Spinning fates and the Song of the Loom

I really want to go to this:

Spinning Fates and the song of the Loom: the use of textiles, clothing and cloth production as metaphor, symbol and narrative device in Greek and Latin literature.

A one day round-table (June 1st) at the Danish National Research Foundation's Centre for Textile Research.

It's a bit far to go for a day-trip, though. Alas.

The dance begins

I've got almost an inch woven now and am tinkering with the process, the dance of it to see what I think works.

One thing I'm considering is tool use. I'm playing with a lot of different tools.

I have used a simple, blunt bone needle to help straighten out the areas where warp bunches together. That works really well, and it makes a pleasant sound that makes me think of the Homeric phrase of a warp "singing." But strumming the web between pairs of warp ends is laborious work, not something I expect should be part of the dance accompanying each pass of the weft. I am hoping that once the first couple of inches are woven there will be less of this kind of warp bunching.

On the other hand, the analyses I've seen of the period textiles indicate quite a lot of variation in thread count within a textile, with airier and more dense sections coexisting side by side. This isn't very surprising considering that the yarn I'm using, a 20/2, is at least double the thickness of many of the yarns from the extant textiles. My thread count and yarn size are not outside the historic range, but they are not representive of its finer end, nor even of its median. The yarns in the period textiles are so fine that they would have been even more likely to bunch than mine, I think. In fact, I'm guessing they would have had to be laced to the shed rod in groups rather than individually, just because there wouldn't be enough room on the shed rod for cross-lacing every single warp end on a warp with that high an epi (ends per inch) count.

I began by using my Anglo-Scandinavian pin beater but decided to stop doing that because it didn't match any evidence I'd seen for ancient Greek weaving. I usually use it more for weft placement than anything else, and my finger also works well for that task.

I have used my sword beater too. But it's a great hulking wooden broadsword that looks like the Norwegian whalebone sword beaters. It works wonders on twill webs. I've never found it as useful for tabby weaving, though; something shorter seems to work better for that. Also, as with the pin beater, I don't want to rely on it because it's not canonical.

So instead I'm using a flat wooden stick that is similar to the finds identified as beaters. The so-called beaters are narrow bone implements, not very long. I have a beautiful maple pick-up stick in about the right size range, although it lacks the hole drilled through one end that several of the bone implements have. I am not sure about the identity of those bone pieces as beaters; the beater shown in the Amasis lekythos is significantly longer than the proposed length of those bone beaters. Nevertheless, I'm willing to experiment with a tool of that size and shape to see what it tells me.

I'm also using a wooden comb. When I do tapestry weaving I usually use a light beater, and this wooden comb has been ideal for that purpose. I expect I'll be using it later when I get to the decorative bands portion of the chiton. Right now I'm using it to help me get a sense for how much tension and take-up I need in wefts. Using it is slow, but it's helping me learn a lot.

I expect that after two, maybe three inches of very laborious weaving I'll have evolved some sort of system that works and is reasonably paced. Right now progress is very slow indeed. Partly that's because the weaving has to fit around family life (in the dining room, which seems to be the center of the house), but partly it's simply because I haven't learned the dance. At any rate, I expected it and I'm not worried about it yet.

Pretty colors

Sometime a couple of weeks ago I saw a photo of a header band being created directly on a cloth beam. I keep trying to retrace my steps, but I haven't been able to relocate that photo. I'm not going to do my warping that way, but I'd like to examine the context of that photo again.

I had a brainstorm today about how to handle the shed rod. Perhaps it was that fall on the stairs last Monday that leads me to look for simpler, less physically stressful methods of warping. I think this time I shall have to sit in a chair while I tie on loomweights instead of sitting on the ground as I customarily do.

Having worked out how I'm going to handle the header band, my attention has turned to appropriate dyestuffs. I'm researching what we know from archaeological contexts, historic documents, and literary references.

I am strongly tempted to take this opportunity to learn how to dye with alkanet, but I think I shall have to resist. It sure would be fun, though, to recreate one of the false purples from the Stockholm papyrus! Maybe next time. (And maybe by then I will have figured out just what "roasted Phrygian stone" is.)

How heavy is that?

Today I've been firming up my understanding of loom weights. I now know what weight range I need, approximately how many weights I need, and what I'd like them to look like. An interested potter has given an estimate for providing the set; hopefully that problem can soon be marked "solved."

Today I also found two documents on the web concerning the building and usage of an ancient Greek style warp-weighted loom. My previous experience weaving on the Icelandic style warp-weighted loom keeps me from from benefiting from beginner documents, and I have come to some different conclusions than the authors of those documents. But I spent a lot of years out in the wilderness with this research, so I'm happy to add their works to my little library.

The museum I wrote to hasn't written me back about getting photos of some artifacts. Other than that, everything seems to be perking along nicely. I've got two yarns to compare (I'm using commercial for this project), and I have plenty of thread count footnotes. If that one last book would arrive, I'd have enough research on hand to feel confident about making some of the final choices -- although they can be punted for a little while yet while I consider matters of infrastructure: to wit, the loom.