Baaaaaaaaah!

Yes, I'm still there - not much in the workshop at the moment, though :-/
There are a lot of good reasons for that: Getting started for the events I'm going to attend this year (TEMPUS at Dorstadt being one of them), work, private things and last but really not least 12 cute little reasons with 4 feet and fluffy wool :o)

Paula, her brother and their proud mum, Josephine

Paula 10 days later

When I'm not at work or with my sheep, I'm working on a new 14th century dress (12 gore dress after Herjolfsnes) and on a research projekt about relics, relic bags and boxes and things related. I'll write more about that soon and show you some of the stuff I made...

In the meantime here is something for all you textile lovers that the people from The Archeology of York have made available for download:
Textile Production at 16–22 Coppergate by Penelope Walton Rogers
Enjoy!

Girdle book (part 4)

It's time to update some of my "work in progress" posts, so here is something about the little girdle book again.

First of all, it turned out quite different from what I originally had in mind...

I decided against a cover made of silk for two reasons:

The friend that is going to use it is a craftsperson, not a rich member oft nobility. So a book bound in silk might be a little bit over the edge - and then I found this picture of a very cute girdle book with a striped leather cover that we both liked very much.

Decision made :-)

The girdle book bound in silk is not totally off my agenda though - I just somehow moved it from the to-do-list onto the wishlist ;-) Now I have to find the perfect text for it. Maybe it's going to be the catechism the Dance of Death is from...  

Back to the little girdle book:

The leather I was going to use for the cover is a very smooth, cream coloured sheeps leather tanned with oxalic acid. Unfortunately, dirty fingerprints stay on easily...

Normally books are blindtooled after attaching the leather to the boards - but here I had to do the blindtooling first. The parallel lines were drawn with a heated blunt knive (really blunt, not only "not really sharp"!) along a wooden ruler. That worked quite nicely and I hope it won't wear off during use.

I glued the leather to the wooden boards with animal glue, which has a great advantage here: You don't have to soak the leather with glue as with wheatpaste, you just apply the glue to the boards.

This way its a lot easier to make sure the blindtooled lines stay parallel than with wobbly wet leather :-) 

On the top and on the sides of the boards the leather was folded around the edges and glued to the inside of the board. Extant leather on the corner was cut away and the edges were additionaly secured by sewing (I don't have a picture at the moment). At the top of the back the leather was folded inside and glued in place so that you can see the silk wrapped headband. 

Five little cast flowers were riveted to the boards as both decoration and protection for the leather surface. Now I have to attach the clasp (you can already see the holes for the nails in the picture above) and finish the loose part of the leather with a cord just like on the original or gather it in a turks head knot - depends on the future owners choice :-)

Dance of Death - Totentanz

For my friends birthday last week I wanted to make something unique - so I did :-)

As I know of his fascination of the socalled Dance of Death (Totentanz in german) motif, I was looking for a faksimile of one of the early printed versions from the 15th century, but found none...

But thanks to a german library I got some scanned images in good quality of the Dance of Death from the "Heidelberger Bilderkatechismus" (illustrated catechism from Heidelberg), printed between 1455 and 1458. So all I had to do was print them on handmade paper and make a small book out of it...

Here is the result:

As there are only 28 pages in the book, it was too small to bind it as a codex (binding with more than one quire and wooden boards). So I used a sheet of sturdy parchment and made a kopert out of it. The 7 leafs of paper are gathered in one quire and sewn through the parchment cover with a waxed linnen thread. The flap closure of the kopert is simply closed with a fine leather thong, wound around the book. A simple, flexible but rather sturdy binding for such a small book: It's only 10cm high!

 

On the first page is an illustration from the Bilderkatechismus that is not really a part of the Totentanz, but I thought it made a good frontispiz... It is titled "von der unausprechliche freyde des ewigen lebens und auch der peyn der hellen" (of the unmentionable joy of eternal life and also the pain of the hells) and shows a really comic-like depiction of hell in the lower right corner: Some monsters mouth full of flames with two people and a devil inside, all grinning sheepishly.

Then there is one page with a short text about how inevitable death is for everybody, regardless of wealth or social status. And then the dance begins... On 25 pages Death in the form of a skeleton / decaying corpse is shown dancing with people, from emperor to little child and everyone in between. Here you see him with an abbot on the left and a jurist on the right. Death takes them by the hand and adresses them in a short speach, printed above the illustration. The answer of the person is always below. Here, as an example, is what Death says to the jurist: "Das ortil yst alzo gegeben, Das ir lenger nicht sullet leben. Her jurist das tut des tod sanft, Mogit ir zo beweisest ewr meisterschaft." And the jurist answers: "Keyn appelliren zu dezir zeit, Hilft des todis harten streyth. Her obirwint myt seynem geflecht, Das geistliche und das weltliche recht."

Small codex part 2

After preparing the boards and spine, the book was finally ready for it's leather cover...

I used bark tanned calf skin for the cover - it has a relatively fine grain, is smooth and strong and has a nice colour due to the chesnut bark used. The leather was cut to size and the part of the leather that will be folded over the edges of the boards was thinned using a paring knive.    

Here you can see my little glue pot - its just a small period mug that I use to warm the animal glue on a little stove. Animal glue is only usable when warm and quickly cools down to a kind of jelly. I like working with it, you have to be rather quick or work only smaller areas at a time, but as there is not so much water inside the glue it does not soak through leather or paper. Some people say that it smells bad - but in my experience that only occurs when the glue pot is used over several days without cleaning. After all, animal glue is a feast for bacteria as long as its not dry... Once dried, it stays strong yet flexible for decades (even centuries).   

Small codex part 1

For some time yet I've been working on a small codex - a book with wooden boards. It's going to be a notebook for a medieval craftsman, so the book is rather small and simple. 

After folding the handmade paper and gathering it into quires / sections, I took strips of rather sturdy leather to sew them onto. These bands have a slit, so the thread goes from the quire up through the slit, around the band and down through the slit into the quire again. 

This makes a distinctive sewing pattern typical for the late medieval codex. After sewing all the quires to the bands, I made boards. The boards are ash wood, because it is is hard, tough and does not work a lot once it is dry. It was not as common for boards as oak or beech, but because of it's fast growth it may have been a cheaper alternative... The boards have grooves for the bands made with a chisel and I smoothed the surface and thinned their edges using a handplane.  

Attaching the bands to the boards is done here in a rather simple way - they are glued into grooves. There are other ways, but for a small book this method was used as some originals show. After the glue has dryed, the bands are cut with a paring knife so nothing will be visible once the leather cover is attached. 

The cords of the headbands are also glued to the boards and strips of chamois stuck unto the spine between the bands to make a smooth surface.

To be continued...

Frilled headware - details

As promised, here are some more detailed photos of the border of my "Kruseler".

You can see the plain weave in tabby with a double thread weft in the left part of the border and the protruding weft loops in the right part.

I simply attached it to the selvedge of a rectangular linnen veil :-)

On the next photo you can see the border going round the corner - from the original paintings of Conrad von Soest I got the impression the women are wearing headscarfs with 4 sides of frill...

The advantage is that I can wear the veil in at least two different ways now: I can either fold it twice and pin it to my braids or fillet as shown here or I can wear it unfolded, draped around head and neck like in the last photo.   

Frilled headwear...

...can easily become an obsession, so be carefull ;-)

Isis from Medieval Silkwork can tell you a lot more about it - here is just a quick glimps on my new frilled veil.

As the process of weaving a veil with a frilled border is really slow and I don't have much time to weave at the moment, I got a bit impatient. I just had to make something I could wear now, not next year...

It's a simple rectangel of handwoven linnen cloth bordered with a narrow linnen band. The band has two different edges: the straight edge is sewn to the cloth, the other edge is curved and forms the frill. 

There are some pictures of this type of frill painted by Conrad von Soest (e.g. on the altar of the Stadtkirche in Bad Wildungen, painted around 1403).

You can even see the different colour of the frilled border on the lower edge on Marys veil:

On another painting you see a tiny line above the frill - so I think this could be some kind of band sewn to the cloth... 

I got lucky and found a border of handwoven linnen with one straight and one curved edge on a piece of vintage linnen from the 19th century that I could use for my veil :-)

The curves are formed by small loops of the weft protruding from the warp.
Technically not very difficult and quite similar to the woven garter with a dagged edge from 14th century London...

Unfortunately I don't have a good photo of me wearing the veil in this style at the moment, just one taken from the side while I was explaining something to a bunch of visitors...