So, here we are - de-gumming results:

The procedure I did yesterday resulted in colour loss and definitely loss of some, but not all sericin - the silk still has a rather firm hand and is stiffer than I'd expect it to be if completely de-gummed.

 


You can see the narrow band of lighter silk on the gummy original silk, and the completely de-gummed and then dyed silk on the left side. Maybe I should take another small sample of the gummy silk and try to get all the gum out by boiling it within an inch of its life? See what happens then?

In other news, I've been busy in the background working on the website re-launch. As usual, it eats up all the time it can and then some, and there's other things to take care of and work on (such as the Egtved Project, for which you're also due an update), too, so it's actually feeling a little like a wonder that I have made as much progress as I have. The learning curve is also rather steep - in the past few days, I've successfully dabbled in CSS, altered php scripts (do not leave an extra . in or you will get a lovely error), edited sql tables by adding columns, written an sql update thingummy to replace values in a column (it's called Abfrage in German and I don't know the English term), and used a regular expression for a search-and-replace routine. I've also cursed the inconsistency of things when an installation went wrong and pondered the pros and cons of starting over or not. (Verdict? I'll try, and if it goes wrong, I'll go with the semi-clean install that seems to work okay for now.) At least I cannot complain about lack of challenges in all kinds of fields!

 

Well, I definitely got your attention with the gummy silk thing yesterday!

First of all, here's a better picture of the two silks side by side:



Now to the answers to all the comments yesterday...

Jessica's comment was:

Sometimes, some detail in research pops up, and then it keeps haunting you, and occupying you, just a tiny bit. It's not growing into a big project, but it is always there, and occasionally, things touch it and then you try and fit the new thoughts into the current theories.

Well, that was probably a bit cryptic. So. Let me explain. About... silk.

As you probably know, most silk used in the Middle Ages was reeled, not spun - the long filaments from several cocoons wound off said cocoons together to get you a thread of silk. The more cocoons, the thicker your thread.

When the silkworm makes the cocoons, they're for its protection - so they are pretty hard. That's caused by sericin, or silk gum, which is more or less a protein-based glue sticking the filaments together and hardening them into a nice, protective shell. Hot water softens the sericin so the cocoons can be reeled off (it also kills the silkworm). The glue stays on, though, getting you... gummy silk, or raw silk.

This raw silk is stiff and can feel like a stiff nylon thread, very un-like the soft silk that we know today... because modern silk is usually completely de-gummed.

The thing about de-gummed silk? If you don't twist it, it is very fragile and prone to snagging. It's hard to handle altogether (though yes, very soft and shiny). Since talking to a conservator friend years ago who told me that usually, medieval silks have a much firmer structure than modern ones, I've been wondering about the use of gummy or partially gummy silk in history. The more recent research about the Albecund band is making me more and more convinced that gummy silk would be the solution to a few of the issues with weaving such a band.

One of the questions in that regard was - how does dyeing gummy silk work? Will it dye well? And will the dye be fast? (Side question - what happens if you de-gum it after dyeing?)

Well, I've gotten back two skeins that were test- dyed together, as in both mordanted and dyed together.



The gummy silk took on the colour much, much better... isn't that fascinating?

 

Do you do nalbinding? If yes, you could help a fellow crafter and researcher with her thesis project - Nele Nuutinen is writing about nalbinding instruction books, and is running a survey about nalbinding instructions used to learn the technique.

You can find the survey here - it is open until March 2. Please feel free to share the link with other nalbinders, too!

 

I'm all excited - the first batch of my embroidery silk in new colours arrived today, dyed lovingly and carefully by my friend and colleague Margit from Alte Künste. And she has managed to dye the most gorgeous yellow I've ever seen.



It's like liquid sunshine. It's like textile gold. It's warm and soft and it's yellow, yellow, yellow.

There's a lovely purple as well - and I have not yet wound off the red and the pink from their skeins into something better storeable and handle-able. Winding silk that fine, I have learned, can be a real challenge if you don't know what you are doing. The skeins, even if handled like raw eggs, tend to tangle a bit during the dyeing process. As this thread is flat silk that has been totally de-gummed, it snatches and tangles easily. My first tries at winding off silk from the skein, years ago, were the total catastrophe. I tried to do that with one of the common four-armed skein holders or swifts. Well. I very quickly found out that there's a reason why Japanese silk swifts have more than four arms... so I did upgrade to a swift with more arms, and that does make a huge difference. It's still a fiddly task. (Weirdly, it's also one that I find very hard to stop. Just past this one snag. Just until the next hitch. Just this one more. Just past this knotty tangle. Oh, is it half past three already? Oops. Well, I can do a few minutes more...)

Once  all the new skeins are wound, I can portion the silk off on the 10 m rolls for the shop, and take photos, and then you'll be able to buy it.

For today, though, I'll sit next to it for a bit longer and go "my preciousssssss"...

I have finally gotten around to taking photographs of the newly (well, sort-of-newly by now) arrived spindle sticks. I've restocked all kinds, and since they are handmade, they are always a little different in each batch.

This time, however, the pearwood sticks are really different - as in very, very colourful. Apparently pearwood has a quite large spectrum of possible appearances: while it's usually a kind of warm, soft reddish tone, it can range from very light (looking almost like cherry wood) to very dark (looking almost like walnut tree wood). And this time, well, my wood wizard seems to have gotten their hands on an especially colourful batch of wood.



So many different colours!  (You can get the sticks in my shop.)

What you see here...



is the rest of the weft yarns spun for the Trindhøj man's garments. They've taken their bath and they have dried and they are en route to being woven... and I am very, very curious on how the finished fabric will turn out!

Each time I spin for a weaving project, I'm amazed at how much yarn is eaten up by a puny bit of fabric. Well, in this case, it's not so puny, with about 170 cm on 275 cm. That makes it a fairly good thing that the thread count per cm is not as high as in a medieval medium-fine fabric, but at only about 3-4 threads per centimetre.

Altogether, I've spun about 6400 m of yarn for this piece of fabric. The loom eats a generous portion as loom waste, which accounts for some of the extra yarn needed; then there's of course a bit of shrinkage after weaving, when the raw weave is wet finished. Finally, there's always need for some leeway just in case, it's not nice to run out of yarn right before the end. I've also added on a bit more of the weft yarn as one of the batches turned out to be rather thinner than intended.

Spinning consistently to the same thickness and the same amount of twist over a longer time - I still find that challenging. Though admittedly my comfort zone regarding yarn thicknesses has grown quite a bit in the past years compared to when I started spinning, and my tendency to gravitate towards a certain thickness of yarn has diminished with all the practice that I've been getting spinning yarns to specification for weaving projects. I think in that regard it did help a lot that some of these projects - like this one - required yarns that were a lot thicker than my default thin yarns.

Have you done spinning outside your comfort zone thickness? And/or spinning in bulk for a larger project?