When we modern folks are confronted with some archaeological find of yet unknown use, sometimes speculations ensue that seem totally plausible and yet can be quite wild. That's no wonder... knowledge dies out once something is not in use anymore, and that, in the worst case, leaves us guessing wildly on what this or that might have been used for. Or saying "unknown use". A bit like the children in this video...




I had a lot of fun watching it - and it is amazing, and also sobering, to see how easy it is for totally known and common things to drop out of the experience pool of the next generation. It's no wonder that we archaeologists sometimes stand in front of some find and really, really don't have any clue whatsoever at what that might be!

In the discussion about thread storage and the bobbin find from London, Suse said

Tony said the end maybe looks a little bit like any technical adapter, but that´s really speculative ;-)

And this made me remember again a post on the Medieval Silkwork blog, where there are two pictures showing some sort of spooling/thread winding concoction. I have been idly speculating about this in relation to the London bobbin before, but now it makes even more sense to me.

In a normal household, even where a lot of sewing is done, the amount of thread needed is not too huge to wind by hand. Yes, of course it is faster to use a bobbin-winder or a ball-winder, but you could also wind your threads in the evening when it's too dark for other work or hand it to one of the household children to wind. For some techniques, it might not be necessary at all to re-wind your thread from the skein into some other form first, but you can take what you need from the skein directly and then re-store the rest. Even knitting is possible from an unwound skein.

But there are situations when this is just not practicable, and where some faster method of winding is needed - like in readying thread for the shuttles while weaving. And that is also the context in which the winding gadgets (which these things clearly are) are shown, in a weaver's workshop.

And this leads me to thinking that maybe the ends of the London find thing might be an adapter of some sort after all - and not a residue from turning it on a lathe (an interpretation I heard from a wood-turner once) or a whim of the maker. Maybe it was used on a winding contraption in the context of a weaving workshop?

First of all, thank you to all you commenters who shared their method of storing thread!
Seems that I am not uncommon in my approach to re-wind only some of the threads, and on different things.

One fact that I have found is that some threads are better suited to being wound on a simple stick or paper roll or similar item with no flanges at the ends, while other threads still have a lot of "spring" in them (usually because they were overtwisted slightly during the manufacturing process) and tend to spring off the smooth thread holders. Flat thread winders or bobbins/spools with flanges are definitely the better choice for such pieces.

If speculation is allowed, I can imagine thread winders made from parchment, too (and I am planning to make some to try): parchment is light-weight, smaller bits of it will accumulate anyways when cutting parchment sheets for book pages out of the whole parchment skin, and it should be very well suited for making thread-winders. Small bones might also have been used, with the thicker joint ends making for a more secure storage of threads even of the "springier" sort. Storing threads on the spindle (especially just until the second batch for plying has been spun) also makes a lot of sense to me.

So maybe lathe-turned bobbins are that rarely found because there really weren't many of them in use - people preferring to use stuff that was handy, or less hard to get and less expensive. Scraps of parchment, slivers of wood, short bits of smooth twigs, small bones, bits of reed, spindle sticks, or simply little balls of thread with or without something as a core. I know that if I need to wind some thread on something today, I'll just use whatever useable thing I can grab at once, so I've torn off some paper from chocolate wrappers, folded that and used it as a winding core more than once. Seen this way, it sort of makes sense to me to just use cheap, available things that do not scream "thread storage item" to the archaeologist and save the money available for textile tools to invest in things not found or substituted as easily. And as far as I see, the habit of using precious, shiny and expensive matching sets of needlework items only comes up much later - so representation of personal affluence by having precious thread storage items was probably not done in the middle ages.

Hm. Maybe I should have some nice roasted chicken soon and keep those practical little bones...

I've almost won my struggle with the unwieldy article - just the pictures left to insert, a once-over on the text and bibliography, and then it's finished. Whew!

In other progress news, I did a bit more on the play-band yesterday evening, so the warp is almost used up now. Besides playing around with turning sequences and finally trying a few pattern variations I've wanted to try for ages, I have arrived at the conclusion that for weaving freestyle knotwork patterns, the "less is more" approach won't work properly.

I set up this play-band with twelve tablets only, because that is a number that will already allow to see some interesting patterning, can be divided into two small, easy to handle packs of six tablets when doing a split of direction in the middle, and is fast to work even in twill - since there aren't many tablets to shift from one pack to the other. Because the band is intended as a teaching tool/workshop helper, those were things I thought important (and I'm still sure it is a very good width and setup for learning how to do twill).

To give me a greater variation of things to try out on the band, I looked for pattern inspiration on other bands (both my own, older play-band sequences and pictures of bands on the internet). There were some simple knot-style patterns that I drafted for trying on my band, and to my delight I found that an astounding lot of patterns will just be possible to do with such a slim band.

However, when weaving those tiny patterns with knotwork elements, I found that while twelve tablets will technically work, it is utterly complicated... because there is so little time. I'd finish one of the red pattern lines, running from the outside to the middle of the band and going back into twill to have only that pattern line visible on the band. But the band is so slim that I can't get into a proper twill pattern there, because already a complete reversion of weave direction is needed, or I have to start out on the next pattern bit. And the other tablets also need attention because of go-into-twill, come-out-of-twill or some patterning in their sequence. That is just too much on too short notice and too little room - and I imagine that on a wider band with more tablets, there is much more time to let this section twill on quietly while you care for the pattern bit in the other section. Also, the sets of tablets going mainly this or that direction were too small. Try working a twill structure with 12 tablets divided into four sets - that is three tablets only per set; much too few to see the structure or get into the rhythm of the thing. And rhythm and structure both are very important to me when weaving, since I hate nothing more than following a pattern draft line by line and counting off tablets (first forward, second backwards, third and fourth forwards, yuck!)

Well, since the play-band is almost finished, and since I have some nice silk lying around for a wider band, and since I wanted to weave a slim belt for some fittings I still have around... I think I'll make the warp for the new band a tad longer and play for a bit, just to see if freestyle knotwork is better possible on a band with 40 tablets.

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.

As I wrote Tuesday last week, I'm into sealing cut edges with wax now.

Yesterday, my brand new (and infernally sharp) pinking tool arrived. (Well, I call it a pinking tool. It disguises itself, though, as a woodcarving implement and hides in woodworking catalogues. But I found it nonetheless!)

I set to work pinking the dagges on a hood. The cloth is heavy silk, dyed a beautiful purple with natural colours. Pinking dagges is fun, and the tool will bite easily through several layers of the cloth at once, but it sure pays to work carefully. That will save a lot of snipping off missed threads afterwards and re-pinking missed spots.

After doing the dagges, I set to work with the wax. What I want is a nice contour of molten wax along the edge of the cloth, hot enough to go into the fabric a bit (to make sure the edge is conserved) but not so hot that it will actually be visible on the outside of the piece. As you can probably imagine, the margin between "too cold" and "too hot" is very slim - so slim that it makes a huge difference whether the tjanting is full or half-empty, even if it is a very small one. With these low temperatures, flow in the tjanting might become obstructed by cooling wax, so there is also a rather big variation in how much wax comes out, and how quickly. While this method is a lot faster and much more reliable than the molten-wax-on-copper-plate method, it demands full concentration and a good sense for when the whole shedoodle is the right temperature (or lots of testing, which is much easier for the beginning). Maybe there is a better method to do this. Maybe there's even a description on how to do it somewhere out there... if you know of one, please share!

I finished the dagges on the hood cape yesterday, including the waxing, and I finished pinking almost all the dagging for the liripipe, so there's some more waxing on today's agenda. This is how the finished and waxed dagges look:

click for larger view

I rather like the look of it.

Oh, and on an aside: Dyeing the fabric seems to have done something for the shine on the not-so-shiny side of the fabric, and I didn't expect that at all. The photos, of course, don't do the colour justice.

In a comment to the measuring tape post, Piia linked two pictures from Tacuinum Sanitatis, both featuring an ell stick lying around in a tailoring workshop.

Measuring sticks like these are still in use today for measuring the cloth off the bolts. The "ells" that are the basic unit for these measuring sticks are in some cases still marked out on a medieval church wall or the town hall, since the exact length of the ell could differ from region to region.

Regensburg ell, foot and fathom. Photo by Klaus Graf, via Wikipedia.
An ell stick would be easy to make: Take a suitable piece of wood, walk out to the town hall and mark the length of the local ell on your stick. Use this for measuring cloth - it is very handy. You could, of course, bring a piece of string instead of a piece of wood and mark the ell on the string, but for measuring out a piece of fabric to cut from a bolt, the ell stick beats the string hands down - much faster and easier to use. Plus you won't get a knot into the stick by accident.

There is no scarcity of evidence that cloth was measured in ells, and it is pretty logical that the ell would be divided into half, quarter ell etcetera. The markings on the ell stick of one of the pictures linked by Piia look to me like they might mark eigths of an ell. But that does not mean it is similar to a modern scaled measuring tape.

One difference between the ell stick, maybe divided up in half, quarters etcetera and a cm- or inch-scaled tape are the starting units. With the measuring stick, you'd start with the ell as base unit, while a modern tape uses inch or cm. The small modern units are just counted up and up - 25 inch, 135 cm - while the larger ell as base unit gets divided. However, there is a limit to how much dividing is useful. Half an ell? Surely. Quarter? Yes. Eighth of an ell? Will still work. A sixteenth? Hmm... that is already getting pretty small, and quite hard to count. But with a thirtytwoth of an ell, at the latest, your stick is going to have so many markings that it will be not too easy to handle anymore. And such small unit divisions might not be necessary - after all, when you buy cloth in a modern store, you usually buy in half meter increments. If you'd need really small units, you could switch to inches (or "fingers" or whatever is in use in your region) and have a conversion into ells, like feet make a yard and inch make a foot in the British measuring system.

Today, we have a centimeter or inch scale, with the unit meaning the same everywhere - so if I tell you "24 inch", you know exactly how long my thing is. This - together with high-precision printing and plastic materials - makes it easy to produce measuring tapes suitable for everybody and withstanding lots of use.

For the middle ages, this is not the case - there is no common unit of the same length everywhere. So if I told you "one ell", that could mean anything between about 40 cm and more than one metre, depending on what ell I'd use (though most are somewhere between 45 and 70 cm in length). Add to that the fact that textile bands used for measuring might stretch over time, and the fact that taking a measurement and writing down the number is almost surely a very modern way of doing it: You could also mark the length measured on a string or band or strip of whatever else you are using for measuring each client, and then keep the marked-up string for using on your project and maybe for future reference. So there might not have been any need to make a measuring tape like we are relying on today.