On making a hobbit-home shadow box

Variations of this idea have been stewing for a long time. About five years ago I created a 'deep picture', where I took apart a picture into layers, drew each layer seperately and cut it out. Two years ago, for our wedding, I started playing around with LEDs more. Additionally recently beautiful shadow-boxes have been showing up.

So when a friend said they had fifteen very difficult stressfull days away from home and with limited access to the internet, all the ideas clicked into one item: a shadow-box countdown activity. Every day you cut one layer or assemble one thing that requires enough focus to bind your mind but is not overly complicated, especially in mental capacities. Everything needed is included: the frame, the LEDs, a small cutting mat, cutter, the paper layers themselves, padding for between the layers... and as one big common denominator to this friend is the Tolkien universe, and as there is little that symbolizes comfort and home as much as a hobbit hole, it's a hobbit-hole shadow-box countdown activity set! (Say that five times fast.)

I find it very difficult to describe how I take an image apart into layers. Basically what I did was take a photo and try to imagine it as different planes. Then I drew around the outlines that I could see for each plane. And some elements or layers I added from other images, e.g. the trees and the fence in the foreground, the trees in the very back background, the night sky.

After I drew the whole thing out, I scanned it and copied it twice, so I and another friend could test it out. Once you have the design, the process is quite straightforward.

Frist you cut out all layers (I had twelve or thirteen, depending on which you count). 

Then you cut strips of your distance-material. I used 1mm card stock that is intended to mount artwork, so it already has one side that is coated with glue. With 12 layers I cut about 48 strips, each 0.5cm wide and half 20cm, the other half 19cm long.

Then, into my 20cm x 20cm frame I placed the first layer of the image, then edging around all edges, the next layer, edging, etc. 

The backdrop was created by sticking paper to the back of the frame, then taping down an LED strip, cutting a small notch to guide the wire outside and then attaching the battery pack to the outside of the back of the frame with rubber cement. Put the back back into the frame, turn your LEDs on, fiddle with their placing until you're happy and voilá, there you go.

Formalities:

• Material: printer paper, 1mm self-sticking card-stock, 20cm x 20cm deep frame, LED strip, batteries, rubber cement (or other strong glue)
• Tools: pencil, laptop screen (to trace layers from), cutter knife, cutting mat
• Time: design about 6 hrs, creation about 4 hrs

PS: The friend is through their difficult circumstances. The project helped them manage. I am very happy that it did.

On prototyping a viking field-bed

In July I wrote about my ideas for a viking camp bed. Well, I've played around with the safari-style camp bed and it actually works! I'm working on a conclusive version and I'll write about time, materials and tools when I have it, but for now here's my prototype:

On creating a antler-hammer

When working fine equipment sometimes you need fine tools. When working with copper or silver alloys to make small items such as sewing needles, temple rings or closures (see this post for more on that work), I sometimes don't want to dent the materials but still whack them with something. For this purpose I have decided to create myself an antler hammer.

The antler was given to me by a friend for this purpose. I suspect it used to be mounted to a stag head. However now it isn't any more.

I selected a section that I wanted, sawed it out using a metal saw. Then I used a wooden drill bit to drill a 1.8cm hole through the middle (carefully and going slowly, antler is much harder than most woods! If you're not careful it will get very hot). A (already blunt, so fully abusable) file blunted the edges quite well.

From a scrap wood pile I found some nice maple wood, carved it to form a handle. It's held in place through a beech wedge. The head is neither very heavy (so the handle does not have to withstand much force) nor does it do much damage if it does come lose, so to be honest I wasn't too fussed with the details of the attachment.

Formalities:

• Materials: Antler, maple, beech
• Tools: metal saw, drill with wood drill bits, old file, knife
• Time: ~1.5 hrs to cut and drill the horn, ~1 hr to make and insert the handle

On making small copper-alloy items

I intended this to be a small course, however sadly nobody showed up. So I'll use the prep and pictures to briefly explain the basic concepts of cold-working copper-alloy in order to do proper instructions in a later post at some point - whenever people feel like showing up to a course (Me? Bitter? Nooo... never!).

By "copper alloy" I specifically mean copper, bronze- and brass-like alloys. I refer to them so unspecifically because some of the alloys used e.g. in the bronze age are now technically referred to as brass. For different applications they used different alloys - depending on the required hardness, melting point temperature, viscocity, etc.

I personally prefer modern bronze for sewing needles because it gets quite hard, however I prefer modern-day brass for thicker items such as closures, because it's easier to still work despite it's thickness. My tools are not all historically accurate, but I'm working on that set of equipment (look at my new horn hammer! I'll post on that soon too! Lots of teasing today...).

So what do I make with this equipment? All sorts of things:

• Slavic temple rings, where the west-slavs had a very characteristic shape (e.g. shown here and here)
• Medieval sewing needles (with their characteristic punched round eyes)
• Pins (Viking and Medieval)
• Viking needle cases
• small closures
• Hygiene set (toothpick, tweezers and earwax spoon connected to one loop)
• Birka-wirewrapped beads
• I have also made a few drill bits, awls and other tools for softer materials from copper alloy. Iron would be better, but that's what I had lying around in a capacity that I could use it quickly and easily when I needed it

The basic principles are quite straighforward.

1. If you want it bent, use tongs to bend (once polished, use leather so the jaws won't marr the surface)
2. If you want it shaped, hit it with a hammer (or, once polished, mallet)
3. If you want it hard, hit it with a hammer some more
4. If you want it soft, heat it over a candle and then quench it
5. If you want material away, use a file to file it away
6. If you want it polished, use increasingly fine grit sand paper to polish. Or, historically, horsetail.

Formalities:

• Materials: copper alloy wires of different thickness and foil, different grit sand paper
• Tools: tongs, files, wire cutters, hammer and anvil (=metal block), to punch needle holes: very fine chisel and led/tin underlay, candle, glass of water
• Time:
•    1 temple ring ~5 mins
•    1 pin ~ 10 mins
•    1 sewing needle ~15 mins
•    1 little closure ~18 mins

On making a sheepskin bedroll

Every good viking bed needs a comfy warm sheepskin bedroll - though I will have to do some serious thinking if I want to have a set of equipment that I can carry myself. Especially when wet.

Well, we'll think about it later. For now I only have a brief post on my new sheepskin bedroll which is so wonderful that I use it in my modern bed on especially cold days.

Now so far I haven't come across much evidence for the existance of these, however this blog discusses it and has some very nice examples. Theirs looks much better, in part because the pelts they use are hand tanned and mine still looks very lustrous. I have done some pelt tanning but so far this will have to do. Maybe sometime I will use selftanned pelts.

I don't really have many process notes. The pelts are wonderfully colourful. I used a stitch called 'Polnische Naht' (Polish seam, I wasn't able to find the English name) using a waxed sturdy linen thread. The holes weren't pre-punched, I just used a normal thick sewing needle and a sturdy thimble. Here's an illustration of the seam on Wikipedia, though I now realize that my seam looks totally different. Oh well, so far it's held.




















Formalities:

• Materials: two pelts, sturdy linen thread, some wax
• Tools: sturdy needle, thimble, potentially pliers if the leather on your pelts is too stiff
• Time: 30 Minutes

On making medieval weaving tablets

So this activity is based on a trick my friend S came up with: using material cut for a completely different use to quickly and easily produce something for your use. In this case: using thick veneer cut wood instead of splitting thin sheets off a proper chunk of wood.

But maybe I should start at the beginning, this feels like I'm in the middle at the moment.

This post is on making medieval weaving tablets. I wrote about tablet weaving in July. My most recent and favourite way to describe the craft of tablet weaving as follows: it's like weaving but instead of having one thread up and one thread down (so two in every repeat - assuming simple tabby weave) you have four threads in every repeat. And instead of just moving them up and down between every wheft, you twist them like for normal cordage. So your sequence basically is 'twist each group of four a bit, pass thread through, twist each group a bit further, pass thread through again' etc.

In order to have space to pass the thread through you space all four threads out a bit. And as you want all four at same distance you create a little square tablet with four holes for the four threads. Then, twisting the tablet twists the four threads and hey presto, you have a weaving setup.

Now historically, these weaving tablets would have been made of many materials: bone, horn, antler (different to horn) wood and even rawhide and thick leather. Some of these materials are a pain to work, wood, rawhide and leather are easiest to come by and to tool. Also, quite thin wooden tablets were found in the Oseberg burial from approx. 800 and I remember seeing somewhere that similar ones found in 12th century Poland, so I think we're probably ok on these.

The veneer I bought was from a shop that sells tools and materials for model-ship construction. It's a 1.5mm thick nut-wood veneer, though in future I think I prefer 2mm or even 2.5mm. I got several pieces, each sized 10cmx50cm.

First, I smootened all the sides of the veneer with several grits of sand paper.

Then I used a normal cutter knife and cutting mat to cut squares sized 4.5cm by 4.5cm. I will admit that 5cm by 5cm looks as though it'll work better, but I really enjoy the slightly smaller size and also it allows me to get two extra tablets out of the material. Then I ground down the new fresh edges with the sandpaper as before.

Next I picked up stacks of 10-15 tablets and placed some scrap material of the same type at the top and bottom. Then I carefully aligned them all (as a future note: some tape might help keep them aligned) and clamped them down tight to some other scrap material in order to drill all the way through.

Drilling was somewhat faffy. For each 10 tablets drilled I surely split about 2-3, no matter how careful I went. But I found no way to reduce the loss - probably this is easier with thicker material.

Finally I sanded the newly drilled holes, oiled the tablets and promptly warped a project.

Formalities:

• Material: Veneer, sand paper of different grit, oil
• Tools: drill, clamp, cutter, cutting mat
• Time: maybe about 20 minutes in total per tablet

On carving an axe-handle

Wölfchen in action

I have a little axe that I love, assembled by a friend of mine and gifted to me on my birthday a few years ago. I take care of it, called it 'Wölfchen' (little wolf) and decided to personalize it a bit to carve a wolf into it's handle. Now Wölfchen has been carved for quite a while and I've observed something interesting: even people who can be careless with other tools always treat Wölfchen well. And I don't even threaten them. I think it's because the carving has made tangible the effort that has gone into this tool and people more quickly develop a relationship to this item because it's more 'humanized'.

Now I was talking about this to a friend - as equipment sometimes gets lost and we were thinking in general about how things could be personalized or marked such that people would treat them with more care. And she said 'I wanted to give my son his first axe for his upcoming birthday. I love the idea to make it a more-valued item by adding some carving to the handle. Would you be able to carve a bat. He loves bats!'

So here we are.

I rarely carve things and am definitely no expert, but this is my procedure:

1.  look at the item and figure out where it's supposed to go and what it's supposed to look like (I have added an image that's already carved, so you can see the overall placing - also advertising Wood Tools who created the axe and who I personally think make great tools)

2. rough out the surfaces, first starting with the profile. Next rough out the surfaces pointing head on. This is not about defining the details or the three-dimensional placement. This is only about transferring the outest-most outlines and taking away the material that is even futher out than that.


3. add in the three dimensional shape and start adding in details.

4. go through and deepen important details, add in the smaller details and finally try to balance out the design.

5. polish if needed, oil

Formalities:

• Material: wood that you want to carve out of, wood oil
• Tools: carving knife, sand paper in different grits, cloth
• Time: ~5hrs, however I always have to stop after 1-2 hrs because the ball of my left thumb swells up from using it to carefully and controlledly apply pressure to the back of the carving knife.

On weaving cloth for clothes

During the last months I have attempted to weave cloth for a dress. Using bought yarn, so at least I don't have the work of spinning. However I am weaving 80cm width at 6 threads/cm, which means I had to warp 480 threads. Also, I have so far woven 4,5m (because my loom starts to get a bit iffy if I wind too much warp), which is by far not enough for an entire dress. If  I'm lucky I will be able to sew the entire body from this fabric and only need to weave additional fabric for the sleeves. Or, even better, I manage the sleeves but not the gores. We'll see. I'll keep you posted.

However, for now, the process.

1. Measuring the warp and warping the loom. This requires all the warp threads to be wound in an orderly fashion and the same length. I wound the warp in bundles of 60 threads, using 5m length

These threads are then carefully threaded through the holes in the heddle (my loom has rigid heddles), died to the warp beam and then wound in an even fashion. Once all is wound, the now free end is tensioned evenly.




















2. The next step is to weave. I took a total of ~15 hrs work time to weave. However I found it difficult to weave more than 20cm before I started cramping up and my back started aching. So I took more than two months to get the weaving done - so long that I ended up upholstering my weaving stool in the mean time.







































3. I was so relieved when I finally was able to take my fabric off the loom. It had felt somewhat like a neverending story. I now wonder if I should have somehow rolled up a measuring tape with the finished fabric or something like that. Lost between a big roll of fabric and a big roll of warp it felt as though I was making no progress. But finally I had managed to use up all warp.

I cut the fabric off, tied the warp in bundles of 6 threads. Then I fixed mistakes and cut off loose weft ends. Finally I threw it in the washing machine together with felt balls. The goal was to somewhat felt the fabric, so the holes close a bit.

Now here I made some nearly-disasterous misestimates... I find it important that you know things also go wrong for me, so I thought I'd discuss them.

I had woven a samplet before and realized that the tweedy yarn that I used for nearly all this fabric, while being real wool was superwash treated to death and barely felted at all. So I used some pretty aggressive settings to felt this (soap, 60°C, full wash cycle). However I forgot that for the edging and the brown stripes I used another yarn - shetland, non-superwash. Which felts very strongly. So when I took the fabric out of the washing machine it hung like draped curtains: the edges and the brown stripes were massively shorter than the rest of the fabric. I tried to pull it straight wet, then threw it over a drying rack in a huff. Once dried, I tried to re-stretch it. I could hear the individual hairs ripping in the brown stripes but they are narrow enough that they could be pulled out. The edging did suffer at some points, ripping entirely, however it is so felted that this does not lead to the fabric unravelling, so after some pulling and ironing the fabric now does lie flat. We'll see how it behaves when wet again...

Formalities:

• Materials: woollen yarn
• Tools: warping board, loom, hook, weft stick, scissors, patience
• Time warping: 6hrs
• Time weaving: 11cm in 20 Minutes -- just under 2 Min per cm. For a total of 450cm: probably about 15hrs
• Time post-processing (taking off loom, tying, walking, etc.): 3 hrs
• Total time: ~24 hrs

On widening a medieval tunic

Along with my post on widening the neckline of a tunic, I seem to be collecting description on tunic-alteration after a drafted tunic did not meet my expectations in fit. The recipient, F, did manage to get it over his head, however it was so tight on his belly that it would be uncomfortable to work in. Now sadly I did not leave enough material in the side seams to easily widen the tunic, so I had to get creative.






Looking at the first picture of the overall tunic, you can see that there is a narrowist part of the waist: where the large gores have stopped and the sleves have not yet begun. This is exactly the area where we needed more material. So I opened up the side seams, including part of the gores both under the arms and down the sides. This left me with an opening that would be rectangular if I didn't have the pointy ends of the gores.

To fill the gap I hemmed a rectangle the length and width of the underlying rectangular shape. I sewed this down the sides of the front and back panel, then attached the point of the sleeve gore to the outside of this rectangle such that it still looks pointy on the outside and sewed down the end of the bottom gores so they wouldn't catch.

Sadly I still don't have any pictures of it being worn. After initial enthusiasm F realized this meant that he would have to change clothes when he arrived and when he left again. I fear he won't wear it. If he doesn't, I hope he'll give it to the group that is trying to outfit the village.

(Sorry for the wrinkly images, I know the seams are hard to see on them. Hope this was useful nevertheless)

On weaving fences

Whenever I weave something in a public space, I usually end up having a very similar conversation with passers by: they ask about what the material is, what the process is and after a while talking I realize that they intend to weave something in their garden. That's great! However the advice I give them for weaving a basket usually is much more specific than the advice you need to weave a fence in your garden. A basket has to be stable no matter from which direction it's moved or pressed or how heavy the load is. A fence, however, does not have to withstand very much shear force at all, it's surroundings barely move and what's the worst consequence if it fails? Normally less significant than your baby falling out of it's basket.

This notion was reignited after weaving a well-basket in dead-central Berlin.

For a fence you don't need fancy basket weaving willows, you don't need to go the proper path of drying and resoaking and besides backwards and forwards you don't usually need much technique. So when this late autumn the trees needed trimming I decided to create a fence to shield our compost from view. Using whatever came up with straight enough sticks that could be persuaded to bend. The vertical stakes are bamboo sticks intended to keep plants up, I had found them in disuse in various places.

This surely isn't the prettiest fence, nor the most stable, but it does do it's job and it does go to show that you can use nearly anything - just be creative!

Tips:

• If a stake breaks, just ram in another
• take the worst thorns off the roses, otherwise they're a bugger to actually weave because they keep getting caught everywhere
• If the material you're weaving is tougher than your stakes then this will be a long day

Materials

•  random bamboo poles
•  branches of: hibiscus, forsythia, rose, corkscrew hazel and wild vines

Time: about 3 hours, trees had already been trimmed but the straight sticks had to be extracted. The rest was used for other purposes.

Tools: hedge cutters, gloves (especially for roses!)

On increasing the neckline of a medieval tunic

This is a very brief follow-up to a post in which I made a medieval tunic just to realized that something went wrong during our collaborative measuring and drafting and so the head of the recipient F barely fit through the neck hole. Now, for men's tunics, a socalled keyhole neckline wasn't unusual: the neckline itself is not low but it has a cut to fit the head through that then is tied closed once the tunic is on. This is exactly what I did:

1. find middle
2. cut ca. 3cm
3. re-hem sides of cut
4. pull thread through newly formed corner, creating long loops
5. weave long loops to form ties to close the keyhole

Formalities:

• Materials: thread
• Tools: scissors, needle
• Time: about 1 hr

On drafting a medieval tunic

Many volunteers are kind souls and the volunteer-based museum village Düppel would not be the same without the volunteers. But there are volunteers and volunteers.

F is one of those kind souls who at times seem barely visible but without them so many things would not work. He's always there, always working and always happy to do even the most unglamourous job. If you're looking for him, he's probably around doing something like clearing leaves or weaving fences.

It used to be normal for volunteers to move around the museum in normal modern clothes, however in recent years medieval gear has become the new normal (which I very much approve of), so when F quietly voiced that he would also like some medieval gear but doesn't really posess the right skillset, a bunch of volunteers including me jumped to the task. My part of the task is the tunic. So here's a description how I go about drafting and sewing a tunic suitable for at 12th century German or Slavic peasant representation.

Raw pieces without neck hole and without gores

Sewing around each piece with a 12th century needle (bronze, round hole) and linen thread.

Now you'll notice that you cannot actually see F wearing it. This is because a friend an I joined efforts to measure him and draft the pattern and she writes down pattern sizes with seam allowance and I write them down without. I assumed that the width of front and back panel were with seam allowance, but they were not. 120cm circumference is quite tight for a tunic around a person with 115cm waist circumference, but if you subtract 8cm off that it becomes impossible to wear. So I will do a follow-up post on how to alter medieval tunics.

Finished tunic.

On pit-firing pottery

This one is not mainly my craft or my knowledge, but I find the principle cool enough that I wanted to share - and some of the pottery fire was mine. The main content of this craft is from our pottery group and the main activity was driven by D. Beginning of November, pottery was pit-fired.

This firing focussed on small items and it also contained all the dodgy items that probably contained air bubbles and wouldn't survive a firing anyhow. There were two loads of items: small things that were fired in a cast-iron pot and larger items that were fired seperately.

The process started by digging a 50cm deep pit, big enough for a fire and some space around it. In this pit D lit a fire and created a bed of glowing embers before placing the cast-iron pot in the middle of the embers. The vessels were then placed around the fire and slowly moved closer, allowing them to heat slowly.


I wasn't around for this part, so this is only how I understand the process to go: Then the fire was slowly built up around the pottery and the then closed iron pot, until the potterly glowed red. Then the entire pit is filled up with earth, cutting the oxygen supply and lowing the content to cool slowly. A week later, the pit was opened up.

Sadly our pots all broke, but the small items in the cast iron pot survived and came out great.

Another befriended potter once told me, that small items can also be wrapped in aluminium foil and carefully placed in the glowing coal of a barbeque. I'll have to try this at some point.

It seems to me that the main challenge is heating up slowly while still maintaining enough heat for the fire to burn.

Formalities:

• Materials: wood, kindling, earth
• Tools: spade, fire liter, cast iron pot with lid
• Time: 6 hrs plus at least a day of cooling time

On weaving a well-basket

About two months ago we had an event-planning day in Düppel. I sat beside one of the two people who weave baskets when the group was asked if anybody could help out with the 'Tag der lebendigen Archäologie' (day of living archeology) and the activities organized in the context of the opening of a new exhibition in the Neues Museum (museum of Egyptian, Prehistory and Early History). The event centred around the opening of the new exhibition on the excavations of Biesdorf, a municipality close to Berlin that had excessive excavations for many years.
The excavations of Biesdorf not only went on for many years, but also uncovered many successive settlement periods back to Neolithic times. And each settlement period had several wells. Many of them containing basket-woven elements.

So, when on the event-planning day, the organizer asked for volunteers for the event looking specifically at the basket weaver beside me. Who then stated that she was probably on a business trip and couldn't make it. As I had woven baskets before I offered to help out if the basket weaver really couldn't make it. This led to me having the honours of doing part of the organization, helped out by our friends the 'Wilde Korbmacher' (wild Basketmakers) who sadly don't have a homepage that I have found yet - I would love to advertize their work here because  they are great!

A week in advance we soaked the willows, weighing them down so they wouldn't float up. Then, directly in dead-central Berlin, we spent the day walking around in Medieval clothes and showing following crafts:

• Cutting logs for the outer block-wood-well-frame (display only)
• Weaving the inner well-basked (fully hands on)
• Making bone harpoon tips with neolithic tools (fully hands on)
• Setting up a warp-weighted loom (display only) 
• Spinning (fully hands on) 
• Needle binding (display only)

The well- and harpoon-builders were outside the museum and had many visitors, sadly the spinning and loom volunteers indoors had far fewer visitors. But it was a fun successfull event nevertheless.

I was responsible for the well, so I would engage the visitors, trying to persuade them to join in and then showed them how to weave. And we really made good progress, by the end of the day we had perfectly finished the basket.

 

As you can see in the image, the well has two layers: an outer wooden layer and an inner basket layer. The wooden layer gives the well solidity and stops it from collapsing, the basket is intended to slow down the sand, as our ground here contains so much sand that sediment builds up very quickly.

I apologize for the uneven edge of the basket, the stakes were not ideal and I didn't try to get the visitors to counteract that while weaving - I wanted them to have fun, not be perfect.


Formalities:

• Materials: fresh and dried-then-soaked willow branches, base with pre-set stakes
• Tools: knife to cut off loose ends and sometimes cut willow branches to suitable format
• Time:  6 hrs