There are things, persons, occurrences on markets like that last weekend that really warm the heart or make you see again why you sit and explain how something works for two days in a row, telling the same tales a hundred times.

One was the lady stopping by again on the second day. On Saturday, she'd seen my bone awl that I use for making eyelet holes and asked for an explanation, since she had one at home but didn't know what it was for. We also chatted about netting needles and tatting, since she described a tatting shuttle to me, asking what it could have been for.
On Sunday, she came to show me the tools we had talked about - and said that since she would not use the netting needles nor the tatting shuttle, she's giving them to me. So I came back from the market with three more textile tools - at least two of them very hard to get.

She made me very happy with these absolutely unexpected presents - and helped me to learn more about the size, form and shape of industrially produced modern (but not really contemporary) netting needles.


The other was the little girl whom the spinner brought over from the spinning booth with the words "And look here, the weaver - that's where the finished thread goes." So she got handed to the weaver for an explanation and demonstration of weaving on a four-shaft loom, and then she came over to me to look at clothes.
After showing her some seams and some garments, I took out a piece of fine silk cloth and explained that even cloth so fine as this was all worked by hand - and then I told her to imagine how long that must take, all those superfine threads, all made and then woven... and she stood in front of my tent for, oh, two minutes, looking totally stunned and saying no more than "Oh. Wow. Oh." while trying to get a grasp on this gigantonormous amount of time and work.

Little lady: Thank you. You really made my day by listening and thinking about what we demonstrated. Seeing you so awed makes me very, very happy.

Bad Staffelstein, a town in Franconia, has a yearly festival called the Altstadtfest. This year's date is the 25th and 26th July.

Historical Craftsmanship and historical crafts are the focus of this event. And I'm proud and happy to announce that I will be there on Sunday, July 26, in the Raiffeisen-Bank Bad Staffelstein, showing textile techniques from the Middle Ages. This is also the opening day for an exhibition in the rooms of the bank, where some of my pieces will be shown. The exhibition will probably stay for two weeks after the opening.

So... should you have nothing planned yet for the 26th of July, drop by and meet me in Bad Staffelstein!

Doesn't everybody hate doing the taxes? Well, count me in, at least.

Our wonderful German system wants a tax form filled out and handed in by the end of May. After catching up on my bookkeeping yesterday (hooray!), I thought that today I could at least install the tax program we bought oh, weeks ago.

It doesn't work. And I'll give up now and try to run it on the other computer (though I'd have preferred it on mine). The installation won't run here on mine because my system is missing two components (the installer says) that can't be installed because they just won't work from the CD. One of them is a security update that I have already installed, and the second one is some cryptic thingie that I've never heard of before. And I've re-installed the Service Pack rollup already. I've even tried to run the other update directly from the Windows server, but it won't download since they want to be sure that it's an official 2000 I'm running. And the verification plugin won't work. And the alternative verification won't work either. Gaargh.

I think that I'll have a piece of cake now. And then I'll do nice, productive things far away from this machine. And when we're back after the weekend, I'll find a way to run it...

I'm back home, the car is standing outside still half-packed, and it won't be emptied out since we're leaving for Freienfels on Wednesday.

I had the most wonderful weekend, with lots of utterly nice people - some that I already knew, some that I had briefly met before, and some that I hadn't seen beforehand. And the weather was glorious. And the coffee was soooo good.

The market - part of a market/festival in Großauheim - was on a small parking lot with some trees to give us shade, and it took the public some time to find us. Hence, Sunday was much better visited than Saturday.

Lucky me stood between a tablet weaver and a weaver who brought his loom (to weave linen diamond twill, no less), and when he didn't sit behind his loom, he sat with me and we chatted (or rather, I babbled and he sat and listened). Then there were the shows given by Firlefanz - I managed to escape from my net (which I was working on) to watch for a bit, and I nearly fell off my seat with mirth! I'm sorry that I didn't catch more (I'll try to do better next time I see them). And I even got to dance once each day, it's been ages since my last dancing on a market or fair.

To top off all this wonderfulness, I sold some thread, some gold thread and some of the beading needles I brought, and people took info brochures both for myself and for the forum. And a few more people got onto the newsletter for my book. So I'm sitting here a very happy woman today...

Time for a little sequel for the hairnet series - all because we did a little math yesterday...
I met up with the lady who did my netting needle, and I have ordered a really teeny slim one - suitable for making very fine mesh. Think Sint-Truiden: think this net:


It is listed as catalogue nr. 102, made of silk thread in rose and beige and almost fully embroidered with silk in grey, beige and white. Mesh size? The publication states 64 mesh per square centimeter, which translates to very little more than one millimeter mesh size! Now that is tiny.

The little math yesterday I hinted at? We tried to calculate how long making such a net would take. The following number crunchies are probably not accurate, but meant to give me (and now you) an idea about how much of a time-sink something like this piece can be.

The basis for our calculation was the net I have almost finished, with the mesh size of 4 mm. For this net, I can pretty safely state about 30 hours for the net until completion, including wetting and setting the finished net. When calculating the same overall size for the tiny-meshed net, I'd need about 16 times the amount of single meshes for the tiny net (since there would fit 16 meshes into one large mesh). Which means 16 times 30 hours, that is 480 hours just for the base of the hairnet! Add to that the embroidery, which I'd guess takes at least as long (maybe one of the embroidering people can pitch in here) - that would leave you at roughly one thousand hours of work just for a puny hairnet.

For sake of comparison, let's translate this into a modern working schedule, with a five day week, fourty hours work time each week. That means twentyfive weeks of work, full-time, provided you really work for eight hours a day on the net, with no distraction whatsoever. Let's add in a week for all the rub-your-eye breaks, breaking threads, bad hair (netting) days, and tea-and-cookie breaks. That means one skilled textile person will work half a year, full-time, nothing else done, just for the puny hairnet.

And people seeing such a net in medieval times will know what this means. How much work this means - and thus, how much money.

So wearing this puny hairnet is something like putting a Ferrari into your garage. Wearing this little beauty is like really thumping the table with your bag of gold, so to speak.

Source: DECONINCK, E., GEORGE, PH., DE JONGHE, D., Y., VAN STRYDONCK M. J., WOUTERS, J., VYNCKIER, J. und DE BOECK, J.: Stof uit de Kist: De Middeleeuwse Textielschat uit de Abdij van Sint-Truiden. Leuven 1991. Catalog nr. 102.

After yesterday's crazy business, today is going to be at least as busy. I have already stacked material and pre-cut material that I'll take with me tomorrow, have almost finished the obligatory name-and-company-name plaque that you have to hang on a stall by German law, and now I'm sitting writing price tags and price lists.

I'm all tensed up about how the market will go. It's the first time I actually sell (or try to sell) stuff that I haven't made to order (and to measure) myself. I have some superfine silk threads to sell, and I have managed to get my hands on a few spools of real gold thread for couching or brocading weaves. I'm so, so curious whether any of this will sell! I know that I would be all over the stuff, so it remains to find out how many others like me are roaming the market.

Oh, and just before going to bed yesterday, we found that we still have enough material left from sewing our tent to add some sort of a tarp to our equipment. Designing was done in the kitchen, between quarter to and half past eleven. Including the walk into the cellar to check how much fabric there is left. That was fun!

As I wrote Tuesday last week, I'm into sealing cut edges with wax now.

Yesterday, my brand new (and infernally sharp) pinking tool arrived. (Well, I call it a pinking tool. It disguises itself, though, as a woodcarving implement and hides in woodworking catalogues. But I found it nonetheless!)

I set to work pinking the dagges on a hood. The cloth is heavy silk, dyed a beautiful purple with natural colours. Pinking dagges is fun, and the tool will bite easily through several layers of the cloth at once, but it sure pays to work carefully. That will save a lot of snipping off missed threads afterwards and re-pinking missed spots.

After doing the dagges, I set to work with the wax. What I want is a nice contour of molten wax along the edge of the cloth, hot enough to go into the fabric a bit (to make sure the edge is conserved) but not so hot that it will actually be visible on the outside of the piece. As you can probably imagine, the margin between "too cold" and "too hot" is very slim - so slim that it makes a huge difference whether the tjanting is full or half-empty, even if it is a very small one. With these low temperatures, flow in the tjanting might become obstructed by cooling wax, so there is also a rather big variation in how much wax comes out, and how quickly. While this method is a lot faster and much more reliable than the molten-wax-on-copper-plate method, it demands full concentration and a good sense for when the whole shedoodle is the right temperature (or lots of testing, which is much easier for the beginning). Maybe there is a better method to do this. Maybe there's even a description on how to do it somewhere out there... if you know of one, please share!

I finished the dagges on the hood cape yesterday, including the waxing, and I finished pinking almost all the dagging for the liripipe, so there's some more waxing on today's agenda. This is how the finished and waxed dagges look:

click for larger view

I rather like the look of it.

Oh, and on an aside: Dyeing the fabric seems to have done something for the shine on the not-so-shiny side of the fabric, and I didn't expect that at all. The photos, of course, don't do the colour justice.

There are still a lot of things left to do, and to add to the scarcity of time and the amount of things to do, I have to do a library run this week.
Today's the day to write a list with all the stuff I will take for the weekend and try getting some more sewing done - yesterday I got stuck at the computer all the time. One of the reasons was that the info-brochure for the Textilforum was due to go to the printer. It's finished now, I hope I didn't miss any errors in the proofing process, and I hope that the colours will turn out acceptably.

As current working projects, I have the dress, the hairnet, a hood that I can't continue working on at the moment since I am waiting for a pinking tool to arrive, and I started a tablet weave play band, contrary to all good intentions (but using as an excuse that I'm preparing a workshop on tablet weaving). There's stuff coming towards me by post - not only the brochures, but also yarns and the pinking tool, so I'm in a state of happy anticipation. And hope I can finish today's computer work before noon, so I can sit in the sun and sew...

Here's a picture of the current status of the hairnet I'm working on. Only about three centimeters left to net, hooray!

Picture clickable for larger view

As you can possibly see (the photos are not that good), the net is worked in a spiral. The spiralling approach has its advantages, but also a fair share of disadvantages, in my opinon.
I like the fact that, when spiralling, you can just go on and on with netting. Once the spiral is properly established, there is no need to fiddle with the mesh size for the transit into the next row, there are no double threads or new knottings-in for this transition, just netting same size endlessly.
What I don't like is that you will get distortions in the first few rows, until the spiral is smoothed out. That can be achieved either by slowly lengthening the cast-on loops so that the first normal-sized meshes don't stick out so much, or by fiddling a bit with the mesh size in the first rows. And the finish of the net is, of course, also a spiral and will need some more fiddling to look smooth and well-rounded.
Spiral netting is also not too well suited to colour changes in the netting - exactly what I did in this piece, just because I felt like using two colours. Where the colour change is, you always get an abrupt change in one of the percieved "rows", and I think it looks a bit sloppy, or disorganized. It is technically not possible to change this when working spirals; there is no sudden change in one row when working circular. So for multicoloured nets, circular might be better.
And the last thing I don't like now that I'm nearing the end: There are no rows, and hence, there is no feeling of accomplishment on finishing a row. What can be seen as an asset of spiral netting - not needing to transit between rows - can feel tedious. I know that I need about 6 or 7 more rounds in the spiral, but it is awfully hard to keep track how much I have netted in one session.

Taking all this together, I personally feel that netting in the circular would be more appropriate for what I'm trying to get, while netting in the spiral might be the best way for a beginner to make a nice practice piece, only needing to concentrate on the act of netting nice even meshes. Therèse de Dillmont doesn't give instructions for spiral netting; her circular netting "recipe" says to knot in anew for every next row.

After this last stint of spiral netting, I'm not so sure whether it was used as an approach for net-making in the middle ages. It would be interesting to look at some of the extant nets in detail to see whether there is a shortened transit mesh or new knotting in of the thread for the next row, or if there are actually nets worked in the spiral.

The last picture shows the size of the meshes in the net, with the net laid out on a normal 5 mm grid paper. Sorry for the bad quality of the picture.


You can see that the mesh size is approximately 4 mm. I think this is a nice size, still easy to work with a fairly sturdy netting needle, within the size spectrum of medieval hairnets and not so small-meshed that it would take ages to do it. However, netting is not a fast craft, and even with this mesh size, it will take its time. Practice speeds the knotting a bit, but there's a limit to how fast your hands can go. I'll give the exact time needed when I'm all finished with the net, but by now it has taken more than 25 hours.

Via the MEDTC-List I wrote about in January, I learned yesterday that a new book about medieval garments will come out in December.

Many of you probably know "Woven Into the Earth: Textile Finds in Norse Greenland" by Else Østergaard. She has worked about the Herjolfsnæs garments and published results and photos of the garments in said volume. There are, however, no patterns in that book.

When I last met her, she told me that she was working on a book with all the patterns. And now it seems to be finished - or at least far enough progressed that there's a publisher and a publication date. The new book will come out in Danish and in English:

The Danish title is "Nordbomønstre - dragtsnit fra middelalderen". The English title is "Medieval Garments Reconstructed: Norse Clothing Patterns." The book deals with garments from about 1200 to 1500; the oldest Herjolfsnæs garment is radiocarbon dated to the 13th century.
Due out in December 2009, Aarhus University Press, Denmark.

The book can be pre-ordered both in Europe and in the US. In Europe, go to the contact form on the publisher's website and mail your pre-order request. For those living beyond the pond, you can pre-order via David Brown books. Don't get confused by the slightly different title there, no Viking patterns are in the book.

My preorder is already off. Hooray for a new book for the personal library! Now... where do I squeeze in another shelf?