Somehow I wonder if I don't have an Anti-House-Elf in my workspace. Or is it really only myself who drops the letters, papers and books on my desk to "file them later"?

The start of the season is coming nearer at fast pace, and I have a bunch of things I still need to get ready and into good order, in both the textile and the text fields of my work. I have started work on a new dress ensemble - the fabric is having a good time in the washing machine at the moment - and I hope to make the first cut into the cloth tomorrow. Another piece of cloth was sent off yesterday for dyeing: I'm in the process of switching to historically dyed fabrics, though I still have a large stash of synthetically dyed textiles, and I will use those too. The weaves are appropriate for garments, after all, and a lot of money went into the stash over the years. Also, having the textiles dyed does cost extra, and not everybody is willing to pay for the cloth, the dyeing and the tailoring. Which is a pity - because if lots of people were as keen on medievally tailored, hand-sewn garments from cloth dyed with natural colours, both my trusted dyer and me would have a better chance of getting rich one day!

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.

I'll toss you some nice links today for a change, and I hope to get a proper textile post in during next week - it's been much too long since the last one. For now, enjoy the more or less textile related goodness here:

The National Museum of Denmark has a new webpage that's worth a good look. If you click your way through to the "exhibitions", you get wonderful pictures that can be zoomed for a real close-up view. Don't miss the Mammen textiles in the Viking section while you're browsing!

I know few people as active as Roeland Paardekooper. The man is a veritable epicentre of connections between folks in archaeology, experimental archaeology, and Living History - it seems to me as if everybody knows Roeland. He's running a rather large database with articles and information about archaeology and open air museums that can be found on http://publicarchaeology.eu/.

In a comment to one of my hairnet posts, Isis from Medieval Silkwork pointed me to another wonderful database: KIK-IRPA, the website of the Royal Institut for Cultural Heritage in Belgium. Click your way through to the photo library database and be awed: They have pre- and post-conservation shots of the hairnets I have shown and a lot more truly amazing things. Thanks, Isis!

And non-textile related, but nice nevertheless: A kitchen maid from around 1900 blogs about life in and around her kitchen, including recipes. Brought to you by the Danish National Museum, and available in Danish only.

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.

Somehow, I'm not really arrived back in daily schedule - hence the later-than-normal blogging. Somehow, my brain is still stuck in holiday mode, even if there are things to do and places to go.

Textile work is a bit frustrating at the moment as well - I still have a bit of the tabletweave to finish, and I just had to unweave a good bit, since I had gotten the tension of the weave wrong, resulting in bad patterning. Not something you'd notice, mind you, but still too much off for this particular project. Pictures and description will follow once it is finished - but not yet.

Apart from that (and I'll be very, very happy once it is finished) I want to cut at least one hood today. And probably get started on writing another article. As soon as I can find the "on"-switch for my brain.

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.

I'm back from my little trip abroad - I went to Ireland for a little more than a week, going to the Borderlines XIII conference and then having a few days more in Dublin.

The conference was neither as international nor as interdisciplinary as I had hoped, but good fun and very informative, as I now know a gazillion more Middle English than before (gone straight up from "none at all" to "I can understand some simple words"); learnt that the same differences between archaeologists' and literature-ists' papers exist in Germany and in Ireland; found that there is so much still to learn; got the distinct impression that I should really try to read some Chaucer one of these days; discovered that Irish saga background is really different from Middle European background; learnt where the Liffey and the Puddle flowed together in the old town of Dublin; finally understood why my "Celtic-style knotwork" always ended up with one crossing out of pattern and a few more odds and ends. Sadly, I was not really fit as with an appalling bout of bad timing, I caught a head-cold straight before leaving for Ireland and thus felt like I had cotton wadding inside my skull instead of a brain for the first one and a half days.

After the conference, I got to see the book of Kells, the Georgian Town House Museum(Number 29), the National Museum, the Collin's Barracks (second part of the National Museum), Phoenix Park, the Botanical Gardens, and the innards of several bookstores and supermarkets. I ended up with a few photos (though sadly, most of the Irish museums seem to have a strict no-photo policy), a few bars of Cadbury's chocolate, some other odds and ends and a few books, both work and non-work.

Alltogether, I'd say the trip was well worth it (even though Ireland seems exceedingly expensive to me) - the visit to the National Museum alone was so good that in retrospect, I'd have travelled for that. Should you get the chance, go see the wonderful hairnets they have, made of silk thread so thin that you'd think it is one single fine human hair; or the small bit of gold brocade tabletweave from Viking Dublin; or the wonderful bog garments, dating to the 17th century but showing stunning parallels to diverse medieval garments. And I should also add that the museum staff I met were all extremely nice and extremely helpful, and the visit to the museum is free (though the cakes in the museum café are enormously expensive).

It was, in short, a wonderful trip, but I'm thoroughly happy to be back home again now. Not least because I really missed the home-cooked food and the fresh fruit out of our grocery box - somehow, even a freshly-made sandwich just can't keep up with, say, a pie with turkey breast, fresh carrots, onions, sprouts and a cream sauce with fresh parsley. And an apple for dessert.