I've been talking about textile reconstructions and some of the things involved in making them, but I think I haven't covered the topic of documentation for them yet... so here's a bit about that.

When I'm working on a reconstruction, I keep track of my work times. That's usually done with a time tracker for the research/planning tasks, such as reading up on textile finds, gathering information, and making plans and preliminary calculations. For the actual work away from the computer, I use a stopwatch, as that is handy and easy to use. A stopwatch is easily stopped for taking a break and started again, and that will guarantee that I have the exact times for how long things take.

Or... the almost-exact times. There's two reasons that I want to keep accurate track of times: For calculating the payment due for my work (obviously), and for gathering information about how long it takes to do things. The latter is half for being able to do better, more accurate pre-calculations and estimates, and half for research purposes. How well the times taken are suited for research depends, of course, on the tools used and the processes in detail, so I won't use my spinning times on the e-spinner for estimating spinning times in the Middle Ages, but there's plenty of tasks that are similar to what would have been done in the original creation to be of some value.

Now, of course, it would be helpful to separate different tasks and write down what each of them was. It makes a difference whether I'm sewing a straight line, or whether I'm hemming seam allowances. It is handy to know how long it takes to spin as opposed to weaving, and then there's the yarn skeining time, and time needed to set the twist. All of these could be just taken together as work time on item X, but it's of more help for my future work to have the extra detail.

Which, of course, adds some overhead work time for documentation.

It's also a smart idea to take at least some rough notes about how things are done, if it's not so simple that there's no other way. (Spinning would be an example for that. But it could already be interesting to note whether a pair of hose was sewn from the bottom up, or from the top down.) A few photos taken of the process also don't hurt... 

In some cases, when a reconstruction is ordered, the museum asks for a bit of "making of"-documentation, which could be pictures or videos, or both. That makes it easier to remember to do the visual documentation - for all the other things, having something to blog about also means I usually take a few photos of things going on.

Otherwise, regarding spinning, I record the following things in an Excel sheet: 

Bobbin number (so I can keep track of the yarn batches) and how long the spinning time for that bobbin was; how many turns on the skein winder (I have a counter for that, so this is a quick and easy way to measure yarn length); weight of the skein. Then my sheet does the calculation on yarn length (number of turns multiplied by 1.69, as that's my skein circumference), spinning speed in metres per hour, and nM as the yarn grist. I'm also getting a running calculation on how much yarn I have (adding the bobbins/skeins already done), and how much is left to do for the project according to my and the weaver's estimates.

So far, I have found that spinning time does vary according to the type of yarn, the amount of twist, and the fibre - but it's usually in a similar range. It does look like I have a normal drafting speed that I will fall into, and that limits the overall working speed. Not very surprising, but there you are.

Do you document your spinning? Or are you tempted now to do so?

Since I was asked about progress on the reconstruction process... well. Here's a first glimpse of the yarn from the test-spin, still on the bobbin: 

I've done a bit of spinning with both Valais Blacknose and Gotland wool, and though I'd have preferred to like the Valais better... I'm inclined towards the Gotland right now, at least for the warp. It's a bit easier to spin, and it comes closer to my impression of the original warp. The weft, though... it might well be that the Valais is better suited for that. 

The new empty bobbin is already sitting on the spinner, ready for the s-spun weft test yarn. Now if I hadn't gotten sidetracked with a lot of other things to do today... 

Mind you, I'm not complaining. But sometimes juggling all the things that have deadlines, or do not have deadlines but still need attention... well. You probably know what I mean! 

Here I am, back home - after having a lovely time at Düppel for the textile day on Sunday!

It was an absolute pleasure to show and tell about distaff spinning, and have some people join me to give this wonderful technique a try. The weather was sunny and warm, but fortunately there was always a little bit of shade to stand in. There were lots and lots of interesting questions by visitors, and at one point I was even taking a group of them further back into history... to starting out textile works (or proto-textile works) with plant fibres and splicing. It was a fortunate coincidence that some nettle plants grew behind my stall.

It was also the first time that I did distaff spinning with a "join in and try" stall. It did work satisfactorily - but has shown me, once more, how important good conditions are for teaching. There is a reason why the amount of participants for a workshop is limited, and why I much, much prefer having a nice closed room to doing a workshop outside, even though it may be nice and pleasant to be outdoors, and I generally enjoy being outside a lot. Distractions are a thing, and do have an impact on the learning curve. 

Apart from that extra bit of added difficulty, there were the usual problems when learning how to spin with a distaff - some of them easier to solve than others. One issue is always movement of the distaff (which is easier to remedy when I have the very large clamps that I bring to workshops, and that I could not bring to the Middle Ages, due to obvious reasons). Another very common issue is problems with remembering which direction the spindle is turning, and that's something that I've not yet found a solution for. (Sometimes I have left-handed people in the workshop who have been re-trained to use the right hand in their childhood, and they often have this issue. But it's not limited to them, and makes the whole thing really hard.) 

It was a lot of fun, and also an opportunity to try slightly different methods for teaching and explaining, and now I can feel the back of my brain processing everything and trying to see if there's things to change for better teaching in the future... because you never stop learning.

If you're following me on Instagram, you may have seen some pictures of this on-going project already. It is, so to say, a left-over from last year's European Textile Forum, where we tried to explore the making of membrane gold threads.

Membrane gold threads are the cheaper version of real gold threads - it's a gilt animal membrane wrapped around a fibrous core. In our case, we built on the analysis results of some Italian threads that Cristina Scibé is researching.

There's a lot of unknowns or insecure things in the reconstruction of the process, and we were (and mostly still are) unfamiliar with most of the materials involved, so there was a really steep learning curve and there were plenty of "d'oh" moments.

But we have arrived at a process that is working, and that would be plausible also for production.

The photo shows the two spindles I am working with for wrapping strips of stuff around the core - one with the two linen single yarns, and the other with the wrapped yarns. These are not membrane strips, but modern metal and metallised plastic strips, done for practise purposes, as the membrane is a little too much work and too much of a resource to use as training material.

It's an utterly fascinating project... and I will give a little presentation about it on the EAA in Belfast this year. I'm already very excited about that!

There's a bit of research happening here right now - not only for some work projects, but also for a little bit of extra. There was, you see, this project at the last Textile Forum to try and find out about how membrane threads were made.

Membrane threads are, to explain it very quickly, the cheap version of gold (or silver) threads. Instead of wrapping a strip of gold or gilt silver around a fibrous core, organic material is gilded or silvered with leaf metal and then cut into strips and wound around a core. Usually, that core is made of cheaper material as well, and not of silk like usual for the proper gold threads. 

In our case, we used bovine gut membrane and linen thread as core, plus leaf silver for the silvering. There was a stack of questions when we started the project, and then there were more and more questions, and now there is still a lot, but also mostly new ones - which is nice, as it means we found answers for many of the questions from the first batch.

I will present our results in August at the EAA conference, and I'm already looking forward to that a lot. The next steps will be a comparison between the originals and our results (where one of the outcomes will, very obviously, be that ours are not very well crafted...) and then we will know more about how our process compares with the original one.

For now, though, I am very happy with what we did.

Even though we lack proficiency in all the relevant steps (mixing the appropriate glue, gilding the membrane, cutting it and winding it around the core), we have arrived at a workable solution for all the process steps that feels like it would be suitable for actual production. It's still a complex, time-consuming process, but then that's the case with so many texile-related tasks that it fits right in. 

And I can't tell you how nice and satisfying it felt to actually produce silver thread in our last go at this reconstruction process!

Somehow time's always too short to get all the things done. Case in point? One of the many, that is? 

I've had a revamp of the distaff spinning kit in the pipeline for a while, and there has actually been progress, but it's not completely finished. One of the reasons for that is the Most Patient Husband of Them All, who did a proofreading stint of the draft and had a few very sensible comments... one of them being about the unequal lenght of the pieces of combed top on the distaff band in the dressing instructions photos.

So "new photos" got on the list... and they have happened this week, so one step further along. 

Since I wrote the last distaff dressing instructions, I've changed my process a little, and it now includes unfolding the top.

Most of the pieces of combed top you can get commercially produced are a rather solid, thick band of fibres. However, there's usually something like a seam in the middle of it on one side, and it can be unfolded, leaving you with a wide, thin band of wool - something that is nice to use for dressing the distaff, and unfolding the top also helps in loosening up the fibres a little where they were compressed due to storage of the top. It works well, too, with just the folded tops, but I think it's even better when taking this extra step.

It's fascinating, by the way, to look back occasionally and see how different processes evolved over time - sometimes by chance, sometimes due to some problems, sometimes due to a change in materials, or getting more familiar with a certain material or preparation. 

When I was in school, I used to love whenever there was a film to be watched. For one thing, it meant less lesson time, as setup of the film equipment would take time; then it was usually amusing to watch the stuff.

Most of the time, these films were already quite old, dating back to the 70s or even 60s. So these educational clips had their own peculiar charm - and I'm very much reminded of these by the films in the TIB.

The TIB is the information portal of the Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, and you can find a video collection there, among a lot of other resources. Which, for instance, includes this gem:

I haven't figured out what the woman spinning the tow does with that circular hand motion, but in one of the shots you can see a lot of debris on her skirt, so maybe it's trying to take out the debris? Towards the end, there's a very quick bit of distaff dressing as a bonus, one of the many, many different ways to get flax ready for spinning.

It's a lovely little film in any way, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!