I distinctly remember having a handful of ideas for blog posts a few days ago - while in South Tyrol, and of course I did not take notes of these ideas.

Then I was back, and immersing myself in all the reading and all the other stuff that hopped around in my brain crying for attention, and gone they were, the little inspiration particles.

So instead of writing you some nice original content that might even have something to do with medieval textiles, I am re-posting you a heads-up that came from the Quilt History List over to another list (that at least has something to do with medieval textiles):

From the Quilt History List:

Dear friends of textile history:

The year 2010 is extraordinary for those interested in early quilt history. Not only is the Victoria and Albert Museum's Tristan Quilt now on public view in London for the first time in generations, but the sister quilt in the collection of the National Museum of Bargello and known there as the Coperta di Usella, will go on public display at the Museo Palazzo Davanzati, Florence, from April 24 to June 24, 2010 under the auspices of the Italian Ministry for Cultural Activities. These two quilts are known as rare surviving examples of all white figurative quilting attributed to a Sicilian atelier circa 1360-1400 (1). As such, they are key pieces in understanding the tradition of quilting from the Middle Ages to present day.

If you are not able to just swish over to London or if you don't even know what the Tristan Quilt is, you can have a look at some pictures here on the V&A website. Enjoy!

I hang around on a few mailing lists and in a few groups, and usually I just lurk in there and read most of the posts. Sometimes I wonder whether it would not be a smart move to unsubscribe from most of those groups and lists, since I don't participate much and since there's often chatter that I find distracting. And then, once in a while, a real gem comes up that makes me glad again about my subscriptions.

A few days ago, such a gem turned up on the 75years mailing list, a list focusing on the years 1250-1325. In a conversation about SCA baron titles (which I almost didn't read, since it falls under "chatter" for me), Michael posted a link to his flickr album with pictures from the St. Louis shirt.

In case you do not know about this shirt, it is said to have belonged to St. Louis and is nowadays in Paris. There was a bit written about the shirt by Dorothy Burnham, but as far as I know, there is no in-depth research published yet.
As Michael writes in his post, the shirt is in the Notre Dame museum, on display and quite easy to see - and no-flash photography is permitted. That is what he made good use of. You can see the photos here on his flickr page - and thank you very much, Michael!

A good while ago, I ran a series about medieval hairnets and netting, writing about my experiences and results from working netting both as a spiral and based on real rounds. And I wrote this:

I'd say that an unadorned, simple net might well be worked in a spiral, since it will take very hard looking to see that: In the crown section, there's too much thread on too small an area, and the lower end of the net, if stitched to a band or sporting longer loops for closure, will not be easy to read. For any net that will show different size mesh, colour changes or embroidered patterns, spirals are out of the game, because they are just irregular enough to show.

in that post back there.

For my suspicions about nets worked in true rounds because of colour changes, different-sized mesh and embroidery, I had a prime example in mind - rolling all those treats into one beautiful hairnet that I had already blogged about by that time - this hairnet:



I was, at that time, convinced that this so amazingly regular-looking hairnet must be made in rounds, not in a spiral.

Well.

I stand corrected, and many thanks to Cynthia, who studied the net much closer than I did. And gave me a heads-up on my error. Proof that I'm wrong (and that looking at the evidence much more closely than I did in that case is always the right thing to do) was before all of our eyes all the time, because even on that blurry picture, you can see that it was netted as a continuous spiral - if you look at the bit at around 3 o'clock:


Can you see it?

Maybe it's a bit clearer in this picture:


(This comes from HEINEMEYER, ELFRIEDE: "Zwei gotische Frauenhaarnetze." Waffen- und Kostümkunde 1 (1966): 13-22.) There's a jog right beside the upper edge of the little shield motif that is cut by the upper edge of the picture. The one without a partner by its side. And there might even be a single green thread going down from the last green bit to the next green bit, crossing right through the white bit. Which would be totally the thing to do if you couldn't be bothered to cut the green thread just for that little bit of white.

So much for netting in rounds... and I take back what I wrote, and now say:

While you might suspect that netting in the rounds would be more useful for nets with embroidery, different-sized mesh and colour changes, the busy overall pattern of such a net, made in fine threads, distracts the human eye enough from the slight irregularities of the jog that these are only seen when looking very hard or studying a net in detail.

(And now I'll wait for somebody else to prove me wrong again. Bring on your hairnet analysis results - I'm quite in the mood!)

Via the MEDTC-Discuss List, I got this information about a new exhibition catalogue:

Kusch, Claudia ; Patrizia Mignani ; Raffaella Pozzi (eds). :
Redire 1427-2009 : Ritorno alla luce : Il restauro del Farsetto di Pandolfo III Malatesti [Back to the light. The restoration of the doublet of Pandolfo III Malatesta]
Fano, Museo Civico, 2009. 24cm., pbk., 107pp. illus., most in color. (I quaderni del Museo, n. 2, 2009)
Price: $48.95 (Shamansky) also available through Italian bookdealers €22.50.


There's an article (in Italian) with two pictures, one a detail of the garment and one shot of the mummy in the grave. And I really want the book, though it could be a little hard to get it here - I haven't found a German distributor yet. So you are in luck if you are in Italy or in the US!

I'm feeling like something classy and really pricey today. So here's something for those that feel like me: A fabric photo of so-called "St. Elisabeth's Cloak". It is a silk and gold fabric, woven probably in Sicily, 2nd quarter 13th century. It's in a Elisabethine convent in Klagenfurt nowadays.


I'm amazed again and again by cloth like this. Something made of rich gold-and-silk must have been worth a fortune, or several fortunes, and still it was woven, sold and made into garments. In some cases, there has been so much gold in old garments that it could be "recovered" from church garments after secularisation - by burning the cloth.

And, as usual, using finer threads or costly materials isn't the only thing for "upgrading". Instead, the fine, expensive materials are usually connected to more work, more complicated patterns - even if halving the thread thickness would already mean more work time, because of four times the number of threads.

But then, textile work seems to always rise exponentially when going finer or more complicated. Thinner threads for weaving? Much more work, regardless of loom type (and it is also true for tablet weaves). Smaller mesh for netting? Much more work. Thinner threads for embroidery? You know the answer. Add an extra pattern weft? Guess what happens. Braiding with fine threads? Uuuuh, takes ages. And it doesn't start with handling and manipulating threads - it starts with making them. Spinning fine will mean more time needed to spin for the same amount of fabric - because half the thread thickness means four times the number of threads. And then, spinning fine makes reattaching the spindle after a break more difficult; increasingly difficulty with thinness. I've tried to go as thin as possible, and sometimes it takes several tries after the thread broke to get a good connection between spun and unspun again. So it really pays to spin a little slower and with more concentration - and once more, it takes longer.

It's the same every time you go "finer, thinner, more" with textile: Work time does not scale up proportional to thread thickness. And that's something to keep in mind when looking at historical textiles, too.

Picture source: TROPPER, PETER (Hrsg.): Hemma von Gurk. Katalog der Ausstellung auf Schloß Straßburg/Kärnten, 14. Mai bis 26. Oktober 1988. Klagenfurt 1988.

I just realised that it's been ages since I last posted something textile-y that is nice and old... so I picked something out at random.
Here you go:


Have you ever seen something like this?

No?

It's a very special textile, but not a proper garment. It seems to be a mix of a burial shroud and a grave garment. You can see the armscyes and a neckopening, and the legs were covered with the leg parts. I'm always reminded a little bit of a baby's romper suit, though the wearer of this expensive, patterned silk lampas certainly didn't romp about anymore, and the piece can have covered only his front.

The piece comes from the grave of Rudolf IV, died 1365. This object is really one-of-a-kind; we know normal garments worn normally in death (especially when accidents happened in bogs), we have lots of proper garments used as shroud textiles in Herjolfsnæs, and we have special grave garments that are only basted together, but still follow the normal tailoring scheme more or less. There is no parallel that I know of for Rudolf IV's shroud/garment. It's the time of short men's jackets and tight-fitting hose. Maybe that was the reason why they cut into a large piece of perfectly fine lampas for some fake tailoring - to have a quick yet costly-looking and representative burial dress for the corpse. He died in July in Milano, and the corpse was transported to Austria to bury it there, so it's possible to imagine why dressing it in proper garments might not have been possible anymore, which would be another reason for a special solution like this.

Whatever the cause, it still looks splendid, and I can easily imagine that when the cloth was used back in 1365, it was fit for a representative burial. And for us today, it tells a bit more about the possibilities and the ingenious solutions of burial problems in the middle ages - the dead body has to represent status, wealth, position, rank, not only until the grave, but right into it. And this has to be achieved no matter if the dead is already decomposing or not...

Picture source: MARINI, PAOLA, NAPIONE, ETTORE und VARANINI, GIAN MARIA (Hrsg.): Cangrande della Scala. La morte e il corredo di un principe nel medioevo europeo. Venedig 2004, page 127.

Oh, and by the way, this is post number 100 in this blog - so happy hundredpostiversary!

Time for a little sequel for the hairnet series - all because we did a little math yesterday...
I met up with the lady who did my netting needle, and I have ordered a really teeny slim one - suitable for making very fine mesh. Think Sint-Truiden: think this net:


It is listed as catalogue nr. 102, made of silk thread in rose and beige and almost fully embroidered with silk in grey, beige and white. Mesh size? The publication states 64 mesh per square centimeter, which translates to very little more than one millimeter mesh size! Now that is tiny.

The little math yesterday I hinted at? We tried to calculate how long making such a net would take. The following number crunchies are probably not accurate, but meant to give me (and now you) an idea about how much of a time-sink something like this piece can be.

The basis for our calculation was the net I have almost finished, with the mesh size of 4 mm. For this net, I can pretty safely state about 30 hours for the net until completion, including wetting and setting the finished net. When calculating the same overall size for the tiny-meshed net, I'd need about 16 times the amount of single meshes for the tiny net (since there would fit 16 meshes into one large mesh). Which means 16 times 30 hours, that is 480 hours just for the base of the hairnet! Add to that the embroidery, which I'd guess takes at least as long (maybe one of the embroidering people can pitch in here) - that would leave you at roughly one thousand hours of work just for a puny hairnet.

For sake of comparison, let's translate this into a modern working schedule, with a five day week, fourty hours work time each week. That means twentyfive weeks of work, full-time, provided you really work for eight hours a day on the net, with no distraction whatsoever. Let's add in a week for all the rub-your-eye breaks, breaking threads, bad hair (netting) days, and tea-and-cookie breaks. That means one skilled textile person will work half a year, full-time, nothing else done, just for the puny hairnet.

And people seeing such a net in medieval times will know what this means. How much work this means - and thus, how much money.

So wearing this puny hairnet is something like putting a Ferrari into your garage. Wearing this little beauty is like really thumping the table with your bag of gold, so to speak.

Source: DECONINCK, E., GEORGE, PH., DE JONGHE, D., Y., VAN STRYDONCK M. J., WOUTERS, J., VYNCKIER, J. und DE BOECK, J.: Stof uit de Kist: De Middeleeuwse Textielschat uit de Abdij van Sint-Truiden. Leuven 1991. Catalog nr. 102.