Work on the shirt is progressing - it's a rather simple one, oriented in measurements on the tunic reconstruction, and sewn from hand-woven linen. The cloth has a charmingly large number of weaving faults, which is rather nice for a shirt to fit a probably quite poor man, though my stitching is the usual - I realised too late that I might have done larger, sloppier stitches.

It's fun and a nice feeling, though, to do "proper" seams and hems for a bit after all the many very coarse seams on the tunic itself - which means I'm quite enjoyng myself.

There was a slight, um, complication while cutting, though, in form of not very helpful furry help:



Usually Madame doesn't care very much about my textile shenanigans, apart from having to sit on every bit of fabric that happens to lie on the floor, but she was especially enthusiastic today, and actually attacked the dangerous moving cloth...It did lose its attraction enough after a while, though, so I could go on and finish my work. Everything is lined up for assembly now, and seams will be kept as simple as possible, so it should be finished soon.

At least re-use - that is, after all, what was done with the Bernuthsfeld tunic. Case in point?



Patches 35-38, our numbering. (Did I mention we gave out new numbers for the patches, as not all of them are covered in the drawing that Hahne did?)

You can hopefully see that there is a light diamond twill fabric and a darker diamond twill fabric, and the lighter one has its own seams, done in a different hand than the main tunic makers' one (which is the rather clumsy overcast stitch around the patches). There is also a proper hem at the bottom of the light fabric, which in turn is stitched to the darker fabric, which has its own proper hem at its own bottom.



So my interpretation is this one: The light diamond twill fabric was once a kind of garment, sporting said seams and hem. At some point, it was worn down so much or had gotten out of fashion so completely that it was taken apart, and the still-okay bits were used again, to make a new garment (maybe a child's tunic) out of the light fabric together with the darker fabric. The two are not the same, but rather similar, so they'd work nicely together.

The colour difference in the original today is not quite as pronounced as it is in our reconstruction, which is partly due to the difference in the base colour of the fibres in our fabrics being larger than in the original and partly due to our decision to make the fabrics a bit more different in order to clearly show that they are two different pieces with different history.

In any case, here we have a beautiful example of re-using fabric not once, not twice, but three times as part of a garment - first, the lighter fabric on its own, then together with the darker one in a garment, then as a big patch in the Bernuthsfeld tunic.

(Also it was really, really nice to sew the proper seams and hem in the light fabric, and an amazing contrast to do this sandwiched right inbetween doing some Bernuthsfeld overcast seams!)

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?