I spent a part of the long weekend (thanks to Pentecost) taking extra naps (thanks to a cold I managed to catch). As Murphy wills it, now that the weekend is over, I'm back to health again, and of course also back to work.

(Not really complaining here, though. Even though I could have done very well without the cold, at least the timing was only mildly annoying, slowing down the weekend, as opposed to horrendous, as in "could have hit me while abroad and needing all my brain and energy".)

Plus side of having some extra time to just sit and do stuff: I managed to do a little bit of sprang. The story behind it is that I might need to make a piece of sprang for a museum project, and that means I have to do at least a rough calculation on how much it will be, and that is, obviously, hard to do without a basis.

For things that I've done before, I have all the data written down and collected, so I know how long something takes when it goes smoothly (or, as it usually does in best case, mostly smoothly) and how long it will take if something explodes. (Figuratively, not literally.) Yes, I always take time measurements when working for work purposes. Yes, I still do it even once it's clear I am way beyond my initial estimate. Even if it hurts to see how much it's going off estimate - it will be really, really helpful for planning the next similar project.

(In case you are planning to track your work times now, too: My recommendation is a simple stopwatch to place at where you work. That way, you can pause whenever you get up for tea, or a phone call, or whatever - just in case it takes longer than planned and then you forget when you stopped.)

So now I'm spranging again. Last time was a good while ago, and this time I am supposed to follow a pattern to get, well, a pattern, so it was a little different. It took me a bit to get back into the flow and figure out how to get a fabric density similar to the original, but now I'm getting there. 

The threads are not optimal, but they have about the right thickness, and were what I had on hand quickly. 

As always with textile techniques, it pays to have a good, even set-up - differences in tension when doing the setup will mess with your work later on. And then...

There's a pattern to sprang, to the normal, very basic crossing pattern. It involves two threads from the front getting closer together as you pull one thread from the back, and then you split the pair and pull one more from the back and have a new pair to split. It's rhythmic and beautiful and mesmerising, and it only gets tricky if you have a tension issue, or if you get to the edge (where tension is normally a little bit off, too). This pattern will be persistent throughout work, only broken at edges (which includes edges of holes, making everything a bit more interesting). 

So basically, this means you have a running feedback on whether you are still correct, or if you have messed up. That requires adequate eyesight (very thankful for that!) and adequate light (thank you, Joseph Wilson Swan, Thomas Edison, and successors) and adequate concentration.

And then it's just... beautiful. It helps if you have a firm fabric, and if you take care to keep all threads nice and orderly, so I like to work close underneath the top fell. One of the hardest things, really, is now to stop in time before concentration wanes and I mess up, or to stop and do other things that need to be done. (I'm looking at you, bills I need to pay and orders I need to send out.)

By the way, my hack for getting an even warp when warping, or an evenly tensioned sprang setup: Don't tension your threads more than necessary to just keep them from sagging. You are measuring them off on a horizontal thingummy, so start with the thread completely slack and only tension it so it just goes straight. Continue with this technique throughout. 

Gravity helps you get it right here, because you always need the same amount of tension to just get it straight, no more. If you always adjust to that exact tension from slack, there's no danger of you building up more tension gradually as you are working - which is a rather common, if unwelcome, effect. In case you have accidentally tensioned more than desired (because your yarn stuck, for instance, and the ball/cone/reel/spool un-helpfully tensioned it for you), just let it go all slack, then re-tension to just straight. You do not need to make the set-up at the exact amount of tension that you want to have later! You can add all the tension you want or need for working with your  bits of string measured off this slacky way later on, and they will be deliciously even. Works with every technique where you do a set-up step measuring off threads that have to be the same length.

I found this video a while ago, and I probably left it open in a tab because of the spindle-spinning technique that is shown for a few times (though only briefly). 

The whole thing is interesting to watch, however - so here you go: 

Some things are really made easier and more accessible by modern technology. Case in point? 3D scans and then digital models of items that you can look at, from your own cosy home, without ever setting foot in Norway.

Or, to make it a little more straightforward: The Uni of Oslo's Kulturhistorisk Museum has made 3D-scans from some of their items and put them online. So now you can look at a medieval incense burner or at wooden items from the Oseberg ship. And yes, that includes the niddy-noddy found there, in great detail.

So you will probably want to head over to https://3d.unimus.no/ now and fall down the rabbit hole yourself... have fun! 

If you are into historical tablet weaving, you might know the tablet-woven band found in Hallstatt. Now a new find has been made and analysed, and it might be from the same workshop or even a part of the same band - at least the colour pattern and the thread number all match so that you can weave both motifs on the same warp.

Want to read more? The new piece has been published in an article in the newest Archaeological Textiles Review for 2024, and you can download the full issue (and all the others, too) on their website.

Welcome back here on the blog - which should have declared my winter break until today, but the post got stuck in the publishing process. Anyways, I'm happy you're here (still or again), and I'm already looking forward to an interesting year with a lot of things going on...

One of my first shenanigans will be going down to Italy to teach a tiny bit of spinning to the participants of the Winter School "Textiles make the world go round". Then there's a knit-along starting on ravelry on January 18 that I'm sort of involved in (I made the pattern). Most of the knit-along will probably be in German, but the pattern is available in both German and English, so if you're interested, you can check it out here. 

And speaking of knitting - the Knitting History Forum this year is taking place on February 1 (a Saturday). It's an online conference with six presentations, followed by discussion, and the tickets are available now on the Knitting History Forum Website.

One of the fruits of the EuroWeb Cost Action is the freshly-published thematic dossier in the open access journal Ophiussa. Some of the talks presented in May 2022 in the conference in Muro Leccese are collected and published here - and the texts are, at least partly, in English, so don't be scared off by the Portuguese titles in the website and dossier contents.

You can access the full journal including the dossier here.  

Yesterday's blog post fell by the wayside - I was away all day going to set up the loom for the exhibition in Bamberg... and it was great fun. (I also learned a lot! Including a new knot, which is actually a big deal for me, as I seem to be a bit of a knot dyslexic sometimes.)

The loom standing in the exhibition now was the result of a lot of thinking, planning, and the effort of many people. Our idea was to show something about weaving in the era around 1000. Now... that's the time when there's already an inkling of the horizontal loom, but we have next to no good evidence for that (as in "good enough to build a reconstruction from"). So we decided to make a warp-weighted loom.

The original plan was to have a regular one, but the building (which is old) does not allow for a loom to touch the walls. (That's also a possible security issue in an exhibition, as a loom only leaning might fall, and attaching it to the wall was out of the question, as the building itself is under heritage protection). The second plan, having an iron/metal holder for the loom, was out because of budget reasons, so we did end up with a free-standing wooden loom.

It's a proper, nice one, though, not looking as if somebody went collecting a few sticks in the wood and cobbled them together.

(The curious thing is that you can build a functional loom from mostly odd sticks from the woods, provided you make sure that the essential bits that need to be straight are straight. That's harder to do nowadays, though, than making one from cured, available, straight bits of wood, though. So that's what we have.)

The main thing that we wanted to do with the loom was to show that textile production at that time was a high-standing, important, and highly developed part of production, and the resulting objects were of high quality. So we found an expert in warp-weighted loom weaving in Sweden - Marie Wallenberg - who worked together with us to get the idea across to the woodworker, who made an almost perfect loom. One of the folks from Kaptorga made the loomweights (scaled down a little to be lighter, because that helps to not wear out the threads over time - the normal fitted loom is not intended to stay for months or years with the loomweights hanging), and Marie wove a fabric to fill the loom.

If you've seen warp-weighted looms in exhibitions, they are often a crooked thing, with a crooked bit of coarse weaving on them. While that may have happened occasionally, it is not what we would expect them to be in general - after all, they were used to make fine, straight, high-quality fabrics in the past. And that is exactly what we wanted to portray.

So once the loom had arrived from the woodworker and the fabric had arrived from Sweden and I had finished making the Rod of Many Holes to attach the weave to the loom's top beam, I set out to set things up in Bamberg, with Marie coaching me through the process.