Even More Diamond Twill Sources

Recently, I've found a few more sellers of diamond twill cloth on the Internet.

The Mulberry Dyer, a seller of natural dye substances and naturally dyed yarns and fabric in the United Kingdom, sells madder red, yellow, and blue diamond twill wool "off the peg" at £35 per meter and cochineal red, green, and black diamond twill wool for £45. Go here for the fabric purchase page. 

Plateau Imprints Archaeology and Heritage Consulting sells a diamond twill blend, 50/50 silk and wool, using dyed and woad-dyed fiber, from their Facebook page. A piece 70 cm by 200 cm costs £30.

Nornilla on Etsy sells fine diamond twill wool fabric for $45.51 USD per meter.  All of the fabrics of this type are two-toned and in the photographs appear to have a slight sheen.

Finally, and surprisingly, Wooltrade.cz advertises two-toned diamond wool twill fabric for 400 Czech Koruna--about $17.00 USD--per meter! At that price, it's not surprising that they are currently sold out of this product.

In other news, I have learned that the diamond twill wool sold by Stas Volobuev, who sells fabric from his Facebook page, has very small diamonds indeed.  The photograph I've seen appears to indicate that three diamond motifs can fit across the diameter of a U.S. penny (a length of a bit more than a centimeter).  My understanding is that the price is about $30.00 USD per meter, but you can always check with Stas yourself.

I still have my rose-red herringbone twill to make into an apron dress, but it's good to see that diamond twill is slowly becoming easier and cheaper to obtain.

Another Diamond Twill Wool Source

In light of my recent post updating my information about diamond twill wool fabric sources, I figured I should pass on the information I got from Jenn Culler's blog just the other day.

Jenn reported that Stas Volobuev, who is based in Kursk, Russia, is selling undyed broken diamond wool twill (as well as other fabrics) for 30 Euros per meter plus shipping. The thread count of Stas's diamond twill is 36 x 16 per cm, and thus is quite fine (and an unbalanced weave, as was true of many of surviving period fabrics).   The cloth is 158 cm (about 62 inches) wide, which makes 30 Euros a very good price (though shipping from Russia is likely to be substantial).

You can contact Stas to arrange a purchase at his Facebook page, here.  His Facebook page says that discounts for "natural dyes are available if you buy them together with cloth proportionally".  That may be worth exploring if you would prefer dyed diamond twill for your project.

EDIT (2/27/2017):  Facebook appears to have blocked access to Stas's account, for now.  Hopefully this will be temporary.  Stay tuned.

EDIT (3/13/2017):  Stas's Facebook page is accessible again.

A Long Overdue Diamond Twill Wool Update

About eight years ago, I looked on the Internet for sources of diamond/lozenge twill wool fabric, hoping to find a vendor selling some at affordable rates.  My problem with the available choices at the time was that the weave wasn't quite right, and the thread count was far too coarse to be desirable for apron dresses--the type of garment which I would be most likely to want to make from diamond twill wool. I checked out a number of potential sources, and reported on what I learned here, here, here, here, and here.

It recently occurred to me that it might be useful to look for diamond/lozenge twill vendors again, to see whether the availability, authenticity and/or cost have improved since my last posts on this subject.  It turns out that while new and in some cases more satisfactory fabrics have entered the market, some of the diamond twill sources I found in 2009 and 2010 no longer sell such fabric or are otherwise defunct.

For example, although the German vendor Naturtuche is still in business, and still sells fabric, its current diamond twill offerings are limited to a large diamond twill in natural linen and a bicolor wool diamond twill in brown.  Judging from pictures on the site, each diamond motif appears to be about 1-inch (2.5 cm) across.  The linen costs 23 Euros per meter and the wool costs 30 Euros per meter.  There are also lovely wools, not of a diamond twill weave but dyed with vegetable dyes (including madder and weld) that sell for 30 Euros per meter. Best of all (for someone who doesn't want to use a credit card to make fabric purchases across international borders), Naturtuche now accepts Paypal.

Handelsgillet, a Swedish vendor whose wools I discussed at some length, no longer sells diamond twill at all. Instead they sell what they call a Lodose diamond check, which is a reproduction of a later medieval fabric from Lodose where the stripes of a plaid, and only the stripes, are woven in broken twill and form a diamond twill motif where the stripes intersect.  It is an interesting and striking fabric, but not useful for my (Viking age) purposes.

I also wrote about Ardalanish Farm, a wool mill in the Hebrides, back in 2010.  They will sell you up to 4 meters of diamond twill wool tweed in two-toned, undyed wools, for £ 75.00 per meter, which is still well beyond what I'm prepared to pay, particularly as the fabric is fairly coarse in texture, which isn't right for the Viking age garments in which I am interested.

Regarding the other sources of usable diamond twill that I found, Sagnlandet Lejre in Denmark no longer seems to be selling diamond twill fabric, and Wollstoff is rebuilding its website, so I don't know what it may be selling. Wollstoff did not formerly sell to customers outside the European Community, and I have no reason at this point to believe that has changed.

Now, for some newer sources.

A vendor known as Elspeth on Etsy is selling bi-colored diamond twill for 385 SEK ($40 USD) a meter. That doesn't sound excessively expensive until one learns that the fabric is only 24 inches wide.  At that width, I would need at least three meters of fabric to make myself an apron dress, which adds up pretty fast.

Blue Wool Studio, a Lithuania-based seller also on Etsy, had for sale a  ready-made cloak plus several pieces of diamond twill fabrics dyed with natural dyes for a total of 2,880.70 SEK ($306.24 USD); her fabric is 36 inches wide.  The pictures of these fabrics are gorgeous, but the prices--though likely appropriate given the amount of skilled work involved--are still far beyond what I can hope to pay. Blue Wool Studio has sold those items since I began writing this post, though the site indicates that negotiating an order for a piece of fabric with specific characteristics (of size, fineness, and color) is possible.

One new source I found that I might actually be able to afford (soon) is a German site called Faserhaus. Faserhaus sells several different diamond and broken diamond twills. There are a diamond twill and a broken diamond twill fabric in undyed, untreated white wool.  The diamond twill costs 26.40 Euros per meter and is 147 cm (about 57 inches) wide.  Their broken diamond twill costs 23.20 Euros per meter and is 158 cm (about 62 inches) wide.  That's more than enough for an apron dress for me.  Faserhaus also sells a light weight, pale brown diamond twill wool (and two other neutral-ish colors also), 160 cm wide (about 63 inches), for 22.80 Euros. Some of the photographs include a marked ruler, and the diamonds appear to be about 0.8 cm tall by about 1.8 cm wide--a good size for an apron dress in my opinion.  I'm bad at doing fiber counts from photographs, but the diamond twills appear to be about 20 threads per cm and the broken diamond twill is finer--maybe 25 per cm.  That's a good quality for an apron dress, too.

Faserhaus accepts Paypal, and doesn't charge for samples (though they do charge 6.50 Euros for postage/shipping of samples to the U.S.)  I may well order some samples to assess the quality of the fabric. If I do, I will post scans of the samples and my observations on this blog.

EDIT:  (1/20/2017)  Note the comments by Marled (a reader of this blog who will weave diamond twill wool among other fabrics to order) and by Bruce Lee about a Swedish on-line vendor, Medeltidsmode.

Another Diamond Twill Site

Today, I learned of another site that sells diamond twill wool. Here, they are not sold by the yard, but as single pieces the maker refers to as "Oseberg blankets". They come in two sizes:  A "blanket" measures 2 meters long by 1.6 meters wide, which is more than enough cloth for me to make an apron dress for myself, and costs 80 Euros.  A "plaid" is 1 meter by 1.6 meters, and costs 40 Euros.  That is probably enough cloth to make a tube-style apron dress, though I'd have to be careful since I could not afford to waste cloth, at that measurement.

It appears from the site that the "blankets" are solid colored: cream, red, brown, blue, black, green, and gray, while the "plaids" are two-tone.

The cloth looks lovely in the photographs, but I suspect that it may be a bit too fluffy and thick for an apron dress. Still, it's one more possibility to think about.

Diamond Twill Reprise

A few weeks ago, I ordered some diamond-twill samples from Handelsgillet in Sweden.  They arrived this morning.

Handelsgillet represents that their wools are all 100% wool, and, judging from the feel of these samples, I believe them.  They are light, and soft, but not too thin, and of a "medium" thread count.  The image of them that appears with this post is a direct scan of the samples, not a photograph.  The price is 295 SEK per meter (about $41 USD), which, though steep, is not impossible for the 2 or so meters I'd need for an apron dress.  The colors are muted, as you can see, but the blue is a nice shade. 

If only they weren't two-toned, I would definitely start saving up for a couple of meters of the blue.  As it is, I will probably think some more about what diamond twill to order, and from whom.

Another Commercially Available Diamond Twill

Today I discovered another producer of diamond twill wool fabric--Ardalanish Farm. Ardlanish is located on the Isle of Mull. The Ardlanish weavers produce a number of different wool twill fabrics, but the diamond twill is woven from fawn brown Manx Loaghtan and dark brown Hebridean wools, and appears from the photograph to be a lovely reddish brown color. The page where this fabric is sold can be found here. Judging from the ruler scale in the photograph, it looks to me as though the thread count is about 10/10 per cm and the diamond motifs are about a centimeter across.

Unfortunately, it sells for 55 GBP per meter. I don't expect to be buying any of it anytime soon, but I like knowing that it's available.

Article on Lithuanian Diamond Twills

While idly searching for more information on diamond twill fabric, I found this article about diamond twills used for the skirts worn as Lithuanian folk costume during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  (Pearl; have you seen this article?)

The authors examined 257 skirts for the article. 55% of the skirts were simple plain weave (by which I assume the authors mean "tabby"), and only 24% were twills. (The rest were either combination weaves or satin weaves). Of the twill weaves, in turn, 41.6% were 2/2 twills; only 15% of the twills are diamond twills, and it's clear from the weave diagrams that appear in the article that many of the diamond twills are not simple broken or unbroken twills but odd, unusual variants that would not have been seen in the Viking Age. On the other hand, the fact that diamond twills are a minority of the twills found is pretty much the same as in Viking Age Scandinavia. (Though I believe tabby weave was less common in the Viking Age than in this sample of folk skirts.) Most of the skirts were wool, though I recall one wool-cotton blend being mentioned.

It's an interesting little article, and I commend it to the attention of any Baltic costume enthusiasts and weavers who read this blog.

Another Modern Diamond Twill

Today I received a lovely sample of the cream-colored wool diamond twill Wollstoff sells. A scan of a portion of that sample appears to the left of this post.

The diamonds on this sample are definitely longer than they are wide, giving a good period impression. Each diamond is about a centimeter wide (measured vertically, the way I have the fabric oriented in this picture) and about 1.5 centimeters long (measured horizontally). The fabric, judging from the feel, is a medium weight.

My sample has no selvedges, so I can't determine warp and weft, but it appears to be about 12 threads per centimeter measured vertically.  I'm having trouble distinguishing the threads in the other direction. The sample looks much more authentic when you actually see the fabric, but even so, each diamond is made up of concentric ridges that don't seem, to me, to quite correspond with the historic specimens. Those ridges are quite pronounced, even more so than the similar ridges in the cream-colored Naturtuche fabric. Overall, however, I like the Wollstoff fabric very much; I'm a bit sorry that Wollstoff can't ship to me here in the United States.

Diagrammatic Comparison of Diamond Twills

While I'm still thinking about diamond twill, I figured that I would post some diagrams of the weave patterns of the Wollstoff's and Naturtuche's twills, since Sanne has so thoughtfully drawn some for me. They might be helpful for people interested in doing comparisons to the "diamond twill" weave diagrams so often seen on web sites and in books. To the left is a diagram of the warp and weft patterning of Wollstoff's wool blend diamond twill. To the right is a diagram of Naturtuche's worsted diamond twill.

Below them both is a standardized diagram of 2/2 broken diamond twill from the Complex Weavers' Medieval Textiles website.

Clearly the Naturtuche worsted and Wollstoff twills are both broken diamond twills. (Though the two-toned Naturtuche twill looks more like the Complex Weavers' diagram than does the fabric Sanne has diagrammed here.)

I am far from expert in thread counting, reading pattern drafts, and other skills associated with weaving, but it seems to me that the Naturtuche and Wollstoff twills have sides of different thicknesses than the "standard" pattern drafts. It also looks as though the Naturtuche diamonds are a bit longer, a bit less like a "square" turned on its corner, than the diamonds in the Wollstoff twill. For that reason, I think the Naturtuche diamond twill looks a little bit more like a period diamond twill. (Which is fortunate, considering that Wollstoff does not ship to the US!) Hopefully, I can gather swatches of diamond twills from the two other sites, the Danish one and the Russian one, and make a real decision whether to buy any fabric, and if so, which one to select.

Naturtuche Diamond Twills

Yesterday, I received the fabric swatches I requested from Naturtuche. They sent me samples of all the fabrics they sell, not just the ones I expressed interest in. However, most of the wools, though very pretty, are not much different from wools I can obtain more cheaply (and with lower shipping costs!) closer to home. So I'm focusing on the diamond twill samples they sent me.

There are three of these: a medium weight wool, with the motif woven with cream-colored and dark brown threads (Product No. 00059); a cream-colored wool worsted (Product No. 00070); and a light-weight linen (Product No. 00030). I have scanned each of these samples with a measuring tape at the bottom to show scale, and the differences are interesting.

Product No. 00059 is the heaviest and coarsest of the three. It is also, so far as I can tell, the most authentic in terms of weave pattern (though all three appear to be balanced twills; period diamond twills were usually unbalanced, sometimes extremely so). I figure it to be about 15/15 per cm, though the actual diamond motifs are much larger than the thread count implies (and in fact are wider than the diamonds in the coarse twill swatch featured in my original post on this subject). Readers can use the scanned images to do their own thread counting, however.

Product No. 00070, the cream-colored worsted, is the lightest and thinnest of the three fabrics. (It is also the one in which I was the most interested because it is undyed). Each diamond motif is about a centimeter wide--much smaller than Product No. 00059, and about the same size as the diamonds on my coarse gray wool swatch.

Finally, Product No. 00030, the linen sample, was a bit heavier than the worsted, but the diamonds were even smaller--about four diamonds on Product No. 00030 fit in the same space that one diamond takes up on the worsted sample, and the thread count appears to be a bit higher than the worsted sample.

Looking at the three samples made me realize that there is one thing that I don't know about period twills. I don't really know the size of the diamond motifs. Does Product No. 00070 or Product No. 00030 better imitate the surface appearance of a fine period diamond twill? Without a travel budget, and an opportunity to see actual archaeological specimens, I'm not sure how to find out.

I'm inspired to see whether I can obtain samples of some modern diamond twills from some of the other companies that sell them to reenactors. Tonight, I wrote to the other companies discussed in my first post to see whether they are willing to send me swatches also. If I receive other swatches, I will scan them and post them here, so my readers can also compare them.

EDIT: I heard back from Wollstoff shortly after I sent my e-mail. It turns out that they do not ship outside the European Community. I wrote back acknowledging their policy but asking for the samples anyway, since at this point I would like to see how their fabric differs in feel, and in size of diamonds, from the ones I've collected so far!

EDIT (10/17/2016):  Reformatted post to improve layout and corrected a few typos.

The Costs of Textile Transport

Last week, I ordered a set of swatches, including diamond twill swatches, from Naturtuche. During that e-mail conversation, I asked about shipping costs.

It turns out that it will cost me 16,49 Euros (about $24.50 USD) to have up to two kilograms of fabric shipped to the US. The website says that the undyed diamond wool twill weighs about 270 g per meter. So two meters would weigh 540 g, or about half a kilogram. Still, I'd be paying nearly $25 USD for the shipping alone, on top of the 22,99 Euros (about $34 USD) per meter of fabric.

That's nearly $100 USD for two meters of wool just to make the most expensive apron dress I would ever have had--and that's before dyeing the fabric, assuming that I have the nerve to decide to do so.

At that price, I would be terrified to cut the stuff, let alone dye it--and I see no point in buying diamond twill if I'm not going to try out some fitted designs.

I need to think some more about this, and get shipping cost information from the other dealers.

EDIT: I have made small changes in the above text to make it read closer to what I meant to say, the biggest of which was to correct my comment about the price of the Naturtuche diamond twill from "over $100 USD" (with shipping) to "nearly $100 USD" (with shipping). Mental arithmetic, unfortunately, is not one of my more solid skills. :-)

The Diamond Twill Blues

Several years ago, I searched the Web intently for wool fabric woven in a diamond twill. A number of the fabrics found in the Birka graves were fine worsteds woven in such a weave, and it occurred to me that it would be a fine thing to make an apron dress out of the closest facsimile to such cloth as I could find.

The image accompanying this post is a scan--not a photograph, but an actual, full-color scan--of a fabric sample I received from a correspondent from one of my costume mailing lists who lives in the UK. She had obtained it for me from a local vendor who caters to reenactors interested in the Viking age and other early periods when such cloth was woven.

It is a beautiful piece in its way, and although I don't recall the price per meter I remember that it was rather expensive. That's to be expected, because there is little demand for diamond twills among members of the general population. But I was bitterly disappointed when I received it, all the same.

Why? Mostly because this sample is nothing like the diamond twills found in the wealthy graves at Birka and other Viking Age sites. The greatest dissimilarity is the thread count. I couldn't find a ruler marked in centimeters when I made the scan, but I remember from when I originally measured it that the thread count of this swatch of fabric is, at most, 4 or 5 threads in both warp and weft per centimeter. In contrast, virtually all of the diamond twills I have ever heard of from Viking era graves have thread counts that are more than *twice* as high. For example, in her essay on the Birka finds that was published in Cloth and Clothing in Medieval Europe, Agnes Geiger gives the following thread count figures for the "broken 2/2 lozenge twill or diamond twill" specimens found there:

The fine quality of these worsteds is best described by the tightness of threads per centimetre in the warp and weft being respectively 28/14, 32/12, 38/14 and 46/15 in the 4-end twills and 50/17, 52/14, and 60/17 in the 3-end specimens.

(emphasis mine). Lise Bender Jorgensen, in North European Textiles Until AD 1000, which catalogs early fabric finds from all of northern Europe, notes that 2 of the diamond twill specimens found in the Valsgarde graves had counts of 20/14 and 20/18 (Appendix B at page 160). But she also notes finds of other diamond twills in other northern European countries before and during the Viking Age, none of which were as coarse as 4 threads per centimeter.

Here's a picture, from Geijer's essay, of a diamond twill from Birka. Although I do not know the scale of the photograph, it is clearly a finer textile than my modern swatch.

On the bright side, since my last serious effort to locate some for costuming purposes, it appears that at least two vendors have succeeded in findings sources for diamond twill wool fabric with more period-plausible thread counts. Handelsgillet, a Swedish web business that sells useful products for reenactors, carries four different colors of diamond twill wool fabric. They don't give thread count figures for their fabric, but they do say that each of the diamond motifs is 15 mm wide. Assuming that the proportions of the diamond motifs are the same on their fabric as they are on the coarser swatch I have, that suggests that their fabric has a thread count of roughly 15 X 15 threads per centimeter--much more in line with the diamond twills found. That's a lot less absurd for reconstructing the luxury costumes of rich Vikings than the very coarse twill I originally found would be.

On the other hand, it's clear from the pictures on the Handelsgillet site that their fabric was woven of gray and white thread, just like my swatch, and overdyed--which still gives a different effect than the grave finds which appear to be all of one color of thread, such as the specimen from Birka shown in the picture above.

This site sells wool fabric, specifically diamond twill fabric, with a (stated) thread count of 14 threads per cm. Much better, and it appears that the fabric does not have the dark thread/light thread contrast, which I have not found in pictures of period twills. At 36 euros (about $50 USD) per meter for pure white fabric (and much more for dyed wool), it's very expensive, but given the limited market for such goods, that's not surprising. Perhaps I should save up for 2 meters of the white, and think about how I might dye, and later use, that fabric.