and white line up. But I still find it amazing how much the alternate threading changes the line-up and the optical impression of the band. 

You're overdue, I think, for a list of accumulated links... so I can close a few of the gazillion open tabs again. 

You can read something about the history and technique of spinning gold threads here. 

Late-medieval leather and textile finds, together with window glass fragments and toys, have been found in Berlin. The finds date to the 15th century, and the large amount of well-preserved organic materials promise very, very interesting results. You can read a German-language article about the find here.

The Internet Archive has so, so many different books and other written sources, it's quite overwhelming. They include a very large collections of cookbooks. The Modern Met has put together some recommendations for you here.

Here you can have a look at a very rare type of illuminated manuscript - the oldest income register of a secular manor, the Codex Falkensteinensis. It dates to the second half of the twelfth century, and its illustrations include people doing agricultural work - which is always nice if you are looking for sources for "normal" people.

You can find nice lace patterns for knitting here - the "Kelpies Hexagon Designs". 

If you're interested in loop braiding, the LMBRIC archives are now again available - via this website here.

Not all that glitters is gold - sometimes it's just gilt silver, hammered into leaf metal, attached to a thin animal membrane and then wrapped around a thread core.

You might know about medieval gold thread, which was usually a strip of metal (often gilt silver, very rarely pure gold) wrapped around a silk core. Well, that's the "good" version, high-quality and rather pricey. And as always, if there's something posh and fancy and expensive, someone tries to get the same effect but for cheaper.

Enter the membrane threads. These are usually not around a silk core, but around a thread made from vegetable fibres, and the metal strip is replaced by animal membranes or, in other places, by a thin leather strip or by a paper strip. These are metallised with leaf metal, and here again, you can make it cheaper by reducing the amount of gold. How? By using "Zwischgold" - silver hammered out, then covered with a thin layer of gold, and this then hammered into leaf metal. 

Gold leaf is really, really thin, so thin that you cannot touch it with your hands. It will instantly cling to your skin and then dissolve. Medieval gold leaf was thicker than modern gold leaf, but it would still not be handle-able without gilding tools. Gold was expensive - so having the cheaper silver as the main metal and just adding a bit of gold would reduce costs considerably. New research about Zwischgold shows how it looked, and the thicknesses given are about 30 nm of gold in the Zwischgold as opposed to c 140 nm thickness of the regular gold leaf. 

This superthin stuff needs something to cling to, so it is stable enough for further processing. In the cheap gold threads that we were aiming to reproduce, animal membranes were used - to be more precise, a layer of membrane from bovine guts. 

So we had a go at silvering them - using not proper Zwischgold, but leaf silver, since that was a lot cheaper to get and is closer to the medieval original material. Then the membrane has to be cut into strips, and the strips then wound around a core, all of which proved to be do-able, but with a lot of room for improvement.

Both the gilding and the wrapping did require a lot of concentration! It also took us a while to puzzle out a method with which a longer piece of thread could be wrapped without getting too much of a twist buildup. 

A final very important part of making these threads, as we also found out: Time. Once the metal is on the membrane, it needs sufficient time to dry out properly, or it will come right off the membrane and right onto everything else - fingers, faces, tables, you name it! With enough drying time, it is much more stable.

Just like with the purple dye imitation, a good bit of work remains to be done on this, but we're very, very pleased with our preliminary results.

I am back, and I had a wonderful time at the Forum - with all the typical hustle and bustle and utter, complete and wonderful madness that this week brings.

We had threads and thread-making as the focus topic, which meant that there were lots and lots of things for me to load into the car and ferry to Mayen - from tools to heckle flax or hemp to all kinds of spindles and spinning tools, plus some other tools in case something needed cutting, sawing, drilling or sanding. (There was some drilling done, so these did come in handy.) There were nettles, and there was wool of all kinds, and some cotton, and as always, it was not enough time during the week to do all the things that I had hoped to do.

That does not mean, though, that there was only little done - on the contrary. We managed to really do a lot of things, with work going on from right after breakfast to long after dinner... spinning, splicing, and some other things as well.

Micky Schoelzke spent a lot of her time in the laboratory room, working on a large series of dye variations to explore fake purple - the imitation of true snail purple dye through the combination of blue (from woad) and red (from madder). Some of the tests were overdyeing, and some of the tests were dyeing fibre to later blend together in different combinations of shades and different ratios.

The blending was a lot of fun, with lots of people working together to weigh the fibres, then blend them, and then spin little samples for comparison. It also looks like blending fibres is much easier to do for achieving a purple-ish colour than the overdying method. The blend will result in a slightly speckled look of the finished product (as can also be seen on a few extant samples where this method was used), while the overdyeing gets a more even result that can come closer to the Real Thing. However, hitting the right colour when overdyeing is much harder than blending fibres together, especially since you can do a little sample with the blending and then adjust ratios rather easily, while overdyeing is much more fickle. Yes, you can do a test dye, but the time, effort, and resources required for that are much higher than to do a test blend or two.

There's still a lot to explore on this topic, and I'm looking forward to more on it. The comparative ease of the fibre blending opposed to the overdyeing is, however, an argument for dyeing something in the wool that I can readily accept - because I'd usually vote that dyeing something in the yarn, or in the fabric, makes more sense. Less felting (which will occur even if you are very careful with your fibre), less loss of dyed fibre, and the yarn needs to be wet-finished anyways so dyeing will take care of that as well... plus yarns are easier to handle than fibre is. But if you want to spin blends of colour, well, you have no choice but to dye in the fibre.

The other big experimental action of this year's Forum was making gilt membrane threads... and I will tell you a bit more about that tomorrow.

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?