So let's say you need to have a starting border on a fabric that doesn't have one.

Traditionally, you have the two obvious usual suspects for doing this: rigid heddle weaving or tablet weaving. In both cases for the Bernuthsfeld Project where we were lacking a starting border, the originals had a rigid heddle border.

So for faking a border, you set up the warp of your band just like you would for a normal band - the necessary length plus a bit more for the loss of yarn at start and end. Then you take the edge of your finished fabric and make sure that there is a warp fringe long enough to go through the width of your band twice, plus a little extra to grab. How much of a little extra you need depends on your fingers and your love of fiddlyness.

You weave a few picks to get a proper start to the band, with a normal weft thread, and then you start using the warp fringe as weft. For this, you pull one warp through the shed so it sticks out of the band at the far side of the fabric, change shed, and go back towards the fabric with the same warp. Into that same shed, you also put the next warp thread in line so that it sticks out at the far side of the fabric. Repeat ad nauseam, or until you reach the other edge of your fabric, and take care not to switch warp threads or miss some. It's not difficult to do, but it is fiddly, and it is time-consuming - as you can see on this video:


You will also have to pay close attention to the growth rate of your band (in length) as compared to the spacing of your warp threads - and here is where the difference between the fake and the real really comes in.

When you make a real starting border, you have two ends going through each shed, as you do with the fake starting border. However, both ends in each shed in the real border are functional warp ends of the main fabric - in contrast to one functional warp end in the faked border, which is accompanied by its colleague going back. So you effectively have to fit double the amount of weft threads into the length of the band if you're doing a fake border.

Can you smell the problem already? If you use a band warp yarn that is as thick as the original starting border warp yarn, the distance between your sheds will be large enough to spread the band out way too much in the faked border. You will have to remedy this by occasionally placing two or more live warp ends into a single shed. This is the way I did the starting border for one of the leg wrap edges:



This is not nice to weave, and the slightly too high spread is still visible. You can also see a tiny hint of the trimmed fringe that is left underneath the border - a telltale sign that it is a faked one.

The alternative is choosing a warp for the starting border that is a lot thinner than it would be in the original. This reduces the distance between sheds along the band, so you can fit all your warp threads one by one into the band. This is the solution I chose for the border faking shown in the video, as the border was much longer. Obviously, using thinner threads also means a narrower border, so you'll have to use more warp ends for the starting border to get it a similar width as the original.

In both cases, you might be able to see a hint of the fringe sticking out of the band. So if you're looking at a replica fabric, or a reconstruction, and it has a starting border - fibre ends sticking out between border and fabric will tell you it's a faked one. If you cannot see fibre ends, look at the thickness of the starting border threads; if they are significantly thinner than the yarn of the main fabric, it's probably also a faked one. It's definitely also fake if the yarns are similar in thickness to the main fabric warp, but there are more than two ends in individual sheds. All that is assuming you can get close enough to the piece, of course!

As I've mentioned a while before, there's no such thing as the perfect textile replica. Well, theoretically, there might be - but really getting it all perfect, down to the fibre and thread and exact measurements? That would mean a truly insane amount of test runs and effort and time and material and money.

So whenever there's a reconstruction, there is usually also some compromising being done. Part of that can be due to time restrictions, or budget restrictions, or technical issues. One of the typical compromises are the changes made to a fabric because of the available looms. There's a difference between how different types of loom work (obviously), but I've recently been told by a weaver that from her own experience and that of others, even small differences between looms will result in different fabrics, as they may or may not work with a certain amount of tension, or may be more or less harsh on the threads.

One of the main issues, though, is the fact that when you weave on a horizontal loom, you have no starting border. (It can, technically, be done. It just makes little sense if you do the normal way of setup on that loom. I've met one lady once who does use a starting border on the horizontal loom, but she's the exception to the rule.) Starting borders are, however, a pretty common feature if you use the warp-weighted loom, as they make total sense when setting up your warp here.

For those of you who are confused now - a starting border is a woven band forming the top (starting) edge of your warp. Think of it as a band with a gigantonormous fringe at one side - that fringe is the warp of your main fabric. The starting border secures your warp threads and spaces them out evenly, two invaluable things when you are setting up the loom.

So if you want to replicate a fabric made on the warp-weighted loom that includes a starting border, there's two possibilities. Obviously, you can find a very competent and willing weaver with a warp-weighted loom and get the fabric done as it originally was, with the starting border and all. Alternatively, have the weaver make a starting border and weave it on a horizontal loom. However, finding weavers willing to do just that is not the easiest of tasks - and you might, again, run into budget and time restrictions.

The other possibility? Get the fabric woven on a horizontal loom, without a starting border, then fake one afterwards. This is, admittedly, only the second best solution, as the faking it will be blatantly obvious to every weaving geek looking closely - but then, it will probably only be blatantly obvious to those. There's a difference between a faked and a real starting border, and it is due to technical reasons.

If you make a real starting border, you weave a band. As the weft for the band, you pull loops of yarn through each shed - this will form your main warp. You have your yarn ball or cone on one side of the band and the warping aid (such as posts) to the other side. So the sequence is: Change shed, pull loop through and around your warping aid, change shed, pull next loop through.

This means there are two threads running through each shed, both of them turning into warp threads.

Next post: How you fake a starting border, and the difference this makes.

Some days, I love my work so much that it borders on the ridiculous... and today (well, yesterday, when you are reading this) is one of them. Definitely.

I'm still working on the Bernuthsfeld tunic reconstruction, and let me tell you: it is utterly interesting, and oodles of fun. It also involves lots of needles and lots of looking at photographs, and a good bit of joy about how the different fabrics all come together into a potpourri of patches.

Piece by piece, the thing is growing. I've started working on it in the back, where there was a fairly good place to get going, with obvious placements of pieces, straightforward seams and not much guesswork or missing pieces. By now, the back is almost complete, the front is almost complete, and I'm getting towards the juicy bits where some actual reconstruction and guesswork are needed.

The process, in principle, is this:

We've taken the outlines of the patches directly from the original, using marker pens on a thin foil, noting the direction of warp threads and making lists of fabrics, sewing threads, seam details and other potentially important bits. Those foil drawings were then turned into paper pattern pieces for each patch, and those served to mark and cut out the fabric bits.

Then there's the list saying which patch lies on top of which, and whether it's a light or a dark sewing thread. There's photos to check for details on the seams, and on how the borders between the pieces look. I also try to catch any unusual stitching in the photo check and, if possible, recreate it.

Here's an example - pieces 12-14, sewn to the side of piece 11 (which is the large checkered breast patch in the front of the tunic). The foil overview of this part looks like this:



which leads to something like this:



The pieces are put into their places, held with pins, and then sewn together according to the lists. I mark them with charcoal or chalk, since these markings will come out easily once it is all finished. I also pin the pattern papers to them for quick and easy reference until every seam around the piece is finished - then the paper goes to the "finished!" stack.

(Yes, this is a black-and-white picture - you're not getting the colours before the museum people do. Sorry.)

and here are the original and the reconstruction in comparison:



You can see that it's close, but not perfect - part of that being due to the very different state the individual fabrics are in, ours not worn at all (yet!) and the original having quite worn fabrics. You can also see the wonderful job our weaver did, down to recreating the weird selvedge with multiple threads in it on no. 13.

And I never thought I'd do patchwork one day!

There's a stack of stuff going on here - first of all, there is (of course) more work on the tunic made out of bits and pieces:



There is also Forum-related stuff going on - the website is in need of an overhaul to make it more convenient to use and the stuff more clearly arranged. I'm also working on a survey to get some feedback for future Forum planning, and on getting a better grip on the registration form to lessen the amount of spammers.

The other website (yes, this one) is also due for a software update, and that's on the list of things to take care of, too. Plus there's several requests that need some writing to be done (or finished). So. Not boring here. Not boring at all...

I almost forgot that there's a blogpost still due today - I've gotten rather sidetracked with both the desk work (where finally the email and paper stacks approach something like normal-ish dimensions) and the Bernuthsfeld tunic project work.

Where I have started on the front of the tunic, since the back is almost finished - there's a few small things still to do on the back, but they need some more thinking and possibly finessing, so they will be taken care of later. Putting the front together also has some interesting spots, as there's missing bits here and there, and the stuff that remains (including seams that run through what once was the patch underneath a missing piece) are not all very clearly indicating size and shape of the missing bits... not to speak of the colour and cloth type at all.

Anyway, there's progress. And this is what the place where the progress takes place looks like:



The computer with pictures to keep track of details, and to check things. Bits and pieces of cloth, partly already sewn together, partly only cut, partly not even cut yet. Lists and more lists - of seam types, cloth types, numbers and pieces. Plus the usual tools - scissors, shears, pins, needles, charcoal and chalk to mark lines, and lots and lots of paper pattern pieces. And, of course, the overview plan taken directly from the original.

Can you tell I'm having fun?

Today, there's progress going on with the Bernuthsfeld project - finally, after the conference and event marathon of the last few weeks. It's nice to settle down again and get some actual textile work done for an actual project, and I'm thoroughly enjoying the lasting smell of birch leaf dye on some of the fabrics.

It's also, as always, utterly fascinating to see how many details you need to know to replicate something, or at least get close to replicating it. I'm very sure that the original maker of this tunic, made out of previously used fabric pieces, didn't bother about many of the steps, or was indifferent regarding which piece of fabric got to sit on top of its neighbour and which got to sit underneath... but for us, trying to keep as close as possible to the original, this is of course a thing to think of (and to look for in the many lists and photographs we made during our documentation session).

[caption id="attachment_3477" align="alignnone" width="721"] Snapshot of me doing documentation of the patches of the original tunic - which was then turned into a pattern...


There's no such thing as a perfect replica of a historical fabric, due to oh so many reasons - and one of them is that you never get all the data you would need. As I've recently told somebody, it's not a question of if you forget to look for a given detail, or take a note, or manage to take a decent picture of a detail that you later on need - it's a question of when you discover that you missed this something, and how many of these discoveries you make, and how bad the missing links are for your overall picture and process.

That said, up until now, there've been a few hitches - some of them due to misunderstandings or misinterpretation of the conservation reports, one of them due to an actual error in them, and none of them really ruinous. I'm hoping like hell it will stay like this!

You might remember that a while ago, I posted about having a project for a reproduction of the tunic worn by the man from Bernuthsfeld.

Well, it's time to get the project into the next stage - which means I'm getting to see the original, and will be starting work on the actual tunic-making together with my colleague. So I'll be off doing exciting things to cloth for the next few days, and thus be taking a break from blogging - I will be back on October 16.

Meanwhile, I will leave you here with a picture of the fabrics that were woven for the tunic and a small mantle-like cloth:

[caption id="attachment_3429" align="alignnone" width="1632"] Fabrics woven for the Bernuthsfeld-Project - lots and lots of different ones, many of them just small patches...


And just because I have them, here are a few more pictures of some bits, close-up:



It's going to be so much fun to dye a selection of the fabrics, then cut everything up, roughen them a bit to simulate use-wear, and stitch them together into the tunic!