How a Class is Born

Presented without comment.

Some months previous, I had committed to teach at a schola way down I-95--they were looking for embroidery classes, so I offered up my disquisition on the styles of embroidery and other embellishments you find on 14th-century purses (a class which was spawned by realizing that making a pouch with a single or nué motif on it was wrongity wrong wrong). The super-nice thing about this was that it didn't matter how fried I might or might not be by that point; the class was together, the handout complete, and I'd just have to run off some more copies of it on the big shiny fast color copiers at work.  

However. There were some empty spots in the schedule, we heard at 12th Night, so I, um, kinda, sorta, stuck my beak in.  

This wasn't quite as sucker-ish as I make it sound; I have wanted for some time to properly put together a tablet-woven edge class--I cobbled together a demo/class a few Pennsics ago (didn't even have my handout together), and even as half-assed as it was, it had a lot of attendance and people seemed to Want More.   And as we have seen, I produce far more reliably if I have a public (or equivalent) commitment I need to meet.  So, it's really a certain amount of gaming my own system.

My deliverables, as it were, are:

• 6 kits for students, each of which would include--
• Two pieces of fabric, to simulate the gown/pouch/whatevs
• Two or four (decide!) cards, cut out of old playing cards, with holes punched in, for the tablets
• Eight or sixteen (decide!) strands of DMC floss for the warp, cut to appropriate lengths (and bundled so as not to tangle)
• Floss and needle for the weft
• String, cord, or lace so the students can attach their warp to some reasonably immovable object*
• A handout (sufficient copies thereof) which contains:
• A brief overview of tablet-weaving
• Examples/pointers of extant tablet-woven edges
• A few words on the Herjolfsnes tablet-woven edges, which I just found out about, and which are apparently completely different, and now Imma have to try those somewhere, argh
• Detailed instructions so the students can pick up the handout four months later having forgotten the whole class, and have a decent shot at doing it themselves
• A bilbo bibliography
• Probably a stiff drink.

* Finding ways for a half-dozen people to warp up is going to be tricky, particularly since you never know what is going to be in a room at any given event.  I had originally been going to get this class together for this past Pennsic, and I spent a fair amount of skull sweat on the problem--we actually came up with the bright idea of a dog collar with multiple rings that one could buckle around the center pole of the tent, and each weaver could radiate out therefrom; but I think that idea reads better than it lives and it definitely won't be useful in a school or church or whatever it is.

So other than the "how are we setting up our looms" question, the kits will be pretty straightforward.  I have infinite scrap fabric, oh yes I do, and rather a lot of cotton floss, and a bunch of needles I never use, and there's a pack of cards I never use around here somewhere. Most of the woe will be trying to get the handout together; this is a non-trivial brain task, and work isn't leaving me a lot of brain right now.  But at least I know it all--I just have to get it onto pages and organized.

The Pouch of Damocles: Tussling with Tassels

Pouches (with tassels!), Manesse Codex, early 14thc.

Having completed all the construction portions of the purse, what remained was detail and ornamentation (other than the central embroidery, ahem).  Tassels are one of the most common--indeed, nearly universal--decorative elements on extant 14th century purses, so that was an obvious place to start.  I hadn't made tassels before but they are dead simple (stack of thread! all same lengths! tie in the middle! fold in half! wrap the top! DONE!); the only question is how long you need to make the threads and how many of them you need to create the tassel of your dream, and this is something you can tinker with on the fly with no trouble at all, at all (unless you happen to be short of whatever floss you're using).  

Tassels. Or festive squid.

However, every extant tassel I'm aware of is not just then sewn onto the purse; they all--all--are topped with a decorative bead of some kind.  Indeed some don't have any tassels remaining, but do have decorative beads still.  So, this is not something I wanted to eschew.  Unfortunately, we again run into the problem where museum photos are usually a) not all that and a bag of chips and b) not focusing on the detail I am interested in.  There is one very fortunate photo from the Met, though:

Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Forel", accession no. 46.156.34a–e

I'm pretty confident in figuring these to be wooden beads wrapped in silk floss (which appears to be the same stuff, corrected for fading, as the red used in the pouch's embroidery--just as the green and straw tassel silk seem to be), which are then wrapped in gold cord.  Wrapping silk around a bead base is a pretty common technique, but we must not discount the possibility that the top of the tassel is just mummified in the red silk, and then the gold's wrapped around.  I feel that would lose a lot of its form over time, though, so I'm still putting my money on the bead option.  This leaves the question open of how exactly they constructed the whole thing, but for my immediate needs it was moot, because I did not have any beads anywhere near suitable for the purpose, and I didn't have time to go on a procurement mission.

Plan B was to try and replicate a couple of Germanic ornaments, which I think might be turks-head knots in gold cord formed over the top of the tassel (and I'm sorry I don't have better close-ups of these; see previous whinging):

Textilmuseum Sankt-Gallen,
inventarnummer 32234.  These
may be so large they qualify as
basket weaving rather than a
turks-head knot.

German National Museum,
inventory no. T518.  Three
of the other tassels have their
wrapping; the one to the right,
as you see, has its under-layer
visible; and one other tassel is
naked. Gosh I wanna see this
purse up close & personal.

German National Museum,
inventory no. T1213.  Only image I can find
is this one from the 1960s. :-/

So I hied me unto the Intarwubs to find tutorials, because there is a YouTube of anything.  Ensued then several hours of frustration and bits of string horribly knotted in un-aesthetic fashion.  There are approximately 3 hojillion tutorials on turks-head knots, but I could not seem to make any of them work.  (It's probably not helping that nearly all of them are aimed at either leatherworkers or people who mess around with paracord (apparently that's a thing)).  

Having lost one of my two remaining evenings of work to this failed quest, I figured to do something a little simpler on my maiden voyage, and just wrapped some gold cord around the top of the tassels.  This looked superficially pretty good, but as I learned later while trying to attach the tassels, the loops don't stay in place in any particularly tidy way.  Which, on the side, made me wonder: how did they get the wrapped gold cord to stay so neat in the Met purse above (for over six hundred years thank you)?  Glue?  Tiny couching that I can't see?  Moral imperative?  

Anyways, I threaded the long tail from the original self-wrapping of the tassels through a needle, and then up through the bottom of the purse, then sort of tacked it down.  This led to a rather unpleasant discovery, which was that I'd been a little too fine and close when sewing on the tablet-woven edges--there were a couple places where I hadn't caught the lining in the stitch.  Ooops.  Lesson learned.  

Final work was to go through and tidy up any rough bits at the ends of the braids, which there were more of than I would have liked, hey ho.  I expect that will go better with practice.

End result:

shiny.

The Pouch of Damocles: Livin' On The Edge

S'up.

(Disclaimer: this post has rather a lot of turgid weaving detail.)

When last we left off, I was dithering about how precisely to do the edges, cords, etc. on the pouch.  Rather than trying to solve everything in one swell foop, I thought it as well to do a test weaving, both to get myself back in the tablet-weaving swing and also to see if I could replicate the cord on the Polish purse.  So I pulled out Crockett and Collingwood and started flipping through patterns.  (Why did I not already have a sense of patterning?  Because the couple of tablet-woven edges I've done thus far were for strength, not decoration; I wasn't working any kind of pattern--just two or four tablets threaded the same direction, turning in the same direction until I had to reverse because the warp twist was getting onerous.)  

After a deal of flipping and mumbling, I reckoned as how I needed four tablets with four threads each, alternating S and Z-threading from tablet to tablet.  The original cord only had one color, though, and I wanted to do two; after some more flipping and mumbling, I figured that the two bottom holes of the two center tablets needed to be threaded in the contrasting color.  So I set up my warp an' all, using scrap fabric and DMC floss, and astonishingly it worked out exactly as it looked in my head:

Gentlemen, BEHOLD!

Heartened by this success, I felt mentally ready to tackle the topography portion of the question.  I mumbled and scribbled and looked at photos and evolved some theories:

• Option 1: start on pouch lower corner, go up the side; when you run out of side, convert to normal weaving to make the hanging cord; when you have 50% of as much hanging cord you want, wrap around a post and come back the other way; rejoin the other side of the pouch & go the rest of the way down, finishing at the other lower corner. (I think the V&A pelican purse and the Met's oak tree purse are both done this way)
• Option 2: start on pouch lower corner, go up the side; when you reach the top, split your weave into two separate paths, each of which will go along a top half of the pouch; rejoin when you get to the other side; then go back down the other side.  Hanging cord is then a separate entity, either tablet-woven or finger-looped. (Polish purse, definitely; maybe the Patient Griselda purse)

(As a side note, some purses have tablet-weaving across the bottom as well, but I think that mostly happens if the front and back are separate pieces--for instance, if they're both heavily embroidered--rather than the purse being a piece of fabric folded in half.) 

Anyways, both of these options make good sense because, in tablet-weaving, setting up the warp is a laborious, time-consuming, and annoying task, so you want to do as much weaving as possible in one continuous run.  I decided to go with #1 because I wasn't confident in my ability to split and rejoin the weaving, and I wasn't going to have time to set up another practice run.  Also, believe it or not, I hadn't had a go yet at doing regular tablet-weaving (the kind where you are making a flat band, rather than attaching it directly to a piece of fabric), and this would give me a nice long opportunity to do that.

Here's a previous version, when
I was doing an edge on a gown

The work begun

So I set up my warp and plunged in.  The first segment was more or less old-hat, and both the technique and the pattern came along nicely.  I should note that I don't have a proper loom or even the standard kludge of the modern tablet-weaver, which is two C-clamps attached to a table or a board or some such; I usually tie one end of the weaving to a table leg and the other end to a chair or something else that can be moved closer as the weaving progresses, and I sit on the floor to weave.  This is un-ergonomic and back-breaking in the extreme, but it works OK, and I hadn't felt like I'd committed to the technique enough to go out and actually buy (or construct) better technology.  However, this project illuminated several major flaws in settling for "good enough".  

First of all, as I started coming back around the other side, keeping the tension firm became more and more of an issue (though this was more due to the furniture items I was anchoring to, i.e. a not-heavy-enough lamp and a cart on wheels).  If your tension isn't at the right point, your weaving may start looking untidy and uneven, but worse, the tablets can flop around and then your pattern will get screwed up.

The tablets are starting to wobble.
This is not good.

 But more importantly, you must choose very very carefully what you are going to use as the pivot point to reverse directions if you are weaving a contiguous loop.

Very very oops.

Oops.

RÅSKOG has been a wonderful asset to my sewing life, as a modern and flexible replacement for the traditional mending basket, but the frame is cast out of a single piece of metal and it simply could not be taken apart in such a way to free up my knitting.  After the requisite amount of fiddling and thorax-thumping, I saw there was no choice but to cut the Gordian knot, as it were.  However, several pouches with extant hanging cords have a decorative bead at the top, so I dug one out of my collection of random findings and jammed the ends through.

#thereifixedit

The next step was to finish the top edges, front and back.  I considered whether to just do the same pattern, but I thought it would be too heavy (as I was only binding two layers of fabric instead of four), so I reduced the pattern to two tablets--in essence just using the two center tablets from the side pattern.  That was fine, but I ran into tension problems of epic proportions, because the "turn" was so tight; I was doing this bizarro mess of pinning the pouch to the fabric of the couch, which only barely worked, and the tablets got twisted and turned and botched the pattern and argh. 

Never do this.

I also ran into problems trying to finish the end of each piece of weaving.  You might think that at least the bottom corners could (with some help) be turned into tassels, but in most cases the tassels appear to be completely separate entities (more on tassels next post).  I ended up just kind of binding them off any ol' way with extra needle and thread, but it's not very tidy and I think there has got to be a better way.  It probably involves planning.

The Pouch Of Damocles

Here's where we are starting today.  And indeed where we
have been since August 2014, ahem.

I had determined that, as a sort of easy re-entry, I would finish the embroidered pouch I started nearly two years ago--and which the embroidery had been complete on for a year and a half, leaving only the comparatively trivial work of turning a flat piece of fabric into a receptacle--in time for a display next week Saturday.  I was warming up to do this in the wake of the previous post, but instead got a second round of illness that was even more debilitating.  I couldn't even knit, let alone do anything that required wit.  And, although I was recovered sufficiently to go back to work on the 4th, the work chaos (office moves + chief henchperson's last week + sundry other wharrgarbl) didn't put me in any excellent creative place in the evenings.

I had then set aside today to really get cracking, figuring that with proper application I should be able to get most if not all of the work complete.   Instead, by 2:30pm I had been a model householder, making vast amounts of food for dinner/the week, vacuumed the living room, done the dishes, and so on.  I'd even spent an hour working out, something I'd found excuses not to do all week... Finally I sat down and started thinking out the work; and proceeded to fall down a rabbit hole of fretfulness and lack-of-confidence.

Put baldly, here are the tasks that want doing:

• Close the sides of the purse with a tablet-woven edge.  This would be a four-layer sandwich: front, back, and the two layers of lining. 
• Close the tops of each half of the purse (front & front lining, and then back & back lining).  --This is a point of fretting, about which below.
• Make holes to pass the drawstring closure through.
• Make a cord to suspend the purse from.  --Also a point of fretting.
• Make tassels for the bottom of the purse.  (I haven't done this before but the technique is pretty straightforward.)
• Optional: cover some beads in silk or gold to decorate the purse sides/bottom with.  (I haven't done this either, and I'd like to learn the technique, as it seems to be a favorite in both the 14th and the 16th centuries.)

This seems tolerably clear, so wherefore the drama?  Well, put simply, I don't know how to do it Right.  We know that tablet-woven edges are found along the sides of pouches.  There are also narrow-worked edges across the top of some of the purses, which may or may not be tablet-woven edges and may or may not be continuations of the side edges.  There are also hanging cords that may or may not be continuations of the side edges (you can turn a tablet weaving into a tubular cord).  But, although I have a plethora of images of purses, in none of them is there enough detail to tell for sure what's going on; and of course no museum has bothered to explore the matter at all, because who cares about that girly shit.  Most museum descriptions don't even mention the cords or edges.

What I can tell from images:

• Patient Griselda pouch: Hanging cord splits in two, becomes drawstring cord, sides/top inconclusive.  I can vouch for the fact that this is a Goddamn nuisance for everyday use.
• Two Figures & Oak Tree pouch: side edge apparently becomes hanging cord; some amount of the top is gone, no sign of drawstring or top closure.  Not super-helpful.
• There's one here which looks like the top edges are done in a U-shape, and each end becomes a tassel; and then the drawstring goes the other way and it ends in a tassel; but it doesn't look like the sides become the hanging cords?  Hard to tell.
• The V&A's pelican pouch could probably tell me a lot, if they had a decent close-up of it.  Or bothered to describe the narrow-work in anything like the detail they did for the embroidery.  Though at least they did that much, which is still miles beyond most other museums. :-P



going from the front image
of the purse to this close-up
messed with my head.  TWO
SETS OF HOLES WAT

• And in the course of composing this very post, I came across a French purse living in Poland which has a second set of holes in the back which is carrying the hanging cord parallel to the drawstring.  And both of those are clearly separate from the stuff binding the sides and top edges--but I can't make out if the edges are tablet-weaving or what.
• One of the Saint-Maurice d'Agaune pouches definitely has a separate drawstring, and it looks like the side edges continue up to be the hanging cord, and the top edge ends are woven in where they meet the sides; but I can't tell.  (PLEASE ANSWER MY MAIL MONSIEUR PROFESSOR)

So anyways, I don't know how I ought to finish this, and I do know I'm overthinking it, because if I who am heavily engaged in this topic can't say what's right how should anyone else be able to tell me I'm wrong?  But here we are.