I'm back from the weekend weaving workshop - which was (as these things tend to be) an enormous amount of fun, both for me and (according to their comments) the participants.

There was a lot of weaving done - quickly making centimeters on the bands on the first day. My weaving workshops always start with the very basics: Getting the hang of what different threading directions do, weaving stripes, the absolute basic principles on how patterns work. Then we do a little bit of doubleface to warm up, and then the fun starts.

That also means that the second is was devoted to more thinking and more looking at tablets, and more sorting things around, which slows down the weaving process. Let's say that it can be surprisingly hard to weave a simple monochrome surface... but all of my weavers did very, very well, and went away with a band and a learning curve that they can really be very proud of.

And I actually remembered to take a few photos! Though most of them are on a different camera than this very, very blurry one that I snapped with my phone, and have not transferred yet:

I did not promise twill in the workshop description, on purpose, but I usually get signals very quickly if the group, more or less, would like to try it. (They usually do.) And if that's the case, I try to get things arranged so everyone who wants to can get a little bit of the twill experience. 

That was also the case on the weekend, and we did manage to progress into twill weaving for the last part, to my great pleasure and to the great spinning of heads (in German you say "rauchende Köpfe", as in the brain is working so hard that smoke curls up from the head) on the weavers' side. 

I love weaving twill on tablets, and I really love teaching it. Twill is hard, though. You have to keep track of a lot of things simultaneously, and there's a stack of tablets that needs to be handled delicately and correctly, so some of your capacity is already taken up by the fine motor skills demands, and then (if you've done tablet weaving beforehand) there are things you always did differently and you have to do my way now (because of reasons, not because I like to pester people) so that eats even more of your brain or (if you haven't done tablet weaving beforehand) there are so many new movements that it's also eating up brain capacity, and that together means that it is getting hard to count to two.

There is concentrated deep silence during most of the time when I'm running a tablet weaving workshop. I have actually tried it once, where there was no carpet on the floor, and yes, you could hear the pin drop. That concentrated silence is even more obvious if twill is requested by the participants, though then you sometimes hear sighs, quiet mumblings (to keep track of the sequence in which things should be done) or, if something has gone properly wrong, a little cry for help or assistance.

As is also usual, only a part of the group went on to venture a little deeper into twill after the first bit of it. Twill weaving is not for everyone - you have to like this kind of brain-bending mental gymnastics, and some people do, and some people don't, and that is absolutely okay. The system I use is all logical throughout, and there's a stack of rules and little hacks and standard procedures that really help, but the challenge in the workshop is that you have to remember all of them at the same time, and a weekend workshop always means that there is limited time to let each new standard really settle into the brain and the hands.

I'd really like to try and teach tablet weaving for a full week some time, and see what could be done with a bit more practise before progressing to the next steps... but that would probably have to be at some weaving school or special event. Who knows, though - there's been so many interesting things and projects and jobs in the past that I'd never have dreamt of, the opportunity might arise at some place and some time.

For now, I have some notes to review, and some bits of my workshop script to tweak, a few little changes to make for the next workshop, and then I'll be waiting for the next opportunity to make some brain cells work very, very hard... 

Just before the presentation in Syke, there was an interview for the NDR (that is the Northern German Radio/TV), which is also online now. You can find it here - again all in German, of course. 

If you happen to be in London in the next months, you might consider going to see an exhibition about Kumihimo in the Japan House London. It will run until June, so there's still some time left. For those who want to get in the mood, or cannot make it but would still like to hear more about kumihimo, there is a recorded talk about the exhibition on the website as well. 

And just in case you'd prefer going for a nap, but have a hard time falling asleep: There's a Boring Books for Bed podcast. Though I'm not absolutely sure I agree with the title "boring" for something about embroidery. You can also listen to things about Egyptian Archaeology. Or Darwin's Origin of Species...

If you'd like to watch the presentation I gave in Syke - here you go! It's all in German (sorry English-only speaking readers).

It wasn't possible to do a livestream, but I'm delighted that there was the possibility to make a recording, and put that online. I hope you'll enjoy it - I certainly did!

Just this weekend, I found myself in the middle of a discussion about changes the pandemic has made to our working life, and the pros and cons of home office and company office. The verdict (at least for me) was - a lot of things very, very much depend on individual circumstances. There's people who find it much easier to stick their head in a colleague's office and ask a question, or ask around at the coffee machine and water cooler, and others find it easier to quickly type a question into a group chat or send an email around.

There's people who can work comfortably from home, having enough space and enough of an internet connection, and there's others who can't. There's those who are on the phone with faraway colleagues most of the time anyways and those who need to handle things that can only be handled in person on site. So - it very much depends.

One thing that the pandemic has changed, though, is the openness towards online-only and hybrid events - and I, for one, am still utterly delighted that a lot of conferences now offer online participation or online streaming. I'm especially delighted if said online participation is free (or has a very low fee) because it's often been the case that a conference had two or three presentations that sounded very interesting to me, but for those it would not have been sensible, or affordable, to travel to a medium to very distant place and do the whole conference. With the hybrid events, I can now tune in to what I would like to see in those cases - and that's just utterly, gloriously wonderful.

And all that is a very wordy lead-in to tell you that the Experimental Archaeology Conference in Torún, Poland, will also be a hybrid event. Online participation is free; the list of sessions and presentations is now online, and you can register for it to keep updated and get info material:

The conference website is https://exarc.net/meetings/eac13 and session 3.B is a textile session - plus there's a lot of other interesting papers about all kinds of experimental archaeology topics. 

The tablet weaving workshop is in March in the Fränkische Schweiz-Museum Tüchersfeld, on Friday 3 to Sunday 5. We'll cover tablet weaving from the basics to free pattern weaving with diagonals - and in some cases, participants in this course even proceeded on to the basics of 3:1 broken twill weaving, also without a pattern.  

The workshop can be booked via the museum website; the price includes materials and lunch on Saturday and Sunday.

Not all that glitters is gold - sometimes it's just gilt silver, hammered into leaf metal, attached to a thin animal membrane and then wrapped around a thread core.

You might know about medieval gold thread, which was usually a strip of metal (often gilt silver, very rarely pure gold) wrapped around a silk core. Well, that's the "good" version, high-quality and rather pricey. And as always, if there's something posh and fancy and expensive, someone tries to get the same effect but for cheaper.

Enter the membrane threads. These are usually not around a silk core, but around a thread made from vegetable fibres, and the metal strip is replaced by animal membranes or, in other places, by a thin leather strip or by a paper strip. These are metallised with leaf metal, and here again, you can make it cheaper by reducing the amount of gold. How? By using "Zwischgold" - silver hammered out, then covered with a thin layer of gold, and this then hammered into leaf metal. 

Gold leaf is really, really thin, so thin that you cannot touch it with your hands. It will instantly cling to your skin and then dissolve. Medieval gold leaf was thicker than modern gold leaf, but it would still not be handle-able without gilding tools. Gold was expensive - so having the cheaper silver as the main metal and just adding a bit of gold would reduce costs considerably. New research about Zwischgold shows how it looked, and the thicknesses given are about 30 nm of gold in the Zwischgold as opposed to c 140 nm thickness of the regular gold leaf. 

This superthin stuff needs something to cling to, so it is stable enough for further processing. In the cheap gold threads that we were aiming to reproduce, animal membranes were used - to be more precise, a layer of membrane from bovine guts. 

So we had a go at silvering them - using not proper Zwischgold, but leaf silver, since that was a lot cheaper to get and is closer to the medieval original material. Then the membrane has to be cut into strips, and the strips then wound around a core, all of which proved to be do-able, but with a lot of room for improvement.

Both the gilding and the wrapping did require a lot of concentration! It also took us a while to puzzle out a method with which a longer piece of thread could be wrapped without getting too much of a twist buildup. 

A final very important part of making these threads, as we also found out: Time. Once the metal is on the membrane, it needs sufficient time to dry out properly, or it will come right off the membrane and right onto everything else - fingers, faces, tables, you name it! With enough drying time, it is much more stable.

Just like with the purple dye imitation, a good bit of work remains to be done on this, but we're very, very pleased with our preliminary results.

I am back, and I had a wonderful time at the Forum - with all the typical hustle and bustle and utter, complete and wonderful madness that this week brings.

We had threads and thread-making as the focus topic, which meant that there were lots and lots of things for me to load into the car and ferry to Mayen - from tools to heckle flax or hemp to all kinds of spindles and spinning tools, plus some other tools in case something needed cutting, sawing, drilling or sanding. (There was some drilling done, so these did come in handy.) There were nettles, and there was wool of all kinds, and some cotton, and as always, it was not enough time during the week to do all the things that I had hoped to do.

That does not mean, though, that there was only little done - on the contrary. We managed to really do a lot of things, with work going on from right after breakfast to long after dinner... spinning, splicing, and some other things as well.

Micky Schoelzke spent a lot of her time in the laboratory room, working on a large series of dye variations to explore fake purple - the imitation of true snail purple dye through the combination of blue (from woad) and red (from madder). Some of the tests were overdyeing, and some of the tests were dyeing fibre to later blend together in different combinations of shades and different ratios.

The blending was a lot of fun, with lots of people working together to weigh the fibres, then blend them, and then spin little samples for comparison. It also looks like blending fibres is much easier to do for achieving a purple-ish colour than the overdying method. The blend will result in a slightly speckled look of the finished product (as can also be seen on a few extant samples where this method was used), while the overdyeing gets a more even result that can come closer to the Real Thing. However, hitting the right colour when overdyeing is much harder than blending fibres together, especially since you can do a little sample with the blending and then adjust ratios rather easily, while overdyeing is much more fickle. Yes, you can do a test dye, but the time, effort, and resources required for that are much higher than to do a test blend or two.

There's still a lot to explore on this topic, and I'm looking forward to more on it. The comparative ease of the fibre blending opposed to the overdyeing is, however, an argument for dyeing something in the wool that I can readily accept - because I'd usually vote that dyeing something in the yarn, or in the fabric, makes more sense. Less felting (which will occur even if you are very careful with your fibre), less loss of dyed fibre, and the yarn needs to be wet-finished anyways so dyeing will take care of that as well... plus yarns are easier to handle than fibre is. But if you want to spin blends of colour, well, you have no choice but to dye in the fibre.

The other big experimental action of this year's Forum was making gilt membrane threads... and I will tell you a bit more about that tomorrow.