Margarita Gleba has organised a zoom Study Day for textile archaeology - you can join online! 

It starts at 15:00 and goes until 18:00, and you can register via this form here (or click the image). 

I'm back home for a bit after the wool festival in Backnang - which was lovely, and full of nice chats, and two spinning workshops that were very well received (at least I got a lot of positive verbal feedback, and nobody hit me over the head with a distaff! I count that as well received overall). 

It was very, very exhausting, though. If you're a solo trader and give workshops, you have basically no break at all. The setup I had - two workshops while running a booth throughout the whole weekend - was only possible because of the wonderful support of the Alte Künste-Team, who graciously occupied my booth and sold stuff for me while I was gone (thank you so much again!) and the help of my other wonderful neighbours, Frau Wöllfchen, who also had an eye on my stuff when I had to run off to the loo.

Because, let's face it - if you're a solo trader at these markets, reality is that you turn up in the morning when the place opens for the exhibitors, get your stuff sorted out, then you're there all the time except for a loo break when necessary - which is run to the toilet, do your stuff, and run back. If you're really lucky, someone from the team running the fair has organised a coffee distributor who passes by your stall and offers you a cup, or if you're really really lucky you have someone to spot you for ten minutes so you can have a breath of fresh air and maybe catch a cup of joe yourself. You're not getting out of your corner otherwise until the end of the day, when all you want to do is go to your overnight place and have something to eat and quiet and an early night to recharge for the next day.

Mind you, please, I'm not complaining. That's just how it is, and on a good fair, the day is so full of chats with people you don't even realize how time passes, and may even have trouble finding the time to eat. (You learn quickly to just make that time, no matter what.) Being in that rush, and knowing you're managing all this by yourself has its own kind of feelgood attached... and it's not that you don't know how it is after, at the latest, the first fair or show you're doing solo. (Kind-of-pro-tip: If you are on a fair, and have the time, and there's a solo trader you like - you might make their day if you ask them if you can fetch them a coffee, or something else.)

And there's always the unexpected talks about half- or very-way-off topics. The quiet chat with lovely people. The unexpected laugh, or crazy little action. In Backnang on the weekend, one of the giggliest times was the visit of the Green-Eared Cat (who is a very well-known personality at wool festivals here, and some of that may rub off on her taxi people). She turned up with her personnel, but of course the little piece of the Bamberg cloak reconstruction I had with me to show to people was only large enough for the cat herself to try on.  (The personnel will have to get themselves to Bamberg into the exhibition, where the full-size object is available for humans of any size to try on.)

But the cat did try it on, and to all our great delight, it fit her perfectly: 

So now it's sorting everything back, then packing for the European Textile Forum. Last prep for that is also running; we're still wondering about the best way to form artificial pearls, for instance. 

There's also two paper drafts that have to be finished and handed in, and some orders to be sent out, so I'm definitely not suffering from boredom right now!

Yesterday's blog post fell by the wayside - I was away all day going to set up the loom for the exhibition in Bamberg... and it was great fun. (I also learned a lot! Including a new knot, which is actually a big deal for me, as I seem to be a bit of a knot dyslexic sometimes.)

The loom standing in the exhibition now was the result of a lot of thinking, planning, and the effort of many people. Our idea was to show something about weaving in the era around 1000. Now... that's the time when there's already an inkling of the horizontal loom, but we have next to no good evidence for that (as in "good enough to build a reconstruction from"). So we decided to make a warp-weighted loom.

The original plan was to have a regular one, but the building (which is old) does not allow for a loom to touch the walls. (That's also a possible security issue in an exhibition, as a loom only leaning might fall, and attaching it to the wall was out of the question, as the building itself is under heritage protection). The second plan, having an iron/metal holder for the loom, was out because of budget reasons, so we did end up with a free-standing wooden loom.

It's a proper, nice one, though, not looking as if somebody went collecting a few sticks in the wood and cobbled them together.

(The curious thing is that you can build a functional loom from mostly odd sticks from the woods, provided you make sure that the essential bits that need to be straight are straight. That's harder to do nowadays, though, than making one from cured, available, straight bits of wood, though. So that's what we have.)

The main thing that we wanted to do with the loom was to show that textile production at that time was a high-standing, important, and highly developed part of production, and the resulting objects were of high quality. So we found an expert in warp-weighted loom weaving in Sweden - Marie Wallenberg - who worked together with us to get the idea across to the woodworker, who made an almost perfect loom. One of the folks from Kaptorga made the loomweights (scaled down a little to be lighter, because that helps to not wear out the threads over time - the normal fitted loom is not intended to stay for months or years with the loomweights hanging), and Marie wove a fabric to fill the loom.

If you've seen warp-weighted looms in exhibitions, they are often a crooked thing, with a crooked bit of coarse weaving on them. While that may have happened occasionally, it is not what we would expect them to be in general - after all, they were used to make fine, straight, high-quality fabrics in the past. And that is exactly what we wanted to portray.

So once the loom had arrived from the woodworker and the fabric had arrived from Sweden and I had finished making the Rod of Many Holes to attach the weave to the loom's top beam, I set out to set things up in Bamberg, with Marie coaching me through the process. 

In the NS era, archaeology was used for a lot of propaganda things, usually to show that Germans are The Best Thing Ever and everybody else was, at best, second grade, and that from the Stone Age onwards. Or so. (This, by the way, is said to be one of the reasons why German archaeology after the war became this hard-facts-only science that is rather sparse with interpretations, if compared to how things are done in other countries.)

The Kreismuseum Syke is working on a case that will give some information about archaeology in that era, and while doing the prep and research for that, they stumbled across an interesting history surrounding a Thanksgiving present to Hitler. If you read German, you can follow that story in a digital exhibition on the museum website. (If you don't read German, you're welcome to look at the pictures and old letters there, but the whole thing is heavily reliant on the texts - and it's quite interesting how the writing styles changed over time.)

I think it's a very good idea to do that exhibition case, and the digital exhibition too!

The 21st Roman Military Equipment Conference will take place in Brno next year, June 2-6. Conference topic is "Body armour and defensive equipment" which, of course, will include some textile elements. 

If you're interested in the conference, you can find out more about it on their webpage.  

EuroWeb has something more coming up: A webinar on traditional wax batik printing! It will take place on September 6, 10 am CET start.  

I'm already looking forward to this - it's always interesting to see traditional textile techniques!

The thing about a medieval-style Great Wheel? It's really Great, as in Large. Looking at images, the wheel appears to be really huge, compared to the spinners. And when one thinks about it, that is sort of understandable - after all, the aim is to get a lot of twist quickly, and there are no gears involved. So the size difference between the wheel and the disc on the spindle (often called whorl, but I find that confusing) has to be as large as possible.

When I built my reconstruction, I was thus looking for a size that would compare to the illustrations we have, and of course with a look at its intended use - demonstrations. Which meant it also had to come apart easily, and the single pieces had to fit into the car. 

Which they do. The wheel itself has its own special spot right under the roof, where it's built to fit perfectly:

The board end in the foreground belongs to the bottom (main) board. The rest is one box with the small pieces (like the wedges, drive band, and spindles) and one pack with legs and the holders for spindle and wheel. 

So now I just have to add the rest of the equipment, and we're ready to roll!

(Ingelheim. Sunday. See me there if you can, and say hello!)