I've been trying to practice using my digital microscope - by doing some fibre thickness measurements. Like so many things, this takes a bit of getting used to, and is not quite as easy or straightforward as one might expect... starting from getting things focused properly, to taking a good measurement of the rather fine fibres. It would help to have a greater magnification to have less margin for error (one pixel in or out does already make a difference), but then it's even harder to get a proper focus, and there's fewer fibres per image...

Anyway, here's a picture for you so you can see how that looks:



 
This is the fibre I'm using for the corded skirt, the cord part. I suspect that the measurements I took are a little bit high, because I have another kind of fibre where I know the micron count, and my measurements were consistently higher than the count that was listed... so, well, probably needs some more practice, and some calibrating of my own eye, and possibly I need to move that one pixel inside instead of outside.

Also... taking these measurements is quite time-consuming! Especially regarding the fact that you need to take measurements from about 100 fibres, randomly selected, to get something like a proper histogram of the fleece (or fleece part) that you are looking at. I only took a random sample of some few fibres, and I probably won't go for the 100 for now. There's other things to do that are more important right now (and I know already that the fibre profile of the stuff I can get does not match the Bronze Age sheep...)

Of course, I got sidetracked - so the belt is not quite finished yet. It is coming along nicely, with its lovely ends, though:



The little rings with their wrappings are quite fun to make, but I think I may have mis-estimated the amount of time they will take... which is not so big a deal for the 28 rings on the Egtved belt, but will add up in an entirely more uncomfortable way with the 340 or so rings on the corded skirt. Well. I will have plenty of opportunity to practice, and hopefully will be quicker as things progress!

Those fancy cords with the wool-wrapped rings at the bottom are not only finishing the bottom of the corded skirt from Egtved, they are the fancy finishing touch for belts as well - for several different belt finds, in fact.

Which means they also adorn the ends of the belt found in the Egtved grave... and I've finished weaving the reproduction of that, and now I'm at the cord-making stage:



The lighter grey thread is the weft thread, visible at the edge of the band; then there's single threads (that is the rest of the warp) and the thicker plies on the upper edge are the extra threads inserted to make the fringe full enough - because the paltry 20 warp threads are not enough by far for a proper, nice, bell-shaped fringe or tassel or however you might call it.

Making these was an enormous amount of fun. It was, however, also a series of movements I'm not quite so accustomed to, so in spite of it being a lot of fun, I had to stop before the thing was all done, because my wrists and fingers started to protest the repetitive twisting movements. Tomorrow, though, will see the thing done and completed!

This smaller amount of shorter cords has also confirmed my suspicions about how the yarn for the corded skirt should be spun and dimensioned in order to make cording as easy as possible, and that is quite, quite hard spun!

The corded skirt!

The Bronze Age corded skirts are definitely a fascinating topic, and they are quite iconic. The one found in the Egtved grave is, to my knowledge, the only complete and undamaged (or almost undamaged) one, and probably the best-known of them as well.

It's basically a band with a long fringe that serves as the skirt part. Not just any simple fringe, though: The individual cords are made from two two-ply yarns each, very tightly twisted, and they are finished in form of a ring at the bottom. That ring is tightly wrapped with some (slightly felted?) wool.

Getting this, of course, means? Right! More tests, and fiddling around, and measuring before and after. It's quite a significant amount of length that is taken up by the cording process, and I've also had to do quite a bit of fiddling and trying different methods and different kinds of wool to end up with a satisfactory process to make the rings.

[caption id="attachment_6487" align="alignnone" width="298"] Getting there! There's a little bit of fibre sticking out of the wrap, but overall it looks good to my eyes.


Neither the cords nor the rings are very large - the cords measure just under 4 mm in diameter in the original. (A lot of the modern re-makes of corded skirts have thicker cords than the originals, by the way.) The cords should end up at about 38 cm length when finished; I figured that I need about 60 cm loop length as the raw fringe to have enough material for the cord, the ring finish, and handling of both.

Last test run showed that I might want some more twist in my yarn for the cords, with the thickness that I did use before. Most importantly, though, it showed that for a change, I don't want to set the twist for the cord fringe before using the yarn, as it will make the cording process a bit easier to do, and will result in a more crisp look. So I'll sit down to some more spinning as soon as the fibre arrives (my first batch has just run out), and then there will be spinning (a considerable amount, since it's a lot of cords), and then... finally... cord-skirt-weaving! (Can you tell I'm really looking forward to that?)

In the meantime, I will work on the belt, which is also finished with cords that end in rings. More practice for the big one!

Sorry for the blog silence yesterday - I got so caught up in textile work that about everything else on my "to do daily" list slipped past me, including (obviously) doing a blog post. It was a very successful day otherwise, though. I have progressed from the "pure testing" stage into the stage where testing segues into actual work; so yesterday, I made two warps.

The current museum project is the reproduction of Bronze Age garments for a museum, to be used in hands-on sessions for visitors. I've posted about the wool problem before (there's no sheep left with the appropriate mix of fibres), so I'm using compromise wools. The rest of the project, though, I'm of course aiming to get as close to the originals as possible, so the people handling the items will get the best experience, and impression, possible.

This means spinning to the same thickness and twist angle as the originals - which is not quite as easy as it sounds, because, well, there's aiming to do something just so and managing to do it just so, and those two don't necessarily coincide. Also, if a yarn looks right when your are spinning it does not always mean it will look right once it's been soaked and stretched and dried again, or when it has been made into a warp. Things can happen on the way... and then you will have to adjust.

Trying to get as close as possible also means weaving, or plying, or twisting tests. There's been one test warp for the Egtved belt a while ago, where I found out that my yarns were a bit too thin; now there's a second warp strung up in the living room, and this time, it looks much better.



I'm working with 1:1 scale printouts of the finds to check if what I'm doing is the right size, and shape, and density. The feeling when you hold your piece next to the print, and it matches? That's so, so satisfactory.

This is the first of the warps I set up, the one of the belt; the other one is for the corded skirt, and that setup was, so far, also successful. The skirt band consists of several sections, the first of them without the extra selvedge cord for the corded part, and with a plied weft, just plain woven - and I have already finished that part. It looks very unspectacular:



You can already see the thick selvedge cord anchored in the weave, and coming out on the right side. Next section will be the part with the cords!

 

Let's get back to some more textile-related things, shall we?

Test spinning has finished, and now... more testing is about to happen: I'll set up the warp for an Egtved corded skirt, and I'm all excited about that!

Before I get to warping, though, you're getting a shot of the test yarns, all nicely set up in a row:



I did some labeling, and weighing, and measuring, of course. Just like I expected, even though I tried to spin all of them about the same thickness and the same amount of twist, there are considerable differences between the individual fibres. The Nm, for instance, varies between 0.8 and 1.9.

If you're not familiar with Nm, that is a gauge measurement for yarn thicknesses, and it tells you how many metres per gram a yarn has. So Nm 1 would be a single yarn with one metre per gram; Nm 5 would be a single with 5 metres per gram. If you have two numbers, like in Nm 10/2, the second one gives the amount of yarns in the ply, and the first the overall count - so the Nm 10/2 would be a two-ply yarn with ten metres per gram, made up from two singles. (In most yarns, you can assume that the single yarns in the plied yarn will be similar, so that would mean they both are an Nm 10, and the plied yarn thus ends up being Nm 5.)

In my test spins, the Gotland yarn has the lowest Nm, with 0.8; it's also the fibre that is densest when I portion tops for sale, and thus makes the smallest 100-g ball. The others were more or less similar, ranging from Nm 1,3 to 1,9 - with the irregularities of hand-spinning, and the squish factor when skeining (the tension, and half a round more or less), and the relatively small sample size, that, to me, does not look like such a significant difference than between Gotland and the others. More spinning will come, though, and maybe then something more reliable will show up.

First, though... off to warp!

(edit to fix typo!)

There's been some more behind-the-scenes website wrangling, though that was not quite successful. (If you've run across broken image links in the blog - I'm working on it, they will be fixed soon. This is a side effect of me getting rid of the many, many extra images that Wordpress generates when media is uploaded... which cluttered up my webspace.)

I hope the other issue, which regards the new site and especially its template (sigh...) will get better with some support... and now I'm really looking forward to the weekend.

Which promises to be quite sunny, and nice, and warm.

There also was some spinning! Here's the results:


One very nice skein of dark, rather shiny yarn, which was a joy to spin up. As opposed to the "fun" spinning I'm currently doing with some mystery fibre (well, I know it's wool, but I forgot exactly which kind) which has a lot of crimp, and somehow does not please me at all to work with. I'll stick with it some more, though, so that we can have some yarn for the Textile Forum to play with.