As you might know if you've done medieval-style tablet weaving before, there's a special kind of contraption usually seen when late medieval women are depicted: Some kind of stand with two uprights, one floor crossbar and usually a second crossbar, or some diagonal stabilisers. The warp is then tensioned between the two uprights, and off you go with your weaving work. 

Like here: 

Now, the plan is to make some more - but larger this time, and with bits of wood bought in a normal hardware store, and less glueing plus more screwing (hopefully not screwing up, though). That should hopefully make them even nicer to work with, and easier to take apart and put together again, with less wonkyness.

We shall see if that plan works out!

I stumbled across this video in my FB feed (which I look at, occasionally, don't judge me). It's worth watching, in my opinion.

And just in case you did not have the pleasure to hang out with the metal folks as much as I did, and are not familiar with the power hammer thing - it's a machine that replaces yourself or someone swinging a very heavy hammer to hit whatever is held underneath.

Now... if you don't have a power hammer, you can wield the heavy hammer yourself, or you could have a helper (the striker) who will hit the place on the item that you point to (by hitting it with a smaller hammer, in counter-rhythm to the rhythm of the striker). It makes things easier in some way, and different in some other - as you have to turn and place the item at the right spot for the power hammer to hit it in the right way now, instead of having control over the hammer as well now (like angling it a little bit, or varying the power with which it hits at the last instance). 

You might see it a little like using an electric spinner instead of a treadled spinning wheel - it takes away the (stunningly boring) effort of powering the machine, but you lose a little bit of the flexibility and control. (Yes, you can use a pedal to adjust the speed of your machine, but I found it to be much less sensitive than my foot on the actual treadling pedal.)

For some people, an e-spinner is out of the question for this reason - they want to do all the work, not just some of it. Some might prefer the full control, while they wouldn't mind skipping the treadling work. Some might be happy to accept the changes because they do not want to treadle, or are not able to. There's always a range of individual decisions and evaluations behind that choice... if you have it.

For some people, buying and storing one spinning device is the most they can afford, and the question about which tool to use is rhetorical. In that case, you decide once (hopefully wisely to best suit your needs) and then you use what you have. If it's not perfectly suited, well, if you are familiar with the tool, it will usually work in some way after all, and you will make do. (As one of my teacher once said - "The best tool for the job is the tool that you have.") 

Will I judge anyone for using a power tool? Unless it was used for an experiment where the aim was to learn about original processes, or if it was used for a reconstruction where the primary goal was to do everything as correctly and historically accurately as possible - no. Not at all. A power tool, or a modern variant of a tool, might make your life and work a little easier, and a little faster, but it does not mean you don't need the knowledge, skills, and experience to achieve a good result. Or, as the man in the video says: A power hammer does not mean you take a lump of metal, place it on the power hammer anvil, and an axe comes out all by itself. 

Myself, if I am working on a project that does not require the complete use of historical means for one reason or another, I will happily go use my modern tools to make my life easier, and, yes, to make ordering such a bespoke piece more affordable for my customers. I will also happily replace original contraptions like a two-post construction to hold up a tablet-weaving warp by two modern clamps. It's two solid thingummies to tie my strings to. This does not change anything at all in the process of messing up my tablets trying to finally reproduce the pattern correctly. 

If, however, you cheat for something that was supposed to be done all medievally, and you use a power drill to ply or a power hammer to forge, or an e-spinner to make yarn, well, I will definitely give you the Evil Glare of That Should Not Have Been Done. 

There you go. I hope you always have the tools you need to do the job, and that you will choose wisely when getting new ones.

Mathematics and weaving go rather well together - it starts with calculating the amount of yarn needed, goes on with doing divisions for the heddle rods and pattern repeats, and then there's calculating the shrinkage, too.

If you're tablet weaving, you can apparently use maths to help you generate patterns, at least of a specific type. There's a freely downloadable short paper here, titled "Markov Chains, Coptic Bananas, and Egyptian Tombs: Generating Tablet Weaving Designs Using Mean-Reverting Processes" written by Joshua Holden.

There's even a link to the code online. So in case you are looking for another way to get some tablet weaving patterns... 

Let's talk about... spinning. If you've heard me talk about spinning, you have probably heard me say that no matter what tools or techniques you use, spinning is always "take fibres, add twist".  Whether you use a stick, or whether you use a modern new-fangled industrial spinning machine.

The way in which these modern new-fangled industrial spinning machines introduce twist, though, is rather... creative. It all starts with the Spinning Jenny and now having several spindles served by one spinner, and not just one (or two). That's also when industrialised spinning starts to rely on slivers, or roving, or whatever the thing called Vorgarn in German is called in the context - thin, already drafted-out fibre bands with sometimes a little twist already inserted.

At some point, the spinner is replaced by clockwork and you have the self-actuator. And then a similar process happens as in pre-industrial spinning: While the self-actuator is still doing, essentially, spindle-spinning with its two phases of drafting and spinning and then winding, the ring-spinning machine copies the flyer wheel action (only multiplied and much faster) and spins and winds in one go.

(By the way, I blame the invention of the flying shuttle and John Kay for this. Faster weavers started this escalation, and now here we are today, with air for everything. I'll come to that later.)

And then someone came up and made machine spinning even faster by open-end spinning, where you basically rotate the fibres and pull out a string of them - similar to when you'd pull a bedsheet out of a spinning washing machine. It would twist up, and so do the fibres.

Because there's an event coming up where I might need to know, at least roughly, the difference between how these spinning machines work, I finally read up on the stuff coming after ring-spinning (which was the most recent I did know). Everything that came afterwards sort of seemed more like magic to me (because, as we all know, any technology that is sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic).

Now I've read that nifty explanation of "imagine pulling out a bedsheet from a rotating washing machine drum", and apart from imagining it to be rather heavy, unwieldy, and potentially also very wet, it did click in my brain and now I get rotor spinning.

There was only one thing left to conquer: The Vortex. Or, more precisely... vortex spinning.

So I looked around, and read a bit of some papers here and there, and wondered how that would work. Because, you see, in all the other methods, one end of the process chain is always rotating. You have your fibre supply at one end, and the wound-up yarn at the other end, and one of them needs to rotate to get the twist in; you can't just add twist in the middle and have both ends fixed, as that would build up reverse twist in both parts. 

I had come far enough to know that there are no moving mechanical parts in the vortex spinning anymore, and that there is airstreams used to introduce circular motion in some way. But you don't have rotation in one of the ends that way, so my poor little brain sort of stopped there, and since it is clearly possible, declared it to be something akin to magic.

Well. Now I've read some more, and it's not magic. It's worse. It's cheating.

Vortex spinning does not take a bundle of fibres and adds twist to them, as all the other methods do in some way. Vortex spinning takes a bundle of fibres (the sliver), splits off some of these fibres and wraps them around the rest. 

I think that's not proper spinning. I do guess that yes, if you're generous, you can say it's core-spun. But... well. 

(If you're interested now and want to see for yourself, you can read this open-source article about vortex spinning, and there's diagrams towards the end that show how the thingummy is build up (where, interestingly, they still have something they call "the spindle") and a diagram that clearly shows the principle of wrap-a-few-to-simulate-a-yarn that is used here.)

Now I am a little sad. I had expected, um, proper spinning. At least it's fast, though!

Aaargh. Sometimes I still manage to click that button necessary to do the blog publishing and not do the confirmation thingie. With the wonderful result of  the post, you may have guessed it, not going out. 

Which is, you may also have guessed it, what happened yesterday. You didn't miss much, though - I finally got around to doing a little maintenance stuff, such as sorting the new stamps, tidying up things in the main stock shelves, and checking if the amounts I have listed for this and that are still more or less correct, and if and what I have to re-order and re-stock.

The little cat, meanwhile, was making the most of the summer heat and has been napping in the wintergarden all day. The wintergarden, of all places, where even with as much shadow as the curtain-like roof thingies will provide and the doors open, it gets very warm. I jokingly refer to it as the cat oven in the summer. But, well, she insists (and could go somewhere cooler any time).

When I took a break and joined her, it was definitely no place where you'd want to do work of any kind. Napping, though... yes, that might work. Unfortunately there's still a few bits to take care of here on the desk! (Where it's also nice and cool compared to outside, so I have no real excuse to slack.) 

This morning, though, it was still cool enough that I could keep the cat company and do a little bit of sprang. I'm getting closer to the required length for the Lengberg cap, and it's really nice to work in that technique again.

One of the things I find fascinating is that sprang also shares that rhythm of "stuff can happen - nothing happens" that you also can get in tablet weaving, and that you sometimes have in knitting (when there's no pattern on the wrong side row and you only purl back). 

In sprang, you do your patterning in one row and then just confirm and get things nice and orderly in the following one. I have done sprang stuff before, but it was mostly solid things, partly with interlinking in the opposite direction and partly with double layers - but I have not worked with a larger hole pattern before. 

My guess before starting out on this would thus have been that with a heavily patterned sprang I will have one slower row (to read and follow the pattern) and one faster row (just go over everything to set up for the next slow one). I've found, however, that it's not as pronounced for me here as I would have guessed.

The main reason for that is... edges. Sprang, when done with the basic interlinking as the main structure, acquires a curl or twist after a while. That's just normal, and with a solid piece, it means you will have some curling, and thus potentially crossing threads, at the start and at the end. Which, coincidentally, is also where the usual selvedge effect happens and your threads are a little looser than the others. (That happens because they only have one neighbour, and thus don't get as nicely fixed down in the fabric, and there's also a little less take-up, so they can get longer compared to the others after a while. It's annoying, but can be found as an edge effect in many techniques.) 

So with a plain thing in sprang, done with only interlinking, I get slowed down a little at the start, where I have to take care the threads are in the correct order, and at the end, where there's the same issue. The rest is breezing through, more or less. With patterns in the sprang, though... Patterns in this case are made by working holes. And holes are, in fact, a right edge and a left edge happening in the middle of the fabric. 

These edges behave, for all practical purposes, like edges. That means they will also try to curl up a little. So instead of having two places where you have to pay a little extra attention, you now have as many extra places that will try to mess with your flow as you have holes. Actually... double the amount, as each hole has a left edge and a right edge.

I've measured time, and it does look like I am almost consistenly as quick doing the pattern row as the unpatterned one. I'm working with fairly little tension on the threads, which might make things a little more difficult sometimes, but definitely helps with getting a nice, tight interlinking. Quite often in sprang, there's rather big holes even in the (technically solid) base fabric; one reason for that is the use of sticks to save the previous sheds, just in case you made a mistake and have to go back. I haven't worked with sticks in a long time, but for the Lengberg sprang, it needs not only no sticks, but also enthusiastic pressing in of the new crossings. Which is made easier by having low tension on the threads, as they will be happier to stay crossed over and not stretch out again.

Very long story short: I am having fun. In both rows. Even though I don't appreciate the edges trying to be difficult.

Well, not much to tell about here today - there was stuff to be done on the computer, so there wasn't even sneaking away for a good bit to do some more sprang. (Which is still growing too quickly, by the way, so I'll only need about half the original row count for the original length. Grrr.) The Little Cat had a vet checkup today to get blood drawn, and she was understandably not very amused. The vet was, though, when I told him that the Little Cat's newest medication seems to be the tastiest thing ever available to a cat, and goes absolutely bonkers for it. (Apparently that's not normal.)

Otherwise, texts, reading, phone, writing, emails, stuff. And because you deserve something not as unexciting as hearing about this, here's a link for you to a new kind of sock heel that can be knit in top-down or toe-up, and a link to a paper about cats doing the "fetch" thing. Enjoy. 

So in case I have gotten you curious about sprang, but you have never really heard about it... let me introduce you to Carol James, who has done an insane amount of sprang in all imaginable shapes, sizes, and colours, and who does a very nice job of explaining holes, patterns, and her notation system (which is also how the Lengberg tree of life pattern is published):