What you see here...



is the rest of the weft yarns spun for the Trindhøj man's garments. They've taken their bath and they have dried and they are en route to being woven... and I am very, very curious on how the finished fabric will turn out!

Each time I spin for a weaving project, I'm amazed at how much yarn is eaten up by a puny bit of fabric. Well, in this case, it's not so puny, with about 170 cm on 275 cm. That makes it a fairly good thing that the thread count per cm is not as high as in a medieval medium-fine fabric, but at only about 3-4 threads per centimetre.

Altogether, I've spun about 6400 m of yarn for this piece of fabric. The loom eats a generous portion as loom waste, which accounts for some of the extra yarn needed; then there's of course a bit of shrinkage after weaving, when the raw weave is wet finished. Finally, there's always need for some leeway just in case, it's not nice to run out of yarn right before the end. I've also added on a bit more of the weft yarn as one of the batches turned out to be rather thinner than intended.

Spinning consistently to the same thickness and the same amount of twist over a longer time - I still find that challenging. Though admittedly my comfort zone regarding yarn thicknesses has grown quite a bit in the past years compared to when I started spinning, and my tendency to gravitate towards a certain thickness of yarn has diminished with all the practice that I've been getting spinning yarns to specification for weaving projects. I think in that regard it did help a lot that some of these projects - like this one - required yarns that were a lot thicker than my default thin yarns.

Have you done spinning outside your comfort zone thickness? And/or spinning in bulk for a larger project?

There was more packing of parcels today, and more prep work for the courses - both the spinning one, and the sewing one. My dressing of the distaffs was supervised by an expert for fluffyness and hair:



I've also been dabbling a bit on the shop relaunch. It's coming along, albeit more slowly than I'd like it to, but hey, what can you expect regarding anything that involves computers, right?

Basically, the shop and site relaunch means a clean, new installation with a template that is compatible to Joomla 4, and I'm trying to find the right balance between "keep everything as it is and get it done as quickly as possible" and "this is the perfect time to make some changes and make everything better and add a gazillion new texts and images to the page which means I will never ever be finished".

The main points are a new shop installation (in hopes that the glitches that happened in the past will then be history), a blog migration to a different system in Joomla (because I'm not sure if my current wordpress-in-joomla thing will continue to get support) and, yes, a little bit of restructuring of the main page. According to my tests, the new template will also mean the site is visible, and mostly useable, without javascript turned on. (The shop, of course, needs JS to function.)

So - if you have any suggestions for the site, or site structure, or comments on what you like on the current one, or dislike - please let me know in the comments. I'm grateful for any input, whether it's regarding the blog, the shop, or the main page, the content or the layout.

Today was gobbled up by all kinds of preparation tasks for the two upcoming online workshops - especially making a few more distaffs, and some more pins for said distaffs.

 


It's been a while since my last pin-making session, so I was really looking forward to this. It's a fun task, if a little fiddly at times, and winding the coil for the pinheads takes a bit of a toll on the fingers... but I still like it a lot. (And I only lost one pinhead somewhere on the floor...)

I really like the simple look of these. Mind you, I also enjoy pins with fancy heads, and pins with pressed heads, but these are charming in their own way somehow.

So - pin-making, distaff-making, distaff-dressing, cutting the fabric for the sewing workshop, and packing things in boxes to be sent off. More boxes tomorrow - plus hopefully some time for the overdue book-keeping, and a few other desk and writing tasks.

A bunch of skeins is hanging out in the cellar, where it's nice and warm, and they are all drying. Actually they are almost dry - but I prefer to be really sure and leave them a little longer, if I can, than take them off sooner.



This is a little more than 2.5 km of yarn. I'm wet-finishing the skeins - soaking them in hot tap water (which has about 60° C here) for about 20 minutes, then stretching each skein, then hanging them to dry with a bit of weight to keep the yarn slightly stretched. It's not a lot of tension they are under, just enough to hold the yarns more or less straight.

I've marked each skein with a number, corresponding to the sequence they were spun in - and I'm very, very curious now to find out if the yardage has changed with the wet finish. Soon. As soon as they are completely dry...

Calculations for the fabric that I'm currently spinning for are finished, and, well, what shall I say? Those bronze age fabrics are... big. BIG.

Which, consequently, means that even though they only have a few threads per centimetre (around 4, overall), they do add up. Which means there's a lot more spinning to do until I'm finished. Overall yarn requirement for the piece of fabric needed to make the Trindhoj find man's garments, consisting of some kind of wraparound tunic and a half-oval cloak, is about... 5700 metres. Plus a bit of wiggle room.

Even spinning quite quickly, and winding into hanks quickly, and wet-finishing several skeins at once (which is taking a lot less time than doing them one by one), that eats up a hunk of hours. So if you're looking for me, I'll be at my spinning place... making yarn. In very nice cat company.

Have you measured your production spinning speeds? If so, I'd love to hear about how much you spin in an hour.

If you haven't done it yet, but are curious - my recommendation is to use a stopwatch, and spin over several hours before measuring. Doing just half an hour or one hour can result in quite different speeds than production over more hours. (Don't ask me how I know...) Note down how long you were spinning for the sessions if your stopwatch tends to eat the current time (I have one that will turn itself off after a while, and then the numbers are gone.) For measuring, find out the circumference of your skeiner and count the rotations.

Then do the metres spun by hours division, and voilà, you have your production speed number for this yarn type and thickness with this tool and this type of fibre... which might be quite different from a different yarn. Which, I find, makes spinning an even more interesting thing!

Following up on the cording and cording tool use discussion - here's a few thoughts about modern tool use for reproducing ancient or old things.

In an ideal world, if you're doing a reconstruction, everything would be as it was in the original - same materials, same processes, same tools. However, that is usually not possible - due to a number of reasons.

Sometimes, getting materials that correspond to the original material is not possible. That is especially the case when working with plant or animal materials that have been undergoing selective breeding for a few hundreds, or thousands, of years since the original item was made. You don't get the medieval varieties of food crops these days anymore (maybe with a few very rare exceptions), and if we're looking at animal materials, whether bone from cattle or wool from sheep, there's been a huge lot of change as well. So compromises may be necessary starting with the material, which will, of course, have an influence on the finished piece.

Using the original tools and processes is the next part that can turn out to be more difficult than one thinks at first. First obstacle is that we often don't know how, exactly, something was made. With a lot of textile work it's possible to use different processes and different tools to arrive at the exact same outcome. You will not be able to tell whether a yarn was spun on a spindle or on a more modern spinning wheel if the spinner takes care to match the properties of the original thread, for example. Same thing applies for a woven fabric - if there's no tell-tale things like a starting border, how could a bit of fabric let you know what loom type it was woven on?

For purposes of research and experiential archaeology (and in some cases, if there's a question to answer and the setup is done accordingly, even experimental archaeology), it would of course be preferable to use tools and processes that are known for the period the original item comes from. However... when a reproduction is commissioned, there is often a limit to the amount of time available before the thing has to be finished, and - even more important - there is also a limit to the amount of money that can be spent on a single item. Both these constraints will make speeding the whole thing up a very attractive, or very necessary, thing.

So while I enjoy working with old methods and reconstructed tools, personally, I have no problem whatsoever with using modern gadgets for my reproduction work if there will be no perceivable difference in the end product. Using an e-spinner for making yarns, or a modern cording tool for making cords, or a treadle loom instead of a warp-weighted one for weaving plain fabrics, these are all things that can still result in a reproduction that is as close as possible to the original while cutting down on costs a lot. And I personally do prefer to make these compromises in the process to make repros more affordable, thus getting more of them out into the world, for people to see and touch and experience, than having a "perfect" replica made once in a blue moon.

Though if you should know of someone wanting to have something made using all old reconstructed methods only - do send them my way, I'd be happy to be part of such a project, too!

 

You probably know about my fascination with medieval pins - which is logical, in a way, since they play a part in two of my regions of interest: tailoring and sewing (where they come in very handy, even though I only need very few of them for working), and fastening dress items when wearing them (my headdress, for instance, relies on three pins to make it just so, and it is very comfy and nice to wear that way).

They are humble, and small, and often overlooked. I find them very, very beautiful though, especially close-up. I'm also fascinated by the question of how they were made - there's several different types, and accordingly different methods to make them.

If you also enjoy looking at these little helpers, head over to the Textile Research Centre Leiden's blog, where there's some wonderful digital microscope photos of early modern pin heads!