Monday, December 12, 2016

Lendbreen Weaving

In a publication called the Norwegian Textile Letter that has recently gone digital, I found an article about a wonderful experiment by some independent craftspeople.  The article may be read here.  It was originally written in Norwegian for a Norwegian museum's blog, and the article contains a link to the Norwegian original for readers who would prefer to read the original instead of the English translation in the Norwegian Textile Letter.

The article describes how three crafters--a Norwegian woman, a woman from the Shetland Islands, and a woman from Iceland--met, and decided to embark upon an ambitious project--to weave a reproduction of the diamond twill wool fabric that had been used to make the Lendbreen tunic, using a warp-weighted loom.

The story starts in 2013, when the crafters were contacted by the Norsk Fjellmuseum I Lorn (Norwegiean Mountain Museum, Lorn) with a request to borrow their warp-weighted loom for an upcoming museum display that would include the Lendbreen tunic.  A few weeks later, the museum called with a different request; to have the crafters weave a bit of diamond twill wool on the loom to be left on the loom as part of the display during that summer.

The crafters were a bit daunted at first, because the conservation report on the tunic had not yet been published, and they did not have access to the tunic itself.  However, it turned out that the photographs of the tunic that had been placed on the Internet were of good enough quality that they could determine necessary information (such as the thickness of the threads and the size of the diamonds) by examining them closely.   The article describes in some detail how they set up the loom in  three days "of fairly intensive work" and wove enough cloth "to see that our technique was correct", and the museum displayed the loom with that bit of weaving on it, along with the tunic.

I don't know enough about the cloth weaving process to appreciate the details in the article, but I commend it to my weaving-literate friends, especially those who have experience working with a warp-weighted loom.  It pleases me to find another instance of the Internet helping people with practical research into the material culture of the past.

9 comments:

  1. I would have made several decisions differently than they did, but it's always good to hear of people doing this kind of work.

    When I work at this sett I typically use about 350 grams of weight per inch of warp, i.e., about 14 grams per thread. Fifty seems really heavy to me.

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    1. As I said, I have no understanding of the nuts and bolts of weaving anything more complex than a tablet-woven band. I was just surprised and pleased that they were able to get useful information about the original cloth from an Internet photo.

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    2. As someone who excitedly pored over and enlarged those photos myself, I recall that they were pretty helpful. Well ahead of the published, more full information, it was possible to get ideas about interlacement and proportion.

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  2. The sleeves of the tunic look very narrow to me, I would expect it to bunch annoyingly under the arms?

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    1. Hi! and welcome.

      I've read that the dimensions of the Lendbreen tunic show that it had to have been worn by a slender small male (i.e., someone without breasts). That may have made any bunchiness tolerable.

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  3. How fascinating! I'm always in awe of people who do these kinds of things. The time and dedication involved is amazing.

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    1. I'm in awe of them too! That's one reason I posted about the article describing their project. :-)

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  4. Hi,thanks for this article. I myself tried to reproduce the cloth, but on a treadle loom, not a warp-weighted. I did it slightly different, because in the publication Vedeler mentions a irregular pattern of diamond twill and I tried to realize it in my work. I described it in my blog but unfortunately only in german, maybe Google trnslator helps a little bit. There are three parts, just click on the link at the bottom of each site.
    http://textileflaeche.blogspot.de/2014/12/die-tunika-von-lendbreen.html

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    1. Hi, Marled, thanks for stopping by!

      I'm working my way through the posts on your Lendbreen reproduction with Google Translate, as you suggested. Very interesting! Thanks for the link.

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