Behold the Stretchiness of Sprang.

I've already hinted that I did some sprang at the Textile Forum - and it was an utter joy to do. My previous dabblings in this wonderful technique had always fizzled and died before I got to the stage where I could understand what is going on. Add in a few misunderstandings (I had a knot in my brain and didn't really get what the instructions were trying to tell me) and the resulting mistakes, and there is no chance in really getting it at all.

For those of you who have little question marks hovering above your heads - sprang is a braiding technique where you braid on ends (or elements) that are stretched in a frame. You work in the middle, in a shed, crossing threads from the back with threads from the front, and your work grows from the top and bottom edge towards the middle. Once you are in the middle, you have to secure it in some way to prevent unravelling.

This time around, however, sprang finally clicked for me. Plus I finally got to use a ball of lovely cotton yarn that some friends had given me as a present years ago - a single ball of cotton, about 230 m length, so not really a thing to knit with, and not something suitable for historical stuff.

It made a wonderful bag, though:

This is the little bag hanging out next to a 1.5 l bottle of water, for size comparison.

And this picture will show you the amazing stretchability of sprang:

Yes, it will hold four of these water bottles without complaint. It might even hold five, but the cord drawn in at the top (the other place where you have to secure your elements) limits the maximum opening of the bag's top. I think it's still impressive.

How to make yourself very tired.

Here's a good recipe on losing some sleep, in a thoroughly enjoyable way:

Have an idea for a conference.
Find a place to run it, organise a caterer, and a place for the participants to stay.
Find about a dozen other people who are passionate about textile research, and historical textiles, and the crafts involved.
Get all of them, plus tools and books and materials, together in said place you organised - to share knowledge and try out things, for one whole week.
Throw a little experiment in with the mix...

... and there you go.

There was sprang, and tea, and coffee. There was much running (at least for me - to open doors, and gates, and nip back to fetch something). There was beautiful weather, and there was chocolate, and of course we had stroopwafels (which is a Dutch sweet and traditionally used for spinning at the Forum).

 There was silk reeling, and with it the admiration of both the intricate process and the dead bugs that made the coccoons.

In short, it was a wonderful week, full of textile crafts and research and learning, of friendly support of each other and discussions about which technique would be suitable, and how this or that could work. It was the European Textile Forum. It was also brutally exhausting - but I couldn't pick a better way to work on making yourself very, very tired!

It's time for the Textile Forum!

The Textile Forum has started, and I am in Mayen to spend all week doing textile things - looking into early modern knitting, investigating the differences between knitting and nalebinding, and other things like it.

As I will be utterly busy running this conference, there will be no blogging until Wednesday, November 11 - when I will have recovered from the incredible textile archaeology overload the Forum inevitably generates, and will be able to tell you stories of what we did and how things went.

I'm here! (Well. Behind this thing. More or less.)

Breaking things, repairing things, twisting templates. And linen dyeing.

I spent the morning going more into the up-and-coming relaunch, and I did manage to do a test migration into WordPress, so there will be some changes to this blog's looks before the year will end.

The new shop design is also coming along nicely. It will be much lighter, and much cleaner, and there will be larger pictures. Overall, I really like it a lot! There's still a few issues to be solved and snags to be taken care of, and changing the old pallia.net site over into Joomla will mean a bit of re-writing of text and menu restructures (read: a good bit of work, including thinking and figuring out the best way for stuff), but I have hopes it will all work out eventually.

Apart from that, I managed to break my xampp programme (the thing required to test-drive a web page on your own computer, under the charming name of "localhost") and to actually fix it again (by deleting a single line of code that had crept in through an aborted installation of WordPress). Whew!

Now, however, I will have to put this project aside for a bit, as the Textile Forum is coming up (I can't believe it is already almost November) and there's still a few things to prepare for it. Packing linen cloth for our next test run regarding linen dyeing, for instance!

Sabine and I have been thinking about the chemistry involved with dyeing linen for a few years now, and we did a first trial run on exploring linen dyeing at last year's forum. One of the possible influences on how well the linen takes the mordant (which is usually not very well at all) is the pH of the mordanting and dyeing liquid, so we set out to test this.

Last year's test results. As you can clearly see, there was not much dye taken up by the linen fabric, regardless of the pH adjustment of the mordanting and dyeing baths.

We'll try different concentrations of alum this time. We've also planned to test a pre-treatment with sulphur fumes, though the required sulphur strips have not arrived yet - I'll keep my fingers crossed that they will come today.

The reason for sulphur pre-treatment? It seems that the metal components of the mordant bind to wool through a connection to the sulphur bonds the wool has. So if it's possible to sulphurise the linen, it might be possible to have a much better mordant uptake, and thus dye uptake. Next week we'll know more!

As promised - the European Textile Forum Call for Papers.

Please note: There was an issue with the direct link to the registration form provided in the CfP below. If you have tried to register and did not receive an e-mail with your registration data, please do register again - I have fixed the link so it works now. Thank you and sorry for any inconvenience!

As promised yesterday, I have spent the morning hours updating the Textile Forum website and re-making that form (have I ever mentioned that php forms are a godsend and a pain in the backside at the same time?) and it's finally, finally finished. It should all work now (and probably I'll be getting an email in about 10 minutes, telling me about something I totally overlooked when going through stuff and setting up the form...)

So, here for you, our Call for Papers:

The European Textile Forum in 2015 will again take place in the Laboratory for Experimental Archaeology in Mayen, Germany. This is the experimental archaeology research center of the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum (RGZM). The date for the Forum is 2-8 November 2015.
We have been very happy with the combination of lectures and practical sessions, and we invite you to submit your proposal for a short lecture (about 20-40 minutes) followed by discussion and practical research regarding the textile techniques or problems presented in the lectures. The practical part can be in form of a workshop, a demonstration, or something like a "hands-on round table". Evenings are reserved for socialising and for more work on textile projects.
Our focus topic in 2015 will be "Non-Woven Textile Structures". This includes a large variety of textile techniques, such as knitting, braiding, nalebinding, felting or netting. We invite you to explore this topic together from all aspects, including but of course not limited to use of different tools or techniques to arrive at the same end product, differences of non-woven fabrics compared to woven fabrics, problems and possibilities of these techniques and their description or identification, and of course their use in everyday life.
As always, while papers or posters about our focus topic are especially welcome, if you have another topic outside this focus that you would like to present, please do submit your proposal. The same applies if you would like to offer a poster presentation or a workshop/demonstration only. For any questions, feel free to contact us directly.
With this Call for Papers, registration for the Textile Forum 2015 is now also open. Please be advised that there are very limited accommodation possibilities at the site: Due to the space available at the Experimental Archaeology Lab, we can accommodate about a dozen to fourteen participants on-site only, and the conference will accomodate only a few more participants than that altogether. Due to these restrictions, we may have to consider registrations with a presentation before those without.
The RGZM is graciously supporting the European Textile Forum by granting us use of the simple, mixed on-site dorms. If you prefer a room in a hotel or pension, you can of course book your own accommodation in Mayen; some more information can be found on the Travel and Accommodation page.
Full board consists of breakfast, lunch and dinner; water to drink as well as tea and coffee will be available at all times. All meals will be served in the Laboratory. The conference fee, including the sleeping possibility in the on-site dorm and full board during the week, is 320 Euro per person.
To register for the Forum with or without a poster or paper presentation, please submit your current area of research or interest as well as the title and abstract of your presentation, if applicable, by using this registration form. If you would like to give a paper longer than 40 minutes, please let us know about that and we will try to make it possible.
If you have questions or suggestions, you can contact us directly via info@textilforum.org.
We are looking forward to a wonderful conference with you!

If you are on our newsletter, you will get the same in an e-mail as well - which I will send out later today. That's it from here for today! And for tomorrow, and Monday, since both days are a public holiday hereabout. I wish you a happy Spring Celebrating Festival, whatever it's called, and I hope you will have a few nice, sunny and relaxed days!

So it goes with plans.

This morning, I was wondering what to do - should I try and do an April Fool post? There are others who are doing it so much better, though.

And then I thought that I'll just be normal and boring and do a totally normal post. Maybe about Textile Forum stuff. Maybe I could just announce the registration being open, and post a Call for Papers... that would be a nice blog post.

However, that means writing the CfP first, and getting the website up to date, and since I had to run some errands inbetween... it was obvious that I would not get it done until early afternoon. So I took a deep breath and thought to myself that since I have been blogging late quite often during the end phase of the Beast, you'll all be used to the occasional late one, and it should be fine if I post it by early afternoon.

It's the end of mid-afternoon now, and unfortunately the CfP is still not finished. Well, the CfP is finished, but I realised that with our newer concept of pairing up a paper with a practical session, I have to fix up the registration form to change it from a radio button set to checkboxes, and that would best be done by making an entirely new form to hopefully tackle some other issues, and that in turn might take another hour or two... so you are getting this blogpost instead, about how plans go kawumph in the afternoon when sudden realisations about the need for updates hit them hard.

Tomorrow, though. You shall have the CfP tomorrow.

Textile Forum Planning.

It's early spring, and what better time of the year than to start planning for November? We have found a date for our next European Textile Forum, and we are hoping to finish plans this week far enough so we can send out the official Call for Papers and update our website. If you are on the mailing list, you'll get anote when we have done that. (If you are not yet on the list, but would like to be - go here to subscribe.)


I'll disclose our year's focus topic for you here right now, though. It will be "Nonwoven Textiles", which includes nalebinding, braiding, felting, netting and of course knitting. So we're excited to hear what papers and presentations will be offered as soon as the CfP will be out. If you are interested in attending and presenting, you could start thinking about something right away... while we'll be planning the actual thing.

Sabine and I are beyond delight that our crazy idea from back in 2008 has developed into a conference that is going strong, and we are looking forward to having another week with fellow textile researchers, crafters, conservators spent talking, thinking, reconstructing and researching. It's a good bit of work every year to plan and prepare that conference - but when that week comes, it is stuffed with wonder and learning, and every time we lean back and say that putting in that work? It is so, so much worth it!

Spinning Experiment Article!

Today it's time for me to rejoice - my article about the Spinning Experiment (yes, that one back from 2009) has been published in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences. Here's the link.

It's not open access, since that requires the author (yes, the author) to pay a stupid amount of money which I can't afford (and even if I did, I would not since I am a strong believer in the Rule, or Yog's Law). I'd much prefer if it were free, or open access, or offered at an affordable price - but as things are, I am very happy to have the article out there, and published in a journal where it will be seen (and hopefully read) by a lot of people.

(If you would like to read the article, you may have access to it from a library computer if the library subscribes to the journal.)

Back to normal.

There I am, sitting back at my desk, the cat sleeping peacefully in her bed beside the desk, reams of papers spread over it (as usual), and a long to-do list waiting to be reduced to a more manageable size.

But I also have the Contraption with a silk warp on it (the Forum saw me finish the woolen band that was on it before). My lovely colleage, after years of softly prodding me, finally got me to dye something by myself, so now I have "smurf hair" - indigo-dyed wool that sort of happened to fall into the dye vat after our experiment was done. (How could that have happened? However would a bunch of textile people, confronted with a still healthy indigo vat, ever think of randomly tossing fibery things into the vat? I cannot imagine.)
There's also some blue-dyed linen thread (and I'm planning to look into that a little more, in the future). And a cuddly toy bat* (which is in want of a little scarf, I think - possibly a blue one). There's the distaff with hemp and the in-hand spindle that I finally found some time to work during the Forum. There's a rather crazy fingerlooped braid with a cross-shaped cross-section.

There's some more books, too - my own book is back in stock at my store, and the Forum proceedings book is also available now.

For today, though, I will try to resist the call of the smurf hair (spin me! spin me!) and instead get busy with more writing work. Because that's on top of my list... for now.


* The area around the lab is one of, if not the one, biggest living quarters for bats in Europe. Several thousands of bats live there, and when night falls, you can do bat-watching. Somehow, the bat became the inofficial mascot of this year's Forum... which, accordingly, led to a bat-buying binge.

I am back home again.

I have returned back home - back to bad weather (today it's raining hard), back to my comfy desk, and (of course) a large stack of stuff to deal with, such as the accumulation of mail both electronic and physical.
The next days will thus be dedicated to getting back up to date (and speed). You, however, will probably want to know how the Forum went... and I can tell you: it was fantastic.

There was a really nice bandwidth of papers, and our new format of paper and corresponding practical unit has met with much approval and made our Forum the most productive one that we had yet. We will definitely stay with this format!
We had a go at loopbraiding, reconstructing late antique underwear, and there was some weaving being done; our resist dyeing experiment took place (with results that are partly making me happy and partly making me wish we'd had some more time beforehand for testing things), and embroidered tunics from late antiquity were looked at and the technique reconstructed. The lab made it possible for us, in addition to the planned practical units, to have an impromptu experiment take place, researching the different outcomes of pressing fabrics into clay pots.

The forum was one full week stacked to the brim with ideas, tries, techniques and textiles. It made me very, very tired but also extremely happy - and even though the papertrail of this year's event has not been cleared yet, I am already looking forward to the next one!

This blog is taking a little break.

Yes, again. This time it's not due to me having gone off to have fun somewhere else and having no time to blog, it's because - oh.

This time it's due to me having gone off to have fun at the Textile Forum. Though it's working fun, this time, and I will have no time to blog because of that. If you want to come and make sure that I will be both working and having fun doing it (the best kind of work), you can stop by and join us for a day - we have day passes. The conference day will start with a paper presentation at 10 in the morning, and day passes are 15 € each.

After the Forum, there will be a few days to finish off our experiment documentation and plan ahead for the times to come, and then I'll be at the Wissenschaftsmarkt in Mainz. You will find me in the tent "Umwelt und Info" together with some colleagues, showing the possible imitation methods for byzantine textiles. The Wissenschaftsmarkt is on the weekend September 14/15, so if you are in the region, make sure to stop by - it's said to be a big thing!

So your regular scheduled blogging will return on September 18, which leaves me a bit of time to recover. Have a good time until then!

It's drawing nearer...

I have a hard time believing how time flies by - it seems just like yesterday that we left for our paddling holiday, and now it's weeks later and the Forum is almost upon us.

Time to take care of the last bits and pieces, which include the last bits of fine-tuning for the experiment that we have planned for this year. It's about Late Antique resist-dyed textiles... and among the things left to do is making a template for the application of the resist pastes we are planning to use. The materials, though, have not all arrived yet, a package seems to have gone astray. Which again proves Rule #1 for Experimental Archaeology: Things always take longer than you expect.*

That, and going through the whole thing together with Sabine who will take care of the actual dyeing process. We will dye using indigo - I'm really looking forward to that, I always love when fabric suddenly becomes blue!


* Rule #2, by the way, is Something that you need is always missing. Maybe I should do a whole post about the Rules...

Experimental stuff - it keeps you on your toes.

One of the things I love about archaeology, and especially experimental archaeology, is how it keeps you on your toes and gets you to suddenly learn stuff about things you never tended to think about before.

As in - did you know that beeswax actually starts to melt at around 40°C, not the 60+ that are usually stated as its melting point? And that the temperature depends not only on the species of the bees and maybe their location, but also on who made the wax and how old it is? I learned about that yesterday. I was not as successful in finding out the melting point of natural pinus pinea resin, though (if you should have a helpful hint, I'd love to have it).

Today, I am trying to find out about the temperatures used in traditional batik techniques. Looks like they dye above the onset of melting of beeswax... and tomorrow, if everything goes according to plan, I will finish the thinking and planning and write down a plan to follow for the actual testing. There's a few sticky points still to solve - how to get the mixture out of the cloth again, how to make sure that everything is dyed at the same temperature but with no bad side effects from stuff touching, how to ensure an uniform temperature for the mixture application, and some more pesky details like that.

And now... on to more hunting of .pdfs, and finding out about melting points and possible sources and temperatures and processes. 

(For those of you who have not guessed it yet: It's all about the resist dye technique test runs at the Textile Forum.)

The dyeing experiment is getting an add-on.

As you might know, the Textile Forum is a very experiment-friendly place. Last year, we had a little dyeing experiment looking at the influences of different metal kettles (simulated by metal plates in neutral pots) on dyeing, inspired by the question why the Romans in Pompeii had lead dye vats. (You can see pictures of the experiment, the dyed samples, and a poster of the preliminary results on the Forum's archive page, here.)

The experiment is now getting an add-on - a second test run, only with birch leaves as dye (due to time restrictions), but with the metal additions split between the mordanting only and the dyeing only. If all goes according to plan, it will be possible to see if there is more influence from the metal in the mordanting process or the dyeing process.

I have been preparing for this quite a bit already - the alum is ordered, the 80 m skeins are wound and tied off so they won't go knotty, and today will see my finishing off the outline and experiment plan. It takes a while to go through all this and type out, bit by bit and step for step, what is to do. But yay for a detailed plan like that - it's so helpful to have a sheet with the single steps all written out, and tables to put the measured values. Also helps a lot in making sure you don't forget to take a measurement, or a photograph.

And week after next will see the actual run of the experiment. I'm really looking forward to this!

Conferences and Calls for Papers.

There are a few conferences coming up:

First of all, the NATCC (North American Textile Conservation Conference) will take place from November 12-15, 2013, in San Francisco. More info on their website.

The next Costume Colloquium will take place in Florence, November 20-23 2014, and focus on colour as a topic - the official name is "Costume Colloquium IV, Colors in Fashion". It says in their Call for Papers:

The event is based on an international, interdisciplinary and intercultural format meant to spark a lively and informative dialogue among speakers and participants from a variety of backgrounds, professions and points of view. The three day event will not only feature an impressive selection of high profile presenters, but also all inclusive behind-the-scenes visits and excursions to exclusive places and sites pertinent to the interests of all who attend.

They are looking for papers from all kinds of backgrounds,  and the CfP is open until August 22 2013. Technically, there is a website, but there is no info whatsoever there apart from three rather unrelated links; so if you are interested, it's probably best to contact info(at)costume-textile.com directly.

The international digital heritage congress will take place from October 28 to November 1, 2013, in Marseille, France. More info, as usual and expected, on their website.

And finally, don't forget about the European Textile Forum - we still have some very few spaces left!

Scatterbrain.

Not so very long ago (as in just a few hours), I did have a different idea about what to blog on than semi-random work-related stuff, but it has miraculously evaporated from my brain. Which is, at the moment, a tiny little bit addled by having heard construction-type noise for all of this week, with the extra serving (as in: in close proximity to me) yesterday afternoon and today. (We're getting new windows set in, which is lovely and very nice, but obviously connected to some work being done.)

In work-related news, I will be hunting for evidence of medieval furniture in England. Also: preparing for two short on-event workshops that will take place when I am in Herzberg, and I'm very much looking forward to this. Also on my list of things (exciting and nice things) to do: get an overview about our paper and workshop/practical session offers for the Textile Forum and update the website. I have been drooling over some pictures already this morning, and I can tell you - I'm really, really psyched about this.

Finally, and also Forum-related: You can actually pre-order our first volume, "Ancient Textiles - Modern Science", aka the European Textile Forum Proceedings. It's a collection volume of the last years, and not every paper given is in there, but it's a very nice variety and a good spread over times, materials and techniques. We hope that it will be successful enough to lead the way to a second volume in the future.

Is it Friday yet?

Somehow, the last few days, my schedule has been all over the place, and I'm not even sure why. I know that I slept way longer than usual today, and I all blame it on my furry biological alarm clock (aka the cat) - instead of insisting to get her morning treats, food, and being let outside, this morning she cuddled up to me for another almost two hours of sleep. No wonder this morning is so short, and this blog so late...

But on to things that might actually interest you. The first registrations for the Forum are in, and it looks like we'll have an in-detail look at some of the decorations on the Lengberg finds as well.Yay for decorated medieval bras!

Speaking of underwear, you are probably familiar with the Dove advertisements and their "real beauty" campaign? Here's an article about "the Problem with Dove". TL;DR: Dove is a part of Unilever, a company that is not about accepting different forms of beauty, and seen together with other stuff Unilever promotes, the campaign seems quite... weird.

European Textile Forum: Registration is open!

After a long chain of delays, finally everything is figured out and the registration for the Textile Forum is now open. My testing of the submission/registration form works, so I hope it will also work for everybody else (in my next life, I will learn how to do proper php and pearl programming!)

The Forum will take place September 2 to September 8 in Mayen, Germany, with the focus topic "Decorative Elements in Textiles". We have changed our concept slightly and moved the paper session to the morning hours, when everyone will be more awake - and after each paper session, we plan to have an afternoon workshop, demonstration, or other practically oriented afternoon session about the same item or topic.

Sabine and I are very excited about this, and we hope it will be a roaring success. If you would like to take part in the Forum, you can register here - we'd be very happy to see you in September!

Books, proceedings, and other nice things

Firstly, the proceedings of the Textile Forum are coming along nicely - the proofs have been proof-read by our very diligent editor, and currently the cover is being tweaked. Soon, very soon our little Textile Forum will have something more to its name than the website and the conference!

Speaking of which - we will have a meeting for planning our next Forum this April, and after that we hope to be able to get the Call for Papers out. Our Forum date and focus topic is already settled upon: Decoration on Textiles - dye, print, embroidery and paint. For more information, as always, go to our Forum homepage.

Now on to more proceedings: There were two sessions titled "Dressing the Part: Textiles as Propaganda in the Middle Ages" in the College Art Association 98th Annual Conference that took place in Chicago, IL, in February 2010. Not only is the conference programme still available on their website, they are also offering an MP3-recording of the second session for download (it costs 25 USD). It's a pity they are not offering the first session, which would have been much more interesting for me.

And there is a volume coming out this summer:

Dimitrova, Kate ; Margaret Goehring (eds.).
 Dressing the Part: Textiles as Propaganda in the
Middle Ages. Turnhout: Brepols, (June 2013).
28cm., pbk., ca. 350pp., 32 color, 150 b&w illus,
210 x 275 mm. English text. ISBN-13 9782503536767 ISBN-10 250353676X
They are approximating the price at about 100 €, but it looks as if it's not really fixed yet. More info available via the publisher's website.

How things grow.

When we started out with the idea of making the very first Textile Forum, we had just a limited number of goals - we wanted to make the Spinning Experiment possible, and we wanted to try if it's possible to get people from different backgrounds together to exchange knowledge, and practical knowledge.

After the absolute success of that first Forum in 2009, we decided to try making it a regular fixture. This was just four years ago, so it's not a real long-standing full-fledged tradition yet. Quite on the contrary, we are still finding how to make the Forum even better, to get better connection between the academic and the practical side, and how to establish it as a true long-term thing.

What I did not expect back then, or dared to dream of back then, is that we would have our own publication one day. But largely thanks to one person taking the stick and running with it (and gently hitting the contributors, including me, when appropriate, with said stick to keep them working) and doing all the editing work, we will have one. And now, since the proofs are in my inbox and our editor is waiting for the feedback, it suddenly feels much, much more real than before.

I will keep you updated once we have a firm publication date - and I am so looking forward to this!