Margarita Gleba has organised a zoom Study Day for textile archaeology - you can join online! 

It starts at 15:00 and goes until 18:00, and you can register via this form here (or click the image). 

EuroWeb has something more coming up: A webinar on traditional wax batik printing! It will take place on September 6, 10 am CET start.  

I'm already looking forward to this - it's always interesting to see traditional textile techniques!

The thing about a medieval-style Great Wheel? It's really Great, as in Large. Looking at images, the wheel appears to be really huge, compared to the spinners. And when one thinks about it, that is sort of understandable - after all, the aim is to get a lot of twist quickly, and there are no gears involved. So the size difference between the wheel and the disc on the spindle (often called whorl, but I find that confusing) has to be as large as possible.

When I built my reconstruction, I was thus looking for a size that would compare to the illustrations we have, and of course with a look at its intended use - demonstrations. Which meant it also had to come apart easily, and the single pieces had to fit into the car. 

Which they do. The wheel itself has its own special spot right under the roof, where it's built to fit perfectly:

The board end in the foreground belongs to the bottom (main) board. The rest is one box with the small pieces (like the wedges, drive band, and spindles) and one pack with legs and the holders for spindle and wheel. 

So now I just have to add the rest of the equipment, and we're ready to roll!

(Ingelheim. Sunday. See me there if you can, and say hello!)

I'm back, I've taken a bit of time off yesterday to make up for the weekend, and now it's playing catch-up with all the tasks left to do this week. 

The weekend was lovely, and fun, and a little exhausting (for everyone, probably, not just for me). Friday morning, as I was ready to go to the train station, I got a message from the app that the train I was planning to take would be 98 minutes late... which, knowing how things go, means it would arrive even later by the time it was supposed to arrive, and I would not be able to catch the second ICE, and would travel at least double the amount of time scheduled. 

Now... if it would have been a 2-hour journey, I would have considered doing it. But it would have been almost 6 hours as scheduled, so... no. Which meant I did take the car after all, and drove there, and I did that rather early to avoid getting caught in Friday evening rush hour traffic. (Plan worked.)

I spent a very nice afternoon and evening with the organiser of the workshop and one of the other participants, and then on Saturday I set out with them to make a lot of brain cells work hard. In theory, tablet weaving is very, very easy - you have to be able to tell light from dark and count up to two. In practice, putting all the things together and remembering all the new rules can make heads spin...  

We started with warping (as I usually do in my workshops) and went on to explore threading and turning directions, stripes and monochrome surface weaving before moving on to diagonals and freestyle diagonal patterning. 

As usual, I took way too little photos during the whole thing... I am always too distracted to remember to do so. This time, it was a little better thanks to "take photos" cues in my workshop script - which means that I can at least show you a photo of part of the room:

That was taken during a break, with everyone getting some nice food and filling up on coffee.

And in case you're curious: Installing the edge tablets did go quite well, but next time I will do the installation a little later, in hopes that that will make things a little bit easier. 

After the end of the workshop on Sunday afternoon, I packed up everything, was gifted with a bit of food for the road and set off for home, tired but happy. 

Today was Warping Day. Well, Warping Afternoon - fortunately, the relatively small warps of limited length that we use in the weaving workshop are quite quick to make. So now I have this, waiting to be packed up: 

On the left there's a few "oh no bad things happened" warps, prepared in case something bad happens and we need a quick new one. On the right... that's a stack of edge tablets, waiting to be installed at some point. 

Edge tablets - usually all threads in one colour, and two or more of those monochrome tablets per edge - are an absolute fixture in historical bands. They make for neat edges, and if you weave patterns with my system, they are one way to tell which tablets turn in which direction. 

However... adding edge tablets also makes warping a little more time-consuming, and it means one more thing to keep track of. That's why I did my workshops without edge tablets in the past. (Remember what I wrote about things evolving? That's one of them.) I've thought about a few different options on how to include them without making things too weird at the beginning, and I think I have found the solution and the hopefully impeccable timing for adding edge tablets: The point where they are actually helpful, and where the basic understanding stuff that does not require extra "empty brainless twisting" has already happened.

Next Monday I will know more. Now there's a tad more preparation to do, but the main stuff has all happened. 

Oh, and due to the Bahn going on strike on Thursday and Friday... I will have to figure out whether I can go by train (probably not) or will have to take the car after all. Sigh.

I'm already looking forward to the next weekend - a group has booked me for a tablet weaving workshop, so we will spend the weekend twisting tablets and brains, and making straight and diagonal lines, and understanding where to look and why things work just as they work. 

So I'm now preparing for the workshop, which includes prepping the tablets:

The workshop starts with warping tablets, and then we weave our way into understanding how patterns happen, and how to make them look just like you want them to look. It's the system I've developed that can be taken further into weaving 3/1 broken twill without a written pattern (though we won't go that far during this weekend). 

All the tablets we'll need are now ready for warping, with all the punched holes empty and waiting to be threaded. I have a list of some more things to prep, and a few printouts to make, and some warping for the edge tablets.

Like all workshops, my tablet weaving workshop evolves over time - sometimes there's a chance discovery of something that works very well, or there's a "snag spot" where participants seem to struggle regularly, so these things get updated in my master script after a workshop, and are done a little differently next time. I really like to see how these things change and evolve and grow over time. And then there's the additional changes made to adapt the workshop to the group's wishes, so while the workshops are somehow the same, they also feel quite different every time... and part of the fun and joy in giving these is discovering their own specific vibe. (Plus, of course, the joy of seeing those little aha!-moments when something suddenly clicks.)

I've been delving into fabrics (well, images and descriptions of them) for a current project - and I am once more amazed at the colours, patterns, and complicated weaves of the Middle Ages. So many different possibilities offered by silks and human ingenuity, it really is mind-boggling.

Tomorrow will hopefully see one more step of this research and request part of the project done and dusted - and after sending that off, I will be packing for the event in Düppel on Sunday. 

I'll be in the "Museumsdorf" with my spinning equipment, and if you are close to Berlin, stop by, say hello, and have a go at spinning with spindle and distaff if you feel so inclined! 

Because I'll be working on the weekend, and will be travelling back on Monday, the next blog post will be on Tuesday. Have a nice weekend everybody!