Today, there's progress going on with the Bernuthsfeld project - finally, after the conference and event marathon of the last few weeks. It's nice to settle down again and get some actual textile work done for an actual project, and I'm thoroughly enjoying the lasting smell of birch leaf dye on some of the fabrics.

It's also, as always, utterly fascinating to see how many details you need to know to replicate something, or at least get close to replicating it. I'm very sure that the original maker of this tunic, made out of previously used fabric pieces, didn't bother about many of the steps, or was indifferent regarding which piece of fabric got to sit on top of its neighbour and which got to sit underneath... but for us, trying to keep as close as possible to the original, this is of course a thing to think of (and to look for in the many lists and photographs we made during our documentation session).

[caption id="attachment_3477" align="alignnone" width="721"] Snapshot of me doing documentation of the patches of the original tunic - which was then turned into a pattern...


There's no such thing as a perfect replica of a historical fabric, due to oh so many reasons - and one of them is that you never get all the data you would need. As I've recently told somebody, it's not a question of if you forget to look for a given detail, or take a note, or manage to take a decent picture of a detail that you later on need - it's a question of when you discover that you missed this something, and how many of these discoveries you make, and how bad the missing links are for your overall picture and process.

That said, up until now, there've been a few hitches - some of them due to misunderstandings or misinterpretation of the conservation reports, one of them due to an actual error in them, and none of them really ruinous. I'm hoping like hell it will stay like this!

You might remember that a while ago, I posted about having a project for a reproduction of the tunic worn by the man from Bernuthsfeld.

Well, it's time to get the project into the next stage - which means I'm getting to see the original, and will be starting work on the actual tunic-making together with my colleague. So I'll be off doing exciting things to cloth for the next few days, and thus be taking a break from blogging - I will be back on October 16.

Meanwhile, I will leave you here with a picture of the fabrics that were woven for the tunic and a small mantle-like cloth:

[caption id="attachment_3429" align="alignnone" width="1632"] Fabrics woven for the Bernuthsfeld-Project - lots and lots of different ones, many of them just small patches...


And just because I have them, here are a few more pictures of some bits, close-up:



It's going to be so much fun to dye a selection of the fabrics, then cut everything up, roughen them a bit to simulate use-wear, and stitch them together into the tunic!

There's some more progress on the Bernuthsfeld project, though it is all but spectacular - pre-wash documentation of the fabrics, and subsequently washing, drying, and documenting them again. That documentation would mostly not be strictly necessary, but I couldn't resist the temptation to gather some additional data. Like how much shrinkage we are getting with the fabrics, and if there are clearly observable changes in how the yarns look before and after washing.

So what I did was take closeups of an  area marked with a bit of red polyester sewing thread - you can see that in the upper left corner of my measurement frame. And these are just a few of the many, many fabrics:


All of these will eventually be cut up and pieced together to form the Bernuthsfeld tunic reconstruction... before that, though, they will get washed and dried and have another photo op. And I'm really, really curious to see how it will come out!

The Bernuthsfeld Man's tunic is really a rather special affair - a very, very simple cut, but it is put together from only patches. It's not a heavily worn tunic that was patched up.

Most publications about the tunic are in German, including one published in one of the NESAT proceedings, which includes this overview picture of the tunic's front:

[caption id="attachment_3151" align="alignnone" width="640"] Picture from: Farke, Heidemarie. "Der Männerkittel aus Bernuthsfeld. Beobachtungen während einer Restaurierung." In Textiles in European Archaeology. Report from the 6th NESAT Symposium, 7-11th May 1996 in Borås, edited by Lise Bender Jørgensen and Christina Rinaldo, 99-106. Göteborg, 1998, p. 100.


As you can see, it's rather... patchy. The individual bits of fabric all show marks of wear from previous use, possibly in garments; there's lots of twill variations and only rather few plain weave bits. My count is 19 different fabrics, used for 43 patches. Some of them are folded double, others are used as single layer. The "cut", if you can call it that without there having been proper garment cutting, is as simple as possible.

Why that tunic looks like it does? Nobody knows - it is a singular piece (alas, like quite a few textile finds). With its patches, possibly in different colours, but at least in very different kinds of fabric, all looking old and worn, and with the very conspicuous checkered fabric #31 right on the breast in front, it would have been very obvious that this was not a "normal" member of society, though. There are a few late medieval images that show beggars dressed in very, very patched garments - so maybe this tunic was a beggar's work clothing?

There was some spinning today... in both black, and white. The reason for this is the exciting new and large project - recreating the finds (including the garments) that were found with the bog body of the Man from Bernuthsfeld (Wikipedia has an article about him, but only in German).

The body and the finds were off for research since 2011, but have returned last summer to the Landesmuseum Emden. The wish to show a better picture of the man, and how he might have looked in his lifetime, has led to this reconstruction project of the finds... which is totally awesome, and means a lot of (partly quite fiddly) work.

First step, after the extensive planning, is getting the fabrics. And, you might have guessed it - they are not your common garden-variety pieces, available without a problem in the next fabric shop. The tunic is put together from patches - more than 40! - and these patches are mostly from already worn fabrics, more than 20 different kinds.

Weaving small bits of fabric (a patch here, a patch there, patches, patches everywhere) is much less efficient than weaving a proper, large piece - which means that a lot of the planning was figuring out how large the individual pieces have to be, and how they can be woven without driving everybody involved utterly crazy.

The yarns are partly also a problem - which is the reason that I did a tiny bit of spinning. The rest of the yarns will be machine-spun, but as close to the original yarns as possible, and the weaving has already started. So exciting!

[caption id="attachment_3143" align="alignnone" width="442"] The yarn, dark and light - it is for a checkered patch that sits prominently on the breast of the tunic...

There is a new project coming up (I have hinted at it), and today was full of planning for it - it involves hand-woven fabric again, a whole stack of pieces in different weaves and from different yarns and in different densities, so there's quite a lot of figuring out to do.

And that was my job today - making a ginormous list of fabrics, going through a huge stack of documentation from the conservation work done on most of the fabrics and scratching my head and cursing fate for those pieces that were not conserved - and are thus not very well documented... which is utterly unhelpful for making a reconstruction.

Anyway, the list is now almost finished - and I really enjoyed this bit of planning work. It just is nice to see how varied those textiles are, and how much work went into them, and how they were used. It's also nice to have so much good, detailed documentation to work off from! After a whole day sitting at the computer and going through stacks of paper, though, I'm also looking forward to doing things with my hands again: I need to make new distaffs, and that's the plan for tomorrow!

The fabric turned out wonderfully after being fulled - soft and lush and beautiful. It also surprised me a lot.

It's a fourshaft twill, which means every thread goes over two and under two, staggered to give diagonal lines. In a fairly balanced weave with a similar amount of warps and wefts per cm, that should result in a fabric that looks the same on both sides.

Well, guess what this cloth does not do?


Look the same on front and back.

There you go. Be surprised along with me! (Probably has to do something with the spin direction in relation to the twill direction...)