Both Beatrix and Harma have posted comments about the Egtved cording and the efficiency of the method, or how to make it faster. (Thank you, both of you, for your input! It's much appreciated.)

Cording by hand is always a relatively slow procedure. It can be made a bit quicker with several methods; one way is like Beatrix suggested, using both hands to insert twist.

In some cases, it's even possible to use the hands and leg to roll the two elements into one direction on the leg, then hold them together and ply them by rolling in the opposite direction. Whether that is possible or not depends on the material, the dexterity of the maker, and - last but not at all least - on the required or desired amount of twist to be inserted.

I find that the more twist is needed, the slower the whole process will be, and simultaneously it becomes harder to speed it up with these small changes to procedure. With more twist inserted, the elements get more "lively" and will untwist much easier than with less twist. That is the reason why my fingers are so close to the fell in the video, and why I only insert a little bit of twist before each cross. I have tried to work further away from the fell, inserting more twist at a time, but the probability of losing much of that when doing the crossing (or plying) then is quite high, which makes that method less efficient than the one shown in the video. At least for me - it may be different for someone else. These making things are, after all, very individual.

Regarding the use of both hands to insert said twist: I actually do this, though it is very hard to see in the video. There's only a rather small motion of the left hand fingers before the cross, but it is there. What does take time is the crossing over, and I can't see myself going much faster on that than I am doing already. The elements have to be transferred carefully, or they will lose the necessary twist for the density of the cording. There's probably a bit of speed-up possibility left with more practise, but I don't see much improvement lingering close by. The elements are quite thin which means a lot of crossings, and as stated, those are what takes time. It takes me about 6 minutes to make one cord with this method.

That all said, Harma's suggestion was the use of a modern tool to speed up things...  which is what I actually do for production. (My cord twisting tool is different from the Ashford tool mentioned, though, and more suitable for the specific requirements of the skirt cords.) The estimate of about 1/10th of the time is, unfortunately, not true - that would be wonderful, and extremely fast. That might be the case for a very long cord with a relatively soft twist, but for mine, the speed difference is much less - though still considerable, which is exactly why I use the tool.

The Egtved Skirt is surprisingly short, with only about 40 cm overall length. Subtract about 2 cm for the waistband, and another c 2 cm for the felted rings on the bottom, and you end up with approximately 36 cm of cords for the actual skirt part.

That does not sound like a lot, right? Well, it quickly adds up, however - after all, there's about 350 or so cords in the complete skirt. These cords are very hard twisted, and one way to make this type of cord is to use the twist-and-cross method that was also employed for making bast proto-fabrics, like the mat Ötzi had with him.

Twist-and-cross means you twist each of your elements in one direction, then cross it over the other in the opposite direction. This gives you very good control and enables you to make a very hard cord with lots of twist and countertwist. Accordingly, the ply angle can be very high. The downside is that it takes a rather long time...

You can see how I do the twist-and-cross on one cord of my skirt in this video:


I've come a bit further than when I filmed this, but there's still about one metre to go... with the cords. That is a lot of twisting left to do!

There's been some more weaving - I've progressed to about 106 cm from the 155 cm of the section with cords in the corded skirt.

Weaving this skirt, like all kinds of weaving or, indeed, about all kinds of craft work, has its own specific rhythm. I'm vastly enjoying it to settle down into that rhythm when working. Because there's three loops drawn through each shed, and I'm doing two sheds as one section at a time, it's a longer and somehow different sequence than "normal" weaving of a band, or even normal weaving of a starting border (which is what doing the corded section resembles quite a lot).

I'm only doing two sheds at a time to have as little difference as possible in loop length, as I find it makes the following steps easier. The weaving itself is a specific two-hand operation, with my right hand holding the shed open, holding the foundation cord for the loops a bit away from the band with the middle finger, and the first finger hooking the weft and handing it through the shed to the left hand, which pulls the loop and places it over a post on my measuring stick thingie. Repeat this two more times, then change shed, do another three loops, change shed and press in the weft before plying up the individual loops. This starts with the last of the loops from the previous sequence, which was stored and held under slight tension on my left pinkie toe - because otherwise, the tension from pulling the next weft loop will eat this one, and that is not good.

So - first loop to go is the stored one, freeing the pinkie toe to take the first loop from my post. Then the five others get plied up, everything gets placed behind the measuring gadget so this sits right next to the stored loop, and the next sequence starts.

These things are like a kind of a dance, using hands and fingers and in some cases also the feet, or other parts of the body. They take a while to develop, and the motions of different people working may be similar, but everyone will have their own specific movements and quirks and solutions. That, too, is lovely to watch when looking at someone crafting.

I've made more progress on the corded skirt, even though it's not very visible. That is mostly because most of the time spent on this project today went into spinning more yarn for the cords...



but there was a bit of weaving, too. I'm now at about 42 cm (the Answer!) of 155 for the corded part. I'm also making "progress" on my podcast backlog list, because both spinning and weaving are a very good opportunity to listen to all these stories and discussions that I have in my subscription list.

It is a lot of fun to weave, and cord, this skirt, but it is taking its sweet time. Also, after a while of sitting on the floor in the weaving or cording position, I really need to remember to take a break to stretch and move a bit. Otherwise I'm feeling it when I finally do get up... it's a slightly weird working position in both cases, and it does take its toll on the hips after a while.

It also does take a good bit of concentration to get everything done as it should be - so I am looking forward to the extended weekend a lot now. We have a bank holiday on Monday here in Germany, so I'll be back on the blog on Tuesday.

One of the things when doing a reproduction or reconstruction that always happens? More testing and trying out methods and materials than you'd have anticipated.

There's often that nagging feeling that there might be a better method. Or a better material. So you're looking at different ways of doing stuff, sometimes completely different, sometimes just a slight variation of what you tried before. At some point, though, there's a working method that does, yes, work - and then it's best to stop messing around and stop looking for something even better, even neater, even closer to the original... even though it may be tempting.

The optimal outcome is when you get to do enough testing beforehand that you end up with a really nice method when starting the actual piece... and that, usually, means more preliminary tests than planned for. Especially when it's a small but important thing that, on its own, is made rather quickly, testing it once more, practising it again, and trying out another fibre can be sort of addictive.

Case in point? The wool-wrapped rings on the bottom edge of the Egtved skirt. Yes, I did get some practice in with making such rings on the belt tassel... but they were still rather awkward to make, took a long time, and I was not overly happy with how the fibre behaved while working the rings.

Especially "took a long time" is a key thing here. With more than 300 rings, each minute that one of the rings takes will make a difference of more than 5 hours total work time. One minute adds up. The rings on the original also look very nice and neat... which can be achieved by picking the right wool.



There's a lot of different possibilities to make these rings, starting from what happens with the ends of each cord to how they are inserted into the fibre wrap or how the fibre is wrapped around them. My current favourite process involves a skewer stick, two needles, and longer ends to work the rings, and its end result looks like this:



Here's a picture of some of the original rings for comparison:

[caption id="attachment_6529" align="alignnone" width="300"] Detail from this image from the Danish National Museum.


So... what do you think? Is it a match?

The belt has finished drying after its final soak now - so it is all done and ready now!



It was not hard to do - not the weaving, nor the cord-twisting, nor the ring-making, though all parts had a little tendency to be fiddly. The wool was slightly sticky (which was remedied with the application of some size), twisting the cords took a bit of time until my fingers got back into the smooth action, and wrapping the end rings with fibre did turn out to be the fiddliest thing of all of the process.

I will definitely look into improving my method for the many, many ring ends on the skirt! At least after some more tries now I know that the fibre has an immense influence on how the wraps look, and how easy they are to make. Which means that I might end up using a different wool fibre than the one I had planned to use, as the results are just so, so much better.

It's amazing how sometimes small differences between materials can have a really, really huge impact. Have you had a similar experience with two kinds of wool that appeared not so very dissimilar at first glance showing very different behaviour, or very different outcomes?

There I am, making slow but steady progress! The belt has been finished, and now I'm back on the corded section of the Egtved skirt:



Yes, I'm working on the floor - I put the warp there on a hunch, and I'm very glad now that I took that decision. While it may not seem as comfy for working as seated at a table, it gives me the possibility to use my foot (or, to be precise, my left big toe) to assist with things. The wooden piece you see in the middle of the photo is used to measure off the cord lengths, and I hold both this measuring thing and, on top of it, the last loop pulled through the previous shed, in place with my toe. That way I don't have to do too many loops at once, which results in loops crossing each other, and me having to sort them out again, and/or in distortion of the weave or changes in loop length. This way, I do each shed's loops as a separate batch, pulling them out, then letting them ply up. Then they are put out of the way. After a while of weaving, I've taken a break from that and started twisting the cords; to have something else to do for a change, and to prevent huge tangles from having too many cords to deal with at once (though I suspect that would not happen, really).

The cords are much longer than the ones on the belt end, and quite a bit thinner, so they do feel and behave rather differently. I'm also not yet happy about the rings, there will have to be some more tests to find the right amount of fibre to wrap around to arrive at the proper size and thickness for the rings. Unfortunately there's no picture showing them clearly from all sides, so part of this will remain guesswork.

To the right of my measuring and weaving tool, you can see the to-scale-printout of the original skirt, which serves as my guideline and to check if I'm about right. This is immensely helpful to have, it's so difficult to work just from descriptions and written measurements!