Okay, so now I'm definitely in love with yardage, and started to wrap another warp with this stuff, thinking I'd try out a fine gauge:
Began with 5.5 yards of warp (that's the max length of my warping board), ended up with 4 yards, 30" total length, so that's 24" of loom waste. The finished piece averages about 32" wide.
Yarns: All of the dark brown weft is alpaca that I spun myself. This is about two pounds-worth. I learned that I don't really like spinning, and have just sold my spinning wheel, so I'll be forced to do the medieval thing and actually buy my yarn henceforth.
The blue warp is also alpaca, but commercial. The orange warp is handspun, but sheep, and not by me...it was a present from someone who went to Ireland. The taupe warp and weft is mystery wool that was a present, so was the rose warp. The light gray weft at the top of this picture is more mystery wool, gifted by Mairi Ceilidh just at Midsummer Revel. I have a lot more of that, and it was a pleasure to work with.
All of the warp yarns are pretty thick...DK weight at least, running to worsted weight. I have them set at a bit more than 6 epi (the reed is 6, but I skipped a slot every inch). These gaps were very apparent in the weaving, but not so much now that it's wet-finished.
The warp yarns are mostly thinner. I started with an unplied version of the taupe, a sport weight, but my spinning and MC's yarn are definitely mostly fingering weight. Mostly...did I say I didn't much like spinning? All you people who ask me, "Greet, is there anything you can't do?" Now we know.
I had a powerful experience recently.
Why yes, I was one of those boring children who read all summer long, but even the most dedicated learner benefits from a change of pace.
That title isn't quite fair, as I am generally interested in the fall of the Roman empire, north and south, so it does make sense for me to have a Roman outfit beyond the 103 temperatures. I'm not being very academic about assembling this one though...
Mistress Honnoria, of Aethelmarc, sent me the following link about using oil lamps.
Placed wicks are those simply placed in the oil, with one end resting on the bottom and the other end resting on the edge of the lamp, outside of the oil. This outer end is what is lit, and burns as the oil is drawn up the wick. This is a very simple arrangement, but suffers from the drawback that since the flame can only burn on the upper side of the wick, the oil on the lower side generally drips down the outside of the lamp. It was common to place the lamp on a saucer of sorts both to protect the table from oil stains, and to recover the oil for reuse.
Okay, I need saucers.
Also, apparently the lamp is partially filled with water for economy, a cotton mop head is recommended for economy (though lots of other wick materials work too).
He also mentions lamps made of glass (which we've all seen) so perhaps my lamps being glazed won't affect their function after all.
So I got it into my head somehow that it'd be cool to have some oil lamps. Or cool to take Lady Kerstyn Gartenier's pinchpot class at Lusty. I did a teensy amount of research (and here's a very basic timeline, look for the Oil Lamp page), and decided I might be able to bring off an Iron Age lamp.
(Interesting historical tidbit I hadn't thought about yet - the Iron Age is later in Britain than other places, but the lamp type is the same. This mushed shallow bowl is an IA lamp, whether it's found in the Mediterranean Near East, or fifteen hundred years later in northwestern Europe. The coolness of the culture clash created by the Romans continues.)
These lamps are hardly A&S-worthy (fortunately I've grown out of the insane idea that everything I make has to be).
But hopefully they will work as a test for Living With Oil Lamps, and that's what I want. And I wanted to play with clay again, as it had been since highschool. Plenty of people seem to sell Something Better...I'll upgrade when I think it's important.
I won't see these again for quite a while, as Kerstyn will fire and glaze them. But hopefully I'll have them back by RUM, and can test them out later in the year.
I don't think of myself as an artist.
A creative person, sure. I have creative skills, and I solve problems with creative thinking. I think of myself on the craft side of the craft vs. art continuum, and that's okay. My work doesn't make any sweeping statements about the human condition in this place and time, it just tries to bring useful and attractive objects and places into being, that weren't there before. I draw and paint and weave and embroider and sew and knit and write and calculate and imagine...and all these skills come together into objects that are sometimes clothing, and sometimes buildings, and sometimes dinner.
I'm really familiar with "artistic success", since my skills are taught by artistic types. I know what it feels like to sit down to work and remind myself that my work doesn't have to "mean" anything, it's okay as it is, solving someone's problem.
Today I found Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk, and
she's brilliantly confronting the myth of artistic success. I'd want
all my friends to watch this
, even if you don't think of yourself as a creative type. I found it via a favorite blog, "this artist's life".
She recaps the Renaissance idea as: "let's put the individual human being at the center of the universe, above all gods and mysteries, and there's no more room for mystical creatures who take dictation from the divine."
(Those mystical creatures would have been the Roman "genius" or Greek "daemon", sprites that live in the walls of a creative person's room, and who whisper ideas to them.)
"For the first time in history, you find people referring to someone as BEING a genius, rather than HAVING a genius. And I gotta tell you....I think that was a huge error."
"Allowing one mere person, to believe that he or she is the vessel, the font, the essence or the source, of all divine, creative, unknowable eternal mystery is just a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile human psyche. It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun."
"What now - can we go back to some more ancient understanding of the relationship between humans and the creative mystery...?" She makes the compelling argument, via her own experience and that of other bona fide artists, poet Ruth Stone and musician Tom Waits, that one can separate oneself from the power of the creative idea, the genius, so as to be kind to oneself, the mere and very frail human being.
I might watch this everyday for a while.
My buddy Cynred introduced me to Roman Army Talk, which I've been finding a terrific resource for my Coptic interest.
Today, I stumbled on Kelticos, which has lots of lovely (and new to me) archeological directions, as well as people who are very focused on late Iron Age Europe.
I was actually looking for some guidance on a ceramic oil lamp, because this weekend I can play with dirt under the guidance of Kerstyn Gartenier, but of course, I got sidetracked. Here's an illustrative exchange about Celtic household furnishings:
Hallstatt Hochdorf burial couch, c.550 BCE
and here's what I wanted on the oil lamps, though I wish there was a better citation. Here's an impressive collection of them on flickr.
While making the first version of my Borum Eshoj dress, I knew I wasn't cutting the skirt as accurately to the drawing as I could have been. I admit I was thinking first about my mundane notions of vanity - which normally I really try not to do, because I think a big part of my historical recreation is setting my modern self aside.
The modern self that is proud of my long thick shiny hair, my fit figure...cover your hair and put on the poofy full skirt, Greet, and see how it goes. It's just an experimental game.
So, here's version 1.0, with skirt cut just full enough to fit the hips, and version 2.0, with skirt cut something like the drawing. Version 2.0 has a circumference of 100", which I find is my comfortable stride minimum; any less and I run into clambering-around issues.
Both shirts are cut the same length, it's just that skirt 2.0 is sitting a bit low. It ought to meet, like in 1.0 You can see the braid I used to trim the neck.* The neck of shirt 2.0 is also 1/2" tighter all the way around. It could still come up in the front - I'm not sure what weaving the slot integrally would do to the proportions of the neck opening, since I think the weave would stretch somewhat. Here's the drawing:
I think version 2.0's fullness is much closer to this depiction. One of my constant technical design concerns, also, is that clothing cost way too much in work hours** to have non-pregnancy-friendly women's clothes, so I wanted to test how the fuller skirt might work on a pregnant woman. Isabella kindly played mannikin for me. You can see the drawstring left on the outside - I'm not going to wear a skirt only belted on, sorry. (There is a drawstring in the checkered Huldremose skirt.)
We decided that the skirt worked much better above the 8-month bump, rather than below. Isabella wears a larger dress size normally than I do, but is shorter. She tried on the top, too, but it was too small in the shoulder/chest circumference for her.
We don't quite understand why there's a vertical slit in the top at all - it's not needed for breastfeeding, as it would be in a full-length garment, as one can just lift the hem of the short top. Hald seems to imply, in "Ancient Danish Textiles", that it's left over from when the shape of these tops was influenced by the shape of an animal skin, but her prose is very sketchy. I need to read more to understand the state of the art on this better.
*It's a four-strand braid of 3-plied linen thread, and I didn't have the heart to cut it, as it was just the right length to perhaps tie around something. I might poke a hole in the other side, and then tie them together - the weave on the herringbone twill is certainly loose enough to not be damaged.
**Regarding the man-hour production value of clothing: I think it's in Elizabeth Wayland Barber's Women's Work, where she explains the studies in the 1950's, of remote Greek villages who still made feast clothing from scratch, using drop spindles, vertical looms, etc, and the discovery that making ONE set of clothing for each person in the village took far more village man-hours than food production. Staggering to think about. And since food availability is certainly related to population replacement (not just fertility, but also child survival) - I think people's clothes were too major an investment to bother having non-pregnancy-friendly clothing design, though I also think that people might not have had such a personal ownership of garments.
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