About every year around the same time, there's pictures of our willow fence, I think.

I've always liked the idea of a living fence - and even though we have a non-living additional fence around our place, the willow one is the higher one, and the more visible one, and the more exciting one.

It's also planted a little bit too close to the actual border of our garden, which, in retrospective, was not the brightest of all ideas. We had thoroughly underestimated how far the new shoots would branch out over the street, and how many of them there would be. We're handling this now by trying to guide everything as straight up as possible with the help of strings; the trick is to tie those in while the new growth is still green and fresh and very malleable.

We planted the fence back in April 2012, when it looked like this:



It's a kind of willow suitable for making baskets, which was important to us - after all, if you cut back the new rods every year, it would be sad if they weren't useful in some way.

Now it looks like this:



The fence, over the years, has taught me a few things. Among them, first and foremost: Even if willows are bendy, and even if you try to get the shapes all nice and even and just so, they are living things and they will react differently. Some will grow more, some will grow less, some will die off. Nothing will be just as accurate as planned, and planted. And in some places, you'll just have to live with something looking different because of a missing bit.

There's limits to what the trees will accept, and the more horizontal you try to make something grow, the closer you get to this limit. Parts of the tree may go up and die suddenly. The low arches are an issue every year, with plenty of them growing only to about the thirdway point, and then the tree puts everything into the new rods and we end up with a dead part beyond.



Another funny thing is when two trees meld together at their contact point. (That was what I had, in my youthful optimism, planned for all of them to do, by the way.) Sometimes, nothing extraordinary happens. Sometimes, though, the new united tree then decides some part of it is not necessary anymore... and there's another bit of dead wood for us to prune off.

What is really fascinating, though, is the difference between the "before" and the "after" harvesting the rods, and how much biomass this fence puts out every year.

Here's the before look:



And here the after, of approximately the same bit:



Every. Single. Year. Amazing, isn't it?

Here's this year's yield, all bundled up. Want to guess how many kilograms of willow?

Do you know these days that go "whoooooosh" and they have passed by? Today was one of those. And now it's time to fire off a blog post before I go to the post office, and the little cat has just settled on my arm for some cuddles, so I'm in for a disappointed look in a very short time, when I will get up and leave her all alone on the quiet, empty desk.

She could have come earlier and gotten some more cuddles. While I was taking care of the invoices, or fiddling with the website, or answering emails... but no, then it was much more important to snooze on our bed. (Which had to be made just so before she deigned to lie down on it. Because the duvet has to be placed back onto the bed, not hang on the end of the bed to air out. Because it's just not as nice to lie on the mattress and not the duvet. Except at some times, when the mattress is the only way to sleep on the bed. Because of Cat Logic.)

At least there was a bit of progress on most of the current things to be worked on, including website progress. Including a major design decision that I'm really, really thrilled about. So yay, and we're getting closer! Also, the weekend has seen all our willow fence pruned back, and we now have a stack of willow withies lying in the garden. Some of them will be turned into distaffs, and cutting the appropriate lengths is another thing on my list for the near future. Thankfully that is not a very time-consuming task due to very good, sharp shears.

Now, though, it's time to brave the rain and post the post...

So, here we are - de-gumming results:

The procedure I did yesterday resulted in colour loss and definitely loss of some, but not all sericin - the silk still has a rather firm hand and is stiffer than I'd expect it to be if completely de-gummed.

 


You can see the narrow band of lighter silk on the gummy original silk, and the completely de-gummed and then dyed silk on the left side. Maybe I should take another small sample of the gummy silk and try to get all the gum out by boiling it within an inch of its life? See what happens then?

In other news, I've been busy in the background working on the website re-launch. As usual, it eats up all the time it can and then some, and there's other things to take care of and work on (such as the Egtved Project, for which you're also due an update), too, so it's actually feeling a little like a wonder that I have made as much progress as I have. The learning curve is also rather steep - in the past few days, I've successfully dabbled in CSS, altered php scripts (do not leave an extra . in or you will get a lovely error), edited sql tables by adding columns, written an sql update thingummy to replace values in a column (it's called Abfrage in German and I don't know the English term), and used a regular expression for a search-and-replace routine. I've also cursed the inconsistency of things when an installation went wrong and pondered the pros and cons of starting over or not. (Verdict? I'll try, and if it goes wrong, I'll go with the semi-clean install that seems to work okay for now.) At least I cannot complain about lack of challenges in all kinds of fields!

 

Well, I definitely got your attention with the gummy silk thing yesterday!

First of all, here's a better picture of the two silks side by side:



Now to the answers to all the comments yesterday...

Jessica's comment was:

Sometimes, some detail in research pops up, and then it keeps haunting you, and occupying you, just a tiny bit. It's not growing into a big project, but it is always there, and occasionally, things touch it and then you try and fit the new thoughts into the current theories.

Well, that was probably a bit cryptic. So. Let me explain. About... silk.

As you probably know, most silk used in the Middle Ages was reeled, not spun - the long filaments from several cocoons wound off said cocoons together to get you a thread of silk. The more cocoons, the thicker your thread.

When the silkworm makes the cocoons, they're for its protection - so they are pretty hard. That's caused by sericin, or silk gum, which is more or less a protein-based glue sticking the filaments together and hardening them into a nice, protective shell. Hot water softens the sericin so the cocoons can be reeled off (it also kills the silkworm). The glue stays on, though, getting you... gummy silk, or raw silk.

This raw silk is stiff and can feel like a stiff nylon thread, very un-like the soft silk that we know today... because modern silk is usually completely de-gummed.

The thing about de-gummed silk? If you don't twist it, it is very fragile and prone to snagging. It's hard to handle altogether (though yes, very soft and shiny). Since talking to a conservator friend years ago who told me that usually, medieval silks have a much firmer structure than modern ones, I've been wondering about the use of gummy or partially gummy silk in history. The more recent research about the Albecund band is making me more and more convinced that gummy silk would be the solution to a few of the issues with weaving such a band.

One of the questions in that regard was - how does dyeing gummy silk work? Will it dye well? And will the dye be fast? (Side question - what happens if you de-gum it after dyeing?)

Well, I've gotten back two skeins that were test- dyed together, as in both mordanted and dyed together.



The gummy silk took on the colour much, much better... isn't that fascinating?

 

I'm all excited - the first batch of my embroidery silk in new colours arrived today, dyed lovingly and carefully by my friend and colleague Margit from Alte Künste. And she has managed to dye the most gorgeous yellow I've ever seen.



It's like liquid sunshine. It's like textile gold. It's warm and soft and it's yellow, yellow, yellow.

There's a lovely purple as well - and I have not yet wound off the red and the pink from their skeins into something better storeable and handle-able. Winding silk that fine, I have learned, can be a real challenge if you don't know what you are doing. The skeins, even if handled like raw eggs, tend to tangle a bit during the dyeing process. As this thread is flat silk that has been totally de-gummed, it snatches and tangles easily. My first tries at winding off silk from the skein, years ago, were the total catastrophe. I tried to do that with one of the common four-armed skein holders or swifts. Well. I very quickly found out that there's a reason why Japanese silk swifts have more than four arms... so I did upgrade to a swift with more arms, and that does make a huge difference. It's still a fiddly task. (Weirdly, it's also one that I find very hard to stop. Just past this one snag. Just until the next hitch. Just this one more. Just past this knotty tangle. Oh, is it half past three already? Oops. Well, I can do a few minutes more...)

Once  all the new skeins are wound, I can portion the silk off on the 10 m rolls for the shop, and take photos, and then you'll be able to buy it.

For today, though, I'll sit next to it for a bit longer and go "my preciousssssss"...

There's some things I really enjoy about running the shop - one of them is being able to make wishes come true. Admittedly, it's usually small wishes like "the distaff in oak, please" or "a biconical whorl in red, if possible", but, hey, it's still nice. Hunting down the fitting whorl, or wood, or whatever, is something I do enjoy.

Another perk is reading all kinds of addresses that there are in Germany. Combinations of street names and place names, or sometimes just the place names, can be rather funny. I have yet to send something to one of the well-known places with curious names, such as "Linsengericht" (lentil meal) or "Kuchen" (cake), though.

Third perk? I get to buy stamps regularly. A lot of the things I send out go by regular post, and Germany has a rather large set of different stamp designs, and lots of different stamp values, at any one time. So every time my stamp stock gets low, I get to look at the current offers. Sometimes I'm lucky, and there's something Middle Age related among them, and then of course I get those. Last time that I went stamp-shopping, there even was an archaeology-related stamp - one celebrating the 200th birthday of Heinrich Schliemann...