Research Trip...

I had the huge pleasure of doing a research trip yesterday - connected to my colleague Andrea's project of researching the so-called Albecunde belt. (I've posted about that here, with an image of the band.) So I packed my photo equipment and my digital microscope and some tablet weave samples to cross-check things if necessary, and met up with Andrea. Then we went to Speyer together, to see the band recovered from an unknown cleric's tomb, dated to the 9th or 10th century. Like the Albecund band, this was woven as a band with letters, in red silk.

It is, also like the Albecund band, a simple thing - monochrome threads, made of fine silk with no twist, and all tablets threaded the same way and turning in the same direction for the background, then switching turn direction for the pattern (which is letters). The Speyer band also has a strip at each side that was originally decorated with a bit of simple brocading in silk.

We took a look, and tried to figure out how the original colouring may have been (as there were differences in colour in the side strips depending on whether the brocade had covered a spot or not), and of course we took photos. So many photos! I learned a lot from the mostly blurry photos from the last trip, so this time, there was a proper tripod with an arm to position the camera properly over the object, and getting the lens in plane with the band. There was also a proper digital microscope instead of the cheap children's play version that I had available last time, and oh, what a difference that made.

Now I have a huge amount of photos to sort through. The most important bit, though: There really is no twist in the silk that was used for the warp, and there is the same very strong twist angle to the tablet-woven cords as in the Albecund belt. Both of these are key to making the visual impact of the pattern as strong as possible.

The only thing I need now is a few extra days (or maybe weeks) of time to play around with untwisted, un-degummed silk...