I really enjoyed the Easter days - Yummy Chocolate eggs, all my family coming together, and glorious weather.

And some productivity, too: Good Friday was spent playing around with cloth in nice company. Sitting around doing strange things to textiles is just so much more fun when you're not alone in the room.

Since Friday was technically a day off, I found the time to play around with wax for sealing and securing cut edges. There are some hints that beeswax was used for this in the middle ages, and I've long wanted to give it a proper try. I did use wax twice before: Once on the kruseler I've made, and once more to seal dagges cut from fine silk cloth. I'm still not sure on how it was done in medieval times, though.

In those first tries, I applied the wax by rubbing some beeswax onto a relatively hot copper plate and then dipping the edge of the fabric into the molten wax. It was pretty hard to control how much wax would come in at once, and it took a rather long time, with uneven wax rims. But it worked, for the straight edges as well as for the oakleaf dagges.

I have recently acquired a tjanting, the Indonesian wax applicator for batik, and I have used that for my last wax application. It is a bit tricky to get the temperature just right (especially when the candle flame used to heat the tjanting is not too cooperative), but it was a lot more convenient than the copper-plate version. And now I'm wondering: In what extent was wax used to neaten and conserve cut edges? With what types of fabric, and in which cases? And how did they apply the wax back in the middle ages - is there a medieval European equivalent to the tjanting that was not yet identified, because nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition a wax application tool in a tailoring/silkworking context?

Friday evening, I finally finished the tabletweave I was hinting at - and here's the virtual unveiling now:

(click to enlarge)
Yes, I have woven a measuring tape.

Now, first of all I need to get my disclaimer in. The first surviving measuring tapes are dated postmedieval, and there is no evidence at all for the use of scaled measuring tapes of whatever material and manufacture during the middle ages. So why have I spent hours weaving a wild speculation?

The tape is for a friend and colleague in medieval crafts, a shoemaker who would like to use something a little less blatantly modern than a plasticised shoemaker's measuring tape. A good while ago, we chatted about the difficulties and the possibilities, and I thought about an overly long warp that I still had lying around. We agreed that I would try to weave him a scaled measuring tape, since he has to write down the measurements he takes to work with them at home, thus needing a reliable scale. The measuring implement should be rather stretchproof and, if possible, flat - so a piece of string with knots in seemed to both of us to be not really suitable. We also agreed, though, that a nice slim tablet weave might do the trick. So after straightening out the warp and re-threading the weft in the tablets in a different pattern, I started out on the preliminary tests for weaving an inch-scaled tape.

Technically, this is very, very simple. You just need to find a material and pattern that will be fine enough to give you bars across the weave at suitably small intervals, find a way to brocade the markings for quarter, half and full inches so that the additional or missing brocade thread will not distort the pattern, and then weave while turning the tablets in one direction only to get an undistorted and firm pattern band. Since even a tablet weave will stretch slightly under tension, you have to keep the tension on the warp so low that the stretching is not noticeable.

I had a bit of luck, because the warp that I had would give me the bars at one eigth of an inch with very little persuasion. I figured out a way to brocade with no distortion by looping parts of one weft thread over the surface of the pattern (essentially a Munter Hitch over the threads on top of the weave) and set markings at quarter, half and full inch intervals, with a colour change every five inches. And then it's just weave, weave, weave - and unweave once in a while.

The main problem with the piece were tension and regularity of the weaving, as you can probably guess. I had to unweave several bits during the weaving, which is a pretty frustrating experience. Every glitch has to be rectified. Left out a weft, accidentally? Disturbs the pattern way too much. Warp tension too high? Same thing, unweave and re-weave with the (hopefully) correct tension. Not beaten the weft in enough? Undo and re-weave.

Now I hope that the tape will do a proper job for measuring feet and marking out patterns for new shoes. I have already decided that I won't make a full length tape for my own use, thank you very much: 24 inch of technically simple, but demanding full attention weaving has been enough for me. I'm happy that it turned out okay, though.

(click to enlarge)
Finally, for those of you who are interested, here are the gory details: Both warp and weft threads are Gütermann Silk No. 100 (comes on blue plastic spools). Warp in colours white, light and dark beige, weft threads in blue and red. 17 tablets, threaded alternatingly s and z, turned in one direction only for the whole band. Length are 24 inch plus a little (as a "handhold" for better handling) at the start and at the end. Accuracy was helped by a regular plastic measuring tape that I clipped to the weave with foldback clips.
Should you repeat this stint, please send me a note about how you're doing and maybe a photo - I'd love to hear how you find it.

We're in Lent right now, as I was reminded yesterday, and our dinner sort of got me thinking about fasting and fasting in Lent in particular.
We went to some friends yesterday and had dinner there - we brought a salad to go with the pastries our friends prepared. Simple puff pastries filled with minced meat and bell peppers.

It's been a good while since I had bell peppers in a hot meal, because our groceries from the box are seasonal and regional produce, and that means no bell peppers in winter. There are still enough different veggies to prepare meals with, but in the last few months of eating local vegetables, I developed a new and deeper understanding of how wonderful spring and summer is when you are living "the old way". It's true that we can read about it, that connected to Easter festivities is the knowledge that this was to celebrate the beginning of the warm season, et cetera et cetera - but knowing this intellectually and looking forward to spring because it directly influences your diet are two very different things.

So yesterday's addition of bell peppers made that dinner an extremely enjoyable meal for me. With the feeling of true luxury (they were very tasty peppers, too). And I started to wonder about lent in the middle ages - fourty days of food restrictions in a row. Food restrictions normally limited to a few days out of each week, hard enough to understand for our modern minds. And that at more or less the end of the winter season, when the tasty treats conserved for the cold half of the year are probably gone or mostly gone, when chickens might stop laying so many eggs, when everyone is probably tired of eating beans, lentils and cabbage dishes.

So. The rather bland winter diet (bland at least compared to summer and autumn fare), followed by a period of even blander food, cutting out meat altogether. Fourty days of scarcity, and then - Easter, the high church festival of the year, the onset of spring, the feasting with meat and eggs and whathaveyou. Somehow, this makes me think of intentional deprivation to heighten the impact of the feasting and celebrating. Digging into the foodie goodness prepared for the Easter meal must have been something really, really special after seasonal winter food and Lent. Something that we today, when following Lent, might only get a small taste of, because my guess is that the winter foodstuff before Lent makes a huge difference.

And by the way, I'm really looking forward to spring.

I've mentioned in my previous post that I've been to see the book of Kells. There was, however, another book in the museum building, a travel book from the 13th or 14th century that I found as impressive as the great Kells manuscript.

Imagine a book, a manuscript, with nice miniatures on the chapter headings. Now shrink it until it has pocket size. You can still buy bibles printed on extra-thin paper, with extra-tiny print that is extra hard to read because the print from overleaf, and the print of the leaf after that all shines through. In the museum, they had the medieval equivalent to this: Tiny, incredibly clean and regular letterings and then that miniature. I'm short-sighted, so I can squint at close-up at smallish things and still see them properly, but to make out all the details on that incredible drawing (which was by far not as faded as the Book of Kells illuminations, and sparkling with a blindingly gleaming gold background), I'd have needed to remove the glass case and move so close to the book that my nose would almost touch it. It really looked like a very detailed normal-size miniature shrunk. It was a moment of awe for me, and I'd have so loved to take a photo of this... but sadly, photograpy was forbidden as usual.

But the smallness of this miniature, in connection with the small detailed knotwork depictions in the B.o.K., make me want to hypothesise a bit. Or, rather, plunge a dear old hypothesis of mine into the cold waters of the blogosphere.

Have you ever wondered how those miniaturists did it? I mean it's not like today, where you just run into the opticians' and buy yourself a pretty little magnifying glass, with a table mount and extra light (battery powered) so you can see things at 15 times their size. Theoretically, magnifying crystals might have been used - but they would almost certainly lead to some distortion.

No, my pet hypothesis is that all those crazy miniature-miniaturists were more or less short-sighted - and maybe extremely so. An optician once explained to me that he wouldn't correct my shortsightedness with my glasses to the full extent theoretically possible, but only slightly below that, because, as he said, "we don't want you to lose that natural magnifying properties your eyes have". In addition to a magnifying effect that shortsightedness seems to have, people like me can also creep up creepingly close to the things we want to look at and still focus properly.* So maybe those illuminators of tiny things made use of their disability, exploiting it as a special talent in the scriptorium? I can imagine a short-sighted monk, hunched over his bit of parchment, nose almost touching the page, using the thinnest brush available to colour in the lines he drew the day before. Smelling the wet scent of the colours, adding a touch of the brush here, another one there.

Of course, once the farsightedness of age came in addition to the nearsightedness, his miniaturist career might have been over. One of these days, before it's too late for me because the far-seeing-of-age sets in, I'll grab some extremely thin brushes and inks and sit down to make a truly miniature miniature. Just to see if I can. Not wearing any lenses or glasses, of course.


* The downside to this, naturally, is shortsightedness. Which means that when reading without contacts or glasses, my nose hovers less than 10 cm above the book page. I have to move the book (or my nose) to the right-hand side of the book once I'm finished with the left-hand page. And I only see blobs and swirls of colours past the half-metre mark. And I regularly thank the powers that be for the invention of contact lenses.