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.   

December's Fallow Fields

This is a pretty good visual analogy, actually.

It would appear I was more burned out than I thought, a condition which was not assisted by work suddenly going from zero to All The Stress Ever.  I haven't been able to do a blessed thing except knit since Colossus: The 19th Century Project was complete, and even that hasn't been constant.  On the bright side, the first sock is done, and I'm maybe a sixth of the way into the 2nd sock (it should have been further, but I didn't get as much done on my travels as I hoped).  I also took a swift detour to start knitting up [REDACTED] for [REDACTED]'s Giftmas, and I'm mildly smug that it's going both swiftly and competently considering it's something I haven't done before.

I'm still feeling uninspired as regards sewing.  There's one project I'd like to do for [REDACTED]'s Giftmas, which I don't think should be difficult but I do have to think it through, and the thinking is the problem.  At the same time, I am feeling the hot breath of You Should Get Some Recreation Stuff Going on the back of my neck; there will be an Arts & Sciences display next month and I really ought to have something to present; I should be doing; I should be advancing my skills and showing this to the world; but my tank of fucks appears to have the needle stuck at "E".  --Interestingly, I was feeling more motivated the week before Christmas.  I wonder how much of this is holiday exhaustion made 100x worse by the wretched cold I've had for the past week.   It is admittedly hard to feel energized and creative when you are horking up lung every time you take a deep breath.

I am trying to combat my general malaise by focusing on small goals, little wins.  I'll concentrate on finishing [REDACTED] and [REDACTED].  I'll nibble away on the 2nd sock while stuck on the couch with lurgy.  I will do the last 10% of work on the furshlugginer or nué pouch so it can be DONE DONE DONE (even if it is wrong wrong wrong).   And then, I'll see where my brain is at.

Knitting And Unexpected Psychological Whuts

Currently knitting: Three Irish Girls' "Keep On Walking In The Free World",
main yarn colorway "Harvest Moon", secondary yarn colorway "Heart of Gold"
Edited to add: this is not yet what my sock looks like

I had previously expressed my intention to do nothing more complicated than sock knitting for the month of November, but I am already feeling the faint stirrings of You Should Really Be Doing Something Real.  This is an interesting peek into the murky depths of my subconscious, because what, pray tell, isn't real about having a pair of colorful warm wool socks for when winter finally decides to show up?  

Apparently, there is that within me which does not countenance the making of objects unless they are a) historical re-creations or b) for someone else.  

So I figure as how I have a few issues to work through right there.   While that's processing, I'm going to double down on my intention to finish these socks first, and not permit myself to go chase some other shiny.  I'm not a great judge of my knitting production speed yet, but I think I should be able to finish them before the month is out (kneesocks though they are).

Once that's done, or at least once I have a comfortable enough rhythm established that I'm OK with alternating work, there comes the dicey task of choosing what to do next.

• I have a big ol' list of mending for our medieval* clothes.
• I have a similarly big ol' list of medieval clothes projects I'd like to begin.
• I have yet another big ol' list of medieval household goods I wanted to make.
• And I have a big ol' Ravelry queue of knitting projects.
• Then there's the embroidery project ideas.
• Oh, and one of my avoidance moments while working on The 19th Century Project was that I suddenly had some inspirations for making modern clothes.

I need to find a way to prioritize my initiatives, and be OK with that prioritization, or I'm going to end up chasing my tail and/or in a meeping pile under the blankets.

* disclaimer: any use of "medieval" in this blog can, unless specified otherwise, be assumed to include any of that weird-ass science fiction stuff that happens after Anno Domini 1410.

19th Century Project: Mission Accomplished

Current mood:

Well, thank goodness that's over.

Last check-in was a gibbering brain-dump two days before the wedding, I believe?  So, in those two days, I managed to get all the critical requirements done, except:

• No additional braid made it onto the uniform, alas.
• My skirt was not hemmed.  Well, it sort of was, in that I attached a wide strip of ciré to the bottom of the skirt and turned it in, thus creating a hem; but having no one to hand until Saturday to actually mark the hem, on that day we found that it was way too long, so I ended up having to pin the whole thing up for the wedding.  Which, of course, started coming down over the course of the evening. But it sufficed.
• I didn't put closures on the skirt waistband or slit.  God Bless Safety Pins.

Bugs and issues:

• On my outfit:
• The 1/4" historically accurate twill tape I used as my corset lacing broke when Beth was lacing me in.  ("Tighter, Mammy, tighter!")  Like the Duke of Wellington, we tied a knot and carried on; but that combined with the fact that we were already super-late and did not have time for adjustments meant that my shape was doing kinda weird things.
• Possibly related to the above point: the bodice was riding a little higher than it should have, I think.  Also, the pointed front was occasionally drifting to one side.
• The stuff I chose to lace the bodice was also inadequate for purpose, but at least it didn't break.
• The sleeves on the chemise ended up being longer than the sleeves of the gown; and even after we rolled them up and pinned them (God Bless Safety Pins, again) they were slightly visible because the pleating plus the stiffness of the silk gave a sort of funnel visibility effect when I raised my arms.  I think I just have to remove them entirely.  WELL THAT WAS THREE HOURS OF MY LIFE WASTED.
• The skirt waistband was, cough, a little small.  I think that if we'd been able to lace me up fully it would've been OK, though.
• On my consort's outfit:
• Somehow the center back piece of the coat ended up being a good 2" shorter than the rest of the back hem-line.  I kludged this by just sewing in another strip of fabric to make up the difference.
• The trousers were way too short!  I realized that this was kind of Not Wrong, because you'd expect to be wearing tall boots and possibly gaiters as well, but this did not help us because he had neither.  I kludged this the same way--sewed in a strip of fabric at the bottom of each leg.
• The collar is a leeetle tall and the cuffs definitely a bit too long.  (The cuffs will be easy to fix, the collar less so.)
• As I think I mentioned earlier, some things went a little off the rails when calculating the shape and angle of the trouser fall, so it comes up higher and further out than it should, which skews the fit slightly in other ways.  I don't think most people would realize this, but it bugs me.
• I should have moved the trouser side points back about a half inch on each side, so the slit at the back isn't forced open so wide.  Again, this is not wrong per se (this is why there is a slit and lacing at the back) but it makes it a less elegant fit.

All in all, however, I'm really quite pleased with our turnout.  As well, the whole project has been a major confidence booster for me; the fact that, from a cold start, I managed to create pieces that were this passable (and on a ridiculous schedule) is a pretty remarkable level-up for me. 

What's that?  You want pictures?  Oh, very well:

Going down the dance (photo by
Serena Star Photography)

My dashing escort and my bestie.
(His jacket does button fully
and comfortably, but it was
late and hot)

Afterwards; you see my hem has
entirely given up the ghost