Knitting, anyone?

For years now, I have successfully been a non-knitter. I just never did it. I had not learned in school how to knit (they only taught us crocheting), and I had only made one short and unsuccessful try to learn it back years ago, when I was still caught in puberty. The technique somehow never appealed to me enough to fiddle my way through it, and I could remember from my one try that it was really difficult to catch those pesky loops of the stitches and that I didn't know what to do when one of them slipped.

And then, when I started out in the textile archaeology field, knitting was said not to come up before the later middle ages, and not properly before early modern ages, when it somehow becomes all the rage and Knitter's Guilds form and those guildmembers knit amazing things. So I had a perfect excuse for not knitting: a, there are more than enough people around who know how to knit and do it (and teach it), so there's no danger of the technique dyeing out; and b, I had more than enough other techniques that were less modern and less well known already. And c, I didn't want to do things in techniques that can fall apart so easily just by pulling on the working thread (yes, you have to take out all the needles before that too, I know).

But. But. Knitting has actually been found dating back to the 13th century (in a German well, of all places). Knitting is a problem for the textile archaeologist because it can be unraveled so easily. The wherefrom and why of the development of knitting is still not known to historians. I like a good scientific unknown - it always reeks of challenge for me. And then there are the socks, which I admit I love. Hand-knitted, nicely patterned, woolen socks... aah.

And then there was the Textile Forum, where a lot of truly awesome knitting went on inbetween all the other things. Fine woolen yarns! Intricate patterning! Really really thin "knitting needles" that were sold to the knitter as "a bit of copper alloy wire"! This all smelled like a challenge and a fascinating opportunity for some full-scale madness much too much for me to resist.

So I have finally given in and learned how to knit. And I have discovered some of the fascination of knitting for myself...

Photos from Finds in Norwegian Museums

Life is so much nicer with pictures! And life is getting nicer and nicer these days, with more and more databases and pictures from museums coming up online. Here's another one that came to my attention very recently: The Universitetsmuseenes fotoportal, with pictures of finds from four different museums. The pictures include some shots of the Oseberg findings, and there's some textile there too (of course).

You can search over all four museums by using the little search box - just remember that it's Norwegian, so make sure to type "tekstil" if you are looking for fibery things. I would love to link a good English-Norwegian online dictionary here to help with the search terms, but I haven't found one yet - the few I tested did not even know how to translate "textile" into Norwegian. Instead, if you need a German-Norwegian translation (or if you know the search term you want in German but not Norwegian), I can point you to trusty Heinzelnisse, where you can even play vocabulary games to improve your language skills...

Setting up...

Today, the two knights for the exhibition at Hartenstein will be placed into their final spots and installed securely (so they don't gallop off in the night or, even worse, fall onto an unsuspecting visitor).

Setting up for an exhibition, for me, it's always a very exciting thing and surely a cocktail of emotions. There's a little anxiety (did I bring everything? will it all fit?), a little stress (oh my goodness I hope it doesn't all take so long to set up as this item), an amount of fun (after all, things are finally coming together as they are supposed to do), a generous measure of pleasant anticipation and hope (ah, this looks really nice here, that will be splendid once we open, I hope everybody else likes it as much) and, of course, a dash of "oh no!" (oh no, a badly done tiny spot/a little fault/a scratch already!) to spice it all up.

And altogether, I like this cocktail very much... so I am really looking forward to today's session.

Tool Talk - Schacht Company: Goko Swift

Not a book review, but a tool review this time - the Goko swift, made by Schacht in a traditional japanese design (and sold more or less only in the US).

I first found mention of this swift when looking for some better way to wind the very thin silk that Sabine dyed onto spools for storage and for sale. I have a normal, four-armed "umbrella" swift, but that just didn't work properly, even not when tuning it with an additional cardboard support strip for the silk to lie on. Unskeining these fine threads was not possible in a humane (and sensible) amount of time, and I was looking for alternatives. There was only one swift to be found on the Internet that was supposedly very well suited for fine, delicate threads - the Goko.


Now this swift is not the cheapest one to buy (around 130 USD), and shipping fees to Germany range between steep and outrageously expensive for such an item. But I was in luck - a travelling colleague brought one back to me, saving me the shipping costs. I unpacked and tested it yesterday, and here's what I think.

The swift consists of a wooden stand and a metal wheel with eight supports for the yarns, making it roundish instead of square as most swifts are. The wood part is quite solid, with a glossy varnish as finish, and marked with the Schacht company emblem. The two vertical support beams are slitted on top to take up the axle of the wheel.
The wheel, in contrast to the wood parts, does not have a good finish or solid feel. On my Goko, the "flanged core" was only half assembled, with one of the flanges off and quite bent. I do not know when or why this happened, due to the mode of shipping via "colleague-mail" meaning this went through several pairs of hands, but I had expected a more solid and better finished piece - the holes for the arms and the edges of the flange were not deburred, and I was not thrilled. Some gentle taps with a hammer soon took care of the bend in the second flange, and both the flange and the arms of the swift then were easy to install. However, the arms were not really perpendicular to the core, but instead seemed to be bent a little out of shape - making the whole wheel look slightly lopsided. I now had some doubts if buying the swift really had been a good move - so I proceeded to test it.

I took out a slightly mangled skein of very thin silk threads (why test with something easy, after all?) and put it on the swift. There was the next surprise in stock for me: The skein was too large, probably due to working with it on the previous swift, which might have lead to some stretching. I put it on anyway - since nothing can get caught in moving parts on that swift - and decided to give it a try.

And what shall I say? It worked beautifully. I unskeined the remaining silk with a few stops to untangle a bit, but compared to before, this was incredibly quick and easy. After all, I had stopped working with that skein before because it was almost impossible to unwind in a humane amount of time. The huge difference that the additional four arms of the swift and the wide support for the skein make is hard to describe and still make believable. The too-large skein, by the way, had quickly shrunk to Goko size without additional tangling. I tested it on a second silk skein, and it worked just as well again - so now I am convinced that for my uses, this swift was worth every penny. I had no yarn breakage due to sudden stops in spooling (with a spinning wheel set up for spooling with very light tension on the drive, so it slips with very little resistance), because both the wheel and the swift stopped at once whereas before, my wheel would stop but the swift would break the yarn.

That also is the upside of the very light quality of the metal parts: They are very light - so the actual working part of the swift seems to weigh almost nothing and turns very, very easily and with little resistance to abrupt stops (for example because there's a tangle in the skein). This swift really is very well suited for fine, fiddly yarns that are difficult to unskein. I haven't tested it with wool or other material yet, but I am quite sure it will work nicely as well.

So if you frequently wind yarns or threads that are on the thin and delicate side and give you trouble turning the corners of a normal umbrella swift, you might want to consider the Goko. It is not cheap, and it is not finished to craftspersons' delight in every last bit, but that does not take away from its functionality - and that, for fine threads, really is awesome. Proving again the old fact that good tools are important, and special tasks may need special tools to make success possible.

Connecting Grad Students

Through a mail from my old Uni, I have just stumbled upon "Gradnet", an association that wants to make life a little easier for grad students by hosting an interdisciplinary and international conference, an opportunity for productive and critical exchange.

I haven't heard about them before (that's a small wonder and has much to do with both my topic and my work style, and little to do with them), but the programme of the next conference is online, and it looks quite large and quite nice.

The next conference takes place in Erlangen, from 20 to 22 November - so pretty soon - and you can check out their programme on the Gradnet website www.gradnet.de.

I probably won't be able to hop over there due to the move coming up on the next weekend, but I'd love to hear about it, so should you go there, please drop me a comment!

Box heaven - or is it hell?

I am slowly but surely surrounding myself with boxes filled with stuff - books, textile implements, more books, resources and materials, more books, tools, cloth, and even more books*. It is a weird-looking mix of order and chaos: a jumble of things on heaps to be sorted out, books still in shelves (almost none left in the study, though), things that are pre-packed in boxes anyways, and the big newly-filled boxes stacked on top of each other, slowly filling up freshly cleared space where shelves were.**

Yes, that sounds like an upcoming move - we will move into a bigger flat, since my stuff seems to have exploded (or maybe "popcorned") during the last months. This is largely connected to my acquiring some exhibition stuff (which includes two dress mannequins) and to the growth of the market stall and its assortment of goods, but also to such slightly mad ventures as the spinning experiment (which resulted in my having about 105 spindles now instead of five, and two more rather large boxes to stash). All this has led to the apartment being too small, and offering too little storage space.

So we will move, but stay in this very nice and quiet part of Erlangen. I will have a nice, large study/work room with no roof slope taking away space for shelf storage or moving around in the room, and enough space to actually do tailoring work in there without feeling cramped. And it is a ground floor flat - hooray for not having to lug so much stuff down from second storey when going to a medieval event!


* Yes, I'm a book junkie. And that is especially true for books on archaeological stuff, textiles foremost, of course. Book buying binges when in museum or exhibition bookstores is a very common quirk of archaeologists, and I'm no exception to that rule. Which means that not only do I have lots of books, I have lots of really seriously heavy books, because most catalogues are printed on thick, glossy, heavy high-quality paper...
** Compared to stacking books on the floor until stack height is still just stable, shelves are a much more compact way of storing (we found this out when emptying a shelf to re-build it with an additional bit a while ago), but even shelf storage cannot beat boxes filled with books and stacked up high. Much less convenient for actual reading, though!

Link Drop

Quite a little stack of links to interesting places and things has accumulated in my "slow blogging day" stash, but they are much too good to languish away. So here's a link drop - I hope there's something for you in there, too!

- Two blogs that recently came to my attention: Fait Attention and Publishing Archaeology.

- For those of you working with MS Word, there's a webpage with tons of good advice, instructions, makros and stuff at the Editorium. This site has helped me a lot when finishing off and layouting my thesis. I still wouldn't recommend to use pictures in large Word files, though. (My pics were layouted half-automatically, using the Word-generated picture list, a homemade makro and LaTex. Not the best layout ever, but very little work.)

- A new project is researching medieval soldiers "to challenge assumptions about the emergence of professional soldiery between 1369 and 1453", and they have put a database online where you can search almost 90 000 muster records for soldiers from 1369 to 1453. So don't forget The Soldier in Later Medieval Times when you are looking for muster information!

- I'm very happy that I usually don't have to cope with Latin (and I would look for help if I had to), but for those who are, there's Du Cange's medieval latin glossary available online: beware the rather large .pdf.

- And for those who read French, there's a bimonthly magazine called "Histoire et images Medievales", with some articles available for download. And of course with nice pictures!