I've been trying to practice using my digital microscope - by doing some fibre thickness measurements. Like so many things, this takes a bit of getting used to, and is not quite as easy or straightforward as one might expect... starting from getting things focused properly, to taking a good measurement of the rather fine fibres. It would help to have a greater magnification to have less margin for error (one pixel in or out does already make a difference), but then it's even harder to get a proper focus, and there's fewer fibres per image...

Anyway, here's a picture for you so you can see how that looks:



 
This is the fibre I'm using for the corded skirt, the cord part. I suspect that the measurements I took are a little bit high, because I have another kind of fibre where I know the micron count, and my measurements were consistently higher than the count that was listed... so, well, probably needs some more practice, and some calibrating of my own eye, and possibly I need to move that one pixel inside instead of outside.

Also... taking these measurements is quite time-consuming! Especially regarding the fact that you need to take measurements from about 100 fibres, randomly selected, to get something like a proper histogram of the fleece (or fleece part) that you are looking at. I only took a random sample of some few fibres, and I probably won't go for the 100 for now. There's other things to do that are more important right now (and I know already that the fibre profile of the stuff I can get does not match the Bronze Age sheep...)

Sorry for the blog silence yesterday - I got so caught up in textile work that about everything else on my "to do daily" list slipped past me, including (obviously) doing a blog post. It was a very successful day otherwise, though. I have progressed from the "pure testing" stage into the stage where testing segues into actual work; so yesterday, I made two warps.

The current museum project is the reproduction of Bronze Age garments for a museum, to be used in hands-on sessions for visitors. I've posted about the wool problem before (there's no sheep left with the appropriate mix of fibres), so I'm using compromise wools. The rest of the project, though, I'm of course aiming to get as close to the originals as possible, so the people handling the items will get the best experience, and impression, possible.

This means spinning to the same thickness and twist angle as the originals - which is not quite as easy as it sounds, because, well, there's aiming to do something just so and managing to do it just so, and those two don't necessarily coincide. Also, if a yarn looks right when your are spinning it does not always mean it will look right once it's been soaked and stretched and dried again, or when it has been made into a warp. Things can happen on the way... and then you will have to adjust.

Trying to get as close as possible also means weaving, or plying, or twisting tests. There's been one test warp for the Egtved belt a while ago, where I found out that my yarns were a bit too thin; now there's a second warp strung up in the living room, and this time, it looks much better.



I'm working with 1:1 scale printouts of the finds to check if what I'm doing is the right size, and shape, and density. The feeling when you hold your piece next to the print, and it matches? That's so, so satisfactory.

This is the first of the warps I set up, the one of the belt; the other one is for the corded skirt, and that setup was, so far, also successful. The skirt band consists of several sections, the first of them without the extra selvedge cord for the corded part, and with a plied weft, just plain woven - and I have already finished that part. It looks very unspectacular:



You can already see the thick selvedge cord anchored in the weave, and coming out on the right side. Next section will be the part with the cords!

 

Today was mostly spent spinning - I'm doing test yarns for a fabric reproduction project. One that has me very, very excited - it's Bronze Age fabrics, and making the yarns for this is one of the tasks coming up for me now.

So I'm doing test spins currently, trying to get a feel for the different fibres that come in question (all of them compromises, because of the lack of real Bronze Age type sheep with their very special type of fibres) and getting a feel for the thicknesses and twist levels that should be suitable. Once the test skeins are done, they get a bath:



and then they are hung up to dry.

Afterwards, I weigh them, label them, calculate the Nm value (that is purely out of curiosity, though), document how long it took me to do that amount of yarn, and once the last batch will have gone through this, weaving tests can start.



It's always fascinating to see how different types of wool spin out differently, and have different properties afterwards (like the Nm count) - even if the yarns have about the same thickness and the same amount of twist.

To my great delight, I received an author's copy yesterday - "Crafting Textiles" is now out. It's the conference proceedings from a conference in honour of Peter Collingwood that took place some years ago.



It's always really nice to get an author's copy... it somehow feels like a birthday present.

If you're not as lucky as me and want to order the book, you can do so at Oxbow Books or, of course, at the brick-and-mortar bookshop of your choice. (When buying books, by the way, usually most of the money goes to the place where you buy it - so you can decide for yourself whether you want to support the publisher, your bookseller of choice or, in case they sell themselves too, the author.)

(continued from part 3)

The pieces to practise on? I have a narrow band that I already set up before the Forum; a wider band (or a very narrow strip of cloth, if you'd prefer); and another band (or two, actually) that I call "The Pharaoh".

These are all three quite different from each other, and I'm feeling a bit challenged with each of them, though The Pharaoh really wears the crown. It's a much simplified version of Tutankhamun's collar that Marie Ekstedt Bjersing researched and taught to us, done in a thicker yarn. Thicker, in this case, means a linen yarn in 60/2, which is still freaking thin.

Here's a picture of it:



You might notice that this lacks its heddles - that's because I had a heddling mistake in my setup, and decided that re-heddling would be a very smart thing to do. Then Marie told me that I might as well do a second warp, because it's quick and easy to do, and, well, so I did. That is why I now have two pharaohs.

This is the second one:

 
That does have all the heddles - I had to re-do the small bunch (for the special shed), but now it works quite fine. Apart from the two white warp threads that I still have no clue where they rightfully belong. They got missed, somehow, during heddling, in addition to two red-coloured warps. I figured out  where the latter really belong, though, and got that fixed by now.



The second pharaoh, by the way, even got to accompany me on our holidays as my crafty thing to do. Usually I take some knitting along, but the current project (dubbed the Neverending Ink) is way too heavy and voluminous at its current stage, and the bike will only accommodate something nice and small...

Sorry for the blog silence yesterday - I completely forgot to post! That happens only rarely, but this year, I had the very interesting idea of scheduling workshops fairly soon after the summer break, and together with the catching up on things that is still going on... well, it totally slipped my attention. Even though "blog" is on the list of daily things to do. But just like calendars, lists are of limited use if you don't look at them...

There's quite a bit going on here at the moment, behind the scenes. There's a newsletter to write for September, I'm preparing the items for the next online sewing workshop (on October 10, and there's still spaces free if you'd like to learn about medieval stitches and seams, in German), and both of these meant taking some photos yesterday. There's also a new thing for the shop, hooray! (Which obviously needs to go in as a listing before the newsletter goes out.) Oh, and I figured out how to solve the broken image problem on the blog - they should all be back now. (For some reason, there was a 1 added to a lot of picture file names, and deleting that meant the pics, which were on the server, could be found again.)

I'm also doing some spinning tests for the next reconstruction project - a museum would like to have Bronze Age fabrics for visitors to touch, and try on garments made from them. This is a lovely project, and a wonderful task, and it means a lot of spinning, which also means a bit of test spinning. Once I have the tests finished, they will go to the weaver to see if they are suitable, and give me some feedback, and then spinning for real will start. I'm very, very excited!

Other news? The vote in Germany is over (that was last Sunday), and now we're waiting to see who is going to run (or ruin) the country for the next 4 years. Mathematically, a lot of party constellations are possible - not, unfortunately, those that I personally would have favoured most. We might still end up with the "traffic lights" - that is SPD, FDP and the Green Party, which is the one I'd prefer out of the options left. It's definitely living in interesting times...

(continued from part 1)

A note to the vendor brought me a weird, and not very logical reply: The HDD frame was not missing by accident (as I had assumed), but was not part of the computer - I would have needed to order a second HDD for it to be included. That, people, makes no sense. A part that is a regular part of the regular (new) computer? The frame (actually a sort of sleeve) is available as replacement part only, and not as an add-on when ordering the computer as a new one. It's also sort of not fitting in with the refurbished-instead-of-new philosophy if I have to order a new HDD to put it into the shelf, along with all the others that were unavoidable cast-offs during the years, to replace the new one with my old one. Anyway, I was not happy at all with the reply, but it was quite clear there would be nothing forthcoming from that place. Needless to say, I will not order from there again. (Greenpanda, in case you're wondering.)

A replacement frame/sleeve was available on Ebay, either directly from China and for a very cheap price, but possibly taking a long time to get here, or from the UK. So the latter it was - fortunately Brexit only prevents me from selling to the UK and not from buying there. The sleeve came, I payed the toll/tax (a full Euro and sixtyfour) and the "Auslagepauschale" - the "lending fee" that DHL charges (which is, hooray, 6 €) and got the sleeve out of the packet... to find that it had been damaged during transit, and one of the metal frame parts was bent out of shape, far enough to not fit properly anymore.

Customer service of that vendor was an entirely different experience - I got a part refund even though I managed to bend the frame back into shape and it became useable again. If that would not have been possible, there was the promise of instant re-sending of a caddy as replacement. Needless to say, I will happily recommend that vendor - Rapid Spares Ltd.

Installing the disk drive had to wait until after the Forum, though. No big changes before big events, if it's avoidable! I did take the new machine along, though, just in case - its camera and speakers are much better than those of the old one, and let's not even consider briefly the "microphone" the old computer had. It clearly was built before the advent of video conferencing.

That all happened at the very start of the summer break, as did the wedding of two friends that we went to - and it was wonderful, if a little weird to be around so many other people again. And then, next on the Things Happening: The European Textile Forum.

With the flooding just before the Forum, it was extra-interesting, too. I had a little niggling doubt whether everything would be happening as planned until, basically, the moment I hopped into the car to drive off...