Enigmatic Beauty

Last week I learned, through a short note from Professor Beatrix Nutz relating to an article of hers that I had just downloaded from Academia.edu, that she has also published an article about a set of textile finds from Lengberg Castle that, though originally thought to be part of a bra-type undergarment, are actually the remains of a headcovering with a section of sprang in it.

The article can be downloaded from Academia.edu here (free account required). It's called "Enigmatic Beauty:  The Decorative Headwear of Lengberg Castle," and Professor Nutz, Rachel Case, and Carol James are listed as authors.  Curiously, similar types of headwear are shown on men as well as women in period art, suggesting that this type of headcovering was a symbol of a particular status.

It's an article well worth reading by anyone with an interest in late medieval clothing, particularly German and Austrian late medieval clothing.

Change in Projects

Now it's November, and although I've slowed down on the nalbinding project, I've finally gotten two mitten cuff edges that are tolerable in appearance. Not perfect, just tolerable, as you'll see from the picture.  I may yet re-do the one on the right, which has more mistakes, and more obvious mistakes, in it.

The beginnings of two mittens!

I finally decided to deal with the issue of changing threads (piece of yarn, actually) this way.  I work each thread until the working thread is too small to take a stitch without falling out of the needle.  At that point, I pull the needle off of the piece of yarn, thread a new piece onto the needle, and start my next stitch without taking the last loop off of my thumb.  After I have completed the stitch, I pull the thread through until only a short piece is left outside the body of the work (about 2-3 inches/5-7.5 cm). Then I take a second stitch, in the same place as before, and in doing so drop the loop off of my thumb in the normal manner.  My new working thread is now anchored in the work, and forms the new thumb loop.  From that point, I go on working as usual. This leaves a pair of 2-3 inch pieces of yarn sticking out of the work for each new piece of yarn I use, but they can be clipped off later without significant ill-effect, so far as I can tell.  

The next step is to change yarn color and begin working the appropriate rounds, decreases, and increases, as specified in the mitten pattern, but I prefer not to push on too far too fast--that usually results, for me, in a bad mistake and a re-start.  I will give it a day or two before taking the next step.

The next time I start a nalbinding project, though, I'm going to take more care to make certain that I have 100% wool that is not "superwash".  My local Jo-Ann's fabric store carries a few nice colors of 100% wool yarn of the Patons brand, and even though it costs about twice as much as the yarn I bought for the mittens, it may be a better choice for nalbinding.

In the meantime, it's now November, and the current Historical Sew Monthly theme is "Red."  Since my sprang yarn is pink, this may be a good time to re-start that project, especially since work is very slow for me right now.  The good news about sprang is that, once I have a sufficiently good sense of what I'm doing, it should go very quickly.  With luck, I'll have at least a progress photograph for this blog before the end of the weekend.

Set up for Sprang: A Question

The discussions I've had, on this blog and elsewhere, about how to properly set up a frame for working sprang have left me with a question. Fortunately, the Internet has given me a clear and simple way to ask it.  

The video shown at the right is a basic tutorial on sprang by den Blauwen Swaen (the Blue Swan). She has set up her sprang sample on what looks to be a warp-weighted loom, winding the yarn around sticks that are a permanent part of the loom.

Other tutorials, however, maintain that the sticks around which the yarn is wound for sprang have to be suspended, because sprang work generates "take up" that requires adjustment of the tension after a while, which is done by winding the sticks around the strings on which they are suspended so that there is more room to work.

But that method is not what Blue shows here, and I've done enough digging to know that she is not alone.

So my question is this:  Is it possible to set up yarn for sprang working between two sticks whose distance from each other cannot be adjusted?  If so, why do so many people show the adjustable or "floating" stick method?  What am I missing here?

If you have answers, or any thoughts on the issue, please feel free to comment here, on my account at Google Plus, or wherever you can reach me.  I'd like to have a better idea of the answer before I finish setting up my frame for a second try (though I've come up with a way to adjust tension, just in case).

The Sprang Project: Boot, and Reboot?

First attempt to prepare the frame

Finally ready  (I thought!)

On the last Saturday evening of February, I finally dragged my homemade sprang frame from my closet and wound my yarn onto it. Afterward I took pictures; the best of the lot is attached.  (See the picture on the left.)

It is surprisingly tricky to set up a sprang frame. What you have to do is wind a continuous piece of thread or yarn around the two suspended bars, with enough consistent tension so that you end up with an even-numbered block of threads, all lying evenly side by side whether you look at the loom from the front or from the back, without any thread crossing over any other thread.   It took me about a half an hour to wind the thread on appropriately, even though I only have the yarn wrapped around about 90 times.  To make matters worse, by going with the inexpensive, versatile option of using PVC pipe for my frame and bars, I made the set-up process tougher, because the yarn tended to slip-slide on the bars as I wound the yarn around them.

I realized as I worked that there seems to be some kind of dirt on parts of the yarn which wasn't there when I first bought it, but I figured I wouldn't worry about that now.  With any luck, I said to myself, it will come out after I wash (carefully, of course, since the yarn is 100% wool)  my finished cap.

A day or two later, I took out the frame again, and realized that at least half of the threads were way too loose to try to work with; it needed to be rewound and retied to the frame.  After wrestling with the threads for another hour and a half later, I finally got them to lie properly with an adequate amount of tension. (See the picture on the right.)

Tonight, I started attempting to work my first piece of sprang.  I got through the first row--struggling, because (among other things) the section of threads is too wide for me to stick my hand through. Worse still, when I got to the end of the row I still  had four back threads left!  So I removed my stick, figuring I'd have to remove whatever twists I'd managed to apply and start over.

And as I was wrestling with the threads, the frame fell apart.  (So much for the theory that I didn't need to use glue on my PVC joints.  Or maybe not--maybe I just needed to twist and shove the PVC pieces comprising the frame together, harder.  It seems stable enough now.)

I decided not to try to untangle the mess of yarn I finally got free of the frame after cutting my stretcher bars off the frame.  I have plenty of fresh yarn, so I'll just set up my threads from scratch, using large (12-inch) chopsticks) as the suspended stretcher bars.  (At least that solves the dirt problem!)  The chopsticks are a more appropriate thickness for end loops for the cap I'm trying to make anyway, and the yarn is more likely to stay where I put it on the wood.

On the other hand, using thinner sticks makes it harder to find the shed, and harder to tell whether the strings are lying properly, side by side.  Particularly since my frame is big enough that I can't place it, say, between two chair backs and expect it to stay still while I work on winding yarn, with tension, evenly between the two chopsticks.

If anyone has advice on how to actually get the thread woven around the two suspended bars/sticks/stretchers (whatever you want to call them), I would appreciate it!  I can't start making the cap I'm trying to make without setting up the frame all over again.

EDIT:  (3/3/2016)  Corrected the language in this post as requested in Katrin's comment (see below), to remove references to "weaving" and "warping" because sprang, unlike most other forms of textile manufacture, does not use warp and weft or a process that is at all like weaving.  

HSM #12--Re-Do

Now it's December, and the final challenge of this year's Historical Sew Monthly is upon us.  The challenge theme is "Re-do", and the challengers can undertake any one of the previous 11 challenges, and do it again.

I've decided to go back to Challenge #6 ("Out of Your Comfort Zone")--and try to complete the sprang cap I wanted to make back in April. Sprang is an ancient textile art that was used by the Viking era Scandinavians, among others, and I'm hoping that completing this project will at least teach me the rudiments of the technique.  This item also qualifies as a re-do of Challenge #7 (Accessories), so I can "re-do" two challenges in the same project!  Assuming, of course, I manage to carve out enough time before the end of the year to work on it!

Greek Hairnet Questions

Because the textile-making technique now known as sprang was definitely used by early Scandinavians, as the Borum Eshøj find and other contemporaneous archaeological finds attest, I have been planning for a while to learn sprang to make myself a hairnet.  However, several minor events combined to cause me to think about a different early culture that probably also used sprang to make hairnets--the ancient Greeks.

When I posted about my Greek head wrap a few weeks ago, one of the issues that came up during the discussion was whether sprang, the ancient net-making art, was used by Greek women for hairnets.  Janet Stephens, hairdressing archaeologist, believes that ancient Greek women wore sprang hairnets.  Her most recent video (to the top left of this post) shows the use of such a hairnet as a 6th century BCE hairstyle. Unusually, most of the nearly five-minute video does not depict hairstyling--it shows Stephens making a simple sprang hairnet on a homemade frame.  The interlinking, though of a very basic pattern, is carefully and elegantly done, with one curious exception.  To understand the significance of this exception, it is necessary to explain how sprang is worked.

Sprang does not use a weft, but consists of twists carefully made on paired sections of a continuous warp thread.  The way it is worked means that the final part of the work appears in the middle of the woven fabric, and it is crucial to secure these middle, unweavable threads so that the piece does not unravel.  (Why this part is unweavable is easy to see from watching Stephens's video.)  Most sprang tutorials suggest fastening a separate thread across the middle section or using a crochet technique called "chaining"  to fasten the center threads together and keep the piece from unraveling.  Stephens simply ties a tight knot around the middle threads, resulting in what I consider to be an ugly stump that sticks up at an odd place on the finished net. 

Seeing Stephens's video raised two questions in my mind:  1) what evidence there is for the wearing of sprang caps by ancient Greek women, and; 2) are there any surviving nets with a "stump" like the one shown in Stephens' video?  To my surprise, I was able to find the beginnings of answers to both questions in a relatively short span of time.  I'd like to share them here, because they might be of interest to people attempting to learn sprang, as well as to people interested in ancient Greek costume.

Evidence for sprang hairnets in ancient Greece.

On JSTOR, "a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources," in the institution's own words, I found an article that has provided me with material that went a long way toward answering my first question.   JSTOR now allows free accounts and searches, even for "independent researchers" like me, and one can read articles from many journals for free on the JSTOR website, but downloading most articles incurs a charge, which can be paid via Paypal.  The other night, I paid to download a copy of an article from the American Journal of Archaeology by Ian Jenkins and Dyfri Williams which discusses the evidence for ancient Greek women wearing sprang hairnets in some detail.*

Jenkins and Williams note that there are not only pictures of women wearing what look like hairnets on ancient Greek pottery, but there are also pictures of women carrying or holding items that look like sprang frames.  The article includes lists of surviving pottery bearing each of the two kinds of images, including the museum inventory/accession numbers and museums where the original pots may be found.  Pictures of some of the pottery showing hairnet wearers I had previously located on the Internet (see below) and posted on Pinterest in my search for nets of the same shape as Stephens's net also appear in the Jenkins and Williams article. 

Even more interestingly, the authors note that there are a handful of woolen sprang fragments in the British Museum that came from tombs near Kertch, in the Crimea.  The tombs date from approximately the fifth century BCE (contemporaneous with the Greek pottery images) through the second century CE, and are located close to the site of Panticapaeum, an ancient Greek city. The British Museum's accession register lists "a quantity of human hair" as being with the fragments, further suggesting that the sprang fragments came from a hairnet; unfortunately, the hair has become lost, making it unclear at best whether the hair was found in such an orientation with regard to the fragments to support the conjecture that the fragments were part of a sprang hairnet.

In short, though there is some primary evidence indicating that ancient Greek women wore sprang hairnets, it is more suggestive than conclusive in nature.

Nets with Tassels or Stumps.

The ancient piece of pottery Stephens shows in her video shows a woman wearing some kind of hair bag or net.  I originally assumed that it would be easier to identify ancient Greek art showing women with hairnets than looking for printed material, so I began my digging for more information about Greek hairnets by looking for images on the Internet, both of Greek pottery of surviving sprang hairnets. 

After doing Google image searches for a while, I recalled that I had recently read an article posted on academia.edu by Anne Kwaspen about a number of Egyptian hairnets that are now in the Katoen Natie art collection.**  Those hairnets are from Egypt, not Greece, and they date to between the 5th and 7th centuries CE--about a thousand years after the images on the Greek pots, but like the Crimean fragments they were worked in fine wool.  Kwaspen's article has wonderful color photographs of a number of the Egyptian finds, which clearly show that most of them are shaped like rectangular bags.  A few of them, however, end in a tail or stump-like point that resembles a few of the images in Greek vase paintings.*** Stephens's net is the same shape as some of the nets shown in vase paintings--except for the stump.

Although most of the images I saw during my search featured either hair tied with bands or headwear that looked more like the headwrap I've already made, there were at least three images that had a little point, or stump, or tail, reminiscent of the sprang net Stephens made for her video.  However, both the Kwaspen and Jenkins and Williams articles indicate that tails were made by row decreases in working the sprang, not simply by tying the center threads together in a big knot.****

Final Thoughts.

My understanding from these sources is that our evidence for sprang hairnets in early Greece consists mostly of pottery art that appear to show both sprang hairnets in wear and sprang frames.  The period Crimean sprang fragments and the later Coptic nets, though far from solid proof that Greek women wore sprang hairnets, provide additional if indirect support for the hypothesis that they did.

Most of the sprang hairnets found in the Old World do not have points or "stumps"; they were finished differently from Stephens's net.  A few surviving Coptic nets do have tails, but those tails do not look like the "stump" on Stephens' net, and neither Jenkins & Williams nor Kwaspen suggest that tying the center threads together was a method typically used to finish a sprang hairnet.  The fact that the style Stephens achieved with the sprang net she made does not match the period art so well also tends to indicate that the "knot" method for finishing nets was not used by the Greeks. 

Stephens is a hairdressing archaeologist, not a weaver, and she only needed the hairnet she made for a brief video demonstration, not for daily wear.  Thus, her decision to finish off her sprang net in the quickest and simplest way possible is defensible.  Still, if I were in her shoes, I would at least have fastened the drawstrings to the net in such a way that the "stump" would be on the inside (and thus much less visible) when the net was worn.  I would like to use a more subtle (and, hopefully, more period) means of keeping my net for unraveling, if I can manage that.


*     Jenkins, Ian & Williams, Dyfri. "Sprang Hair Nets: Their Manufacture and Use in Ancient Greece," American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 89, no. 3, pp. 411-418 (1985).

**     Kwaspen, Anne.  "Sprang Hairnets in the Katoen Natie Collection," in De Moor, Antoine & Fluck, Cäcilia, eds., Dress Accessories of the 1st Millennium AD from Egypt, pp. 70-95 (Lannoo, Oct. 5, 2011).  Katoen Natie is a corporate sponsor of art through an organization called HeadquARTers, which sells the 1st Millennium book in its gift shop, here.  You can find out more about HeadquARTers here.

***  See, e.g., Jenkins & Williams, Plate 46, Fig. 13 (excerpt of scene from the tondo of a cup by Onesimos in the British Museum).  Interestingly, Jenkins and Williams mention "Coptic hairnets" in their article.  Jenkins & Williams, p. 418.  The article notes that the Coptic nets are identifiable as nets, because "the drawstring occurs invariably on only one side of the top edge" and, in many cases, because of "the presence inside of varying quantities of long hairs."  Id.  I would not be surprised if the nets in the Jenkins & Williams collection are the same as the Katoen Natie nets, though I don't have enough information to establish that as fact.

**** See Jenkins & Williams, pp. 414-15 (suggesting a method for narrowing or decreasing the piece's width in the center section to produce a tail); see also Kwapsen, p. 89 (discussing techniques for narrowing a sprang hairnet at the top).

First Adventure in Sprang

The third Historical Sew Fortnightly project is to make something that is pink.  I have decided to use this project as justification for an experiment in sprang by making a sprang hairnet.  A search of Etsy revealed a suitable quantity of wool in a pink shade I found appealing, and purchased.  A picture of the wool may be found to the right of this post.

Pink wool!

Next, I needed something to use as a sprang frame. After rejecting the idea of using branches from my yard (too brittle) or my tablet-weaving loom, with dowels or something similar tied to it (too unwieldy), I decided to go with a tested, but thoroughly modern idea--a sprang frame made from PVC pipe and right-angle connectors (pictured). After soliciting some advice from a string-geek friend, I decided to make the frame 18 inches by 28 inches, with the tied-in support pieces being 16 inches each.  That size should give me enough room for a variety of future sprang projects, assuming that I succeed with this one.

I have also been reading different web sites, seeking clear and detailed explanations for how to warp a sprang frame and actually do some basic sprang weaving.  Here are the ones that look the most helpful to me so far.

Blue's videos on sprang working, the first one of which is embedded in this post.

Phiala's handout on basic sprang:
http://www.stringpage.com/sprang/sprang1.html

Gwynnyd's handout on basic sprang:
http://www.ceilingpress.com/Resources/BasicSprang.pdf

The Sojourning Spinner's basic sprang tutorial:
http://thesojourningspinner.blogspot.com/p/learn-to-do-sprang.html

Now, I have to find some suitably sized sticks to hold the weave, and then nerve myself to warp my frame and start experimenting.   Since my home is still without power and I have paying work to catch up on, how soon I can get to this project is debatable.

Less debatable is how authentic I'm going to try to be.  At this point, I'm not attempting to recreate any particular type of sprang hairnet; I just want to make a basic piece of sprang that can be fashioned into a net or cap. Particular patterns can wait until I've learned the basic technique.