Knitting, weaving...

Unlike the tablet-woven bands , which were from the start intended to be displayed, my collection of replicas of knitted objects started as a serie of knitting experiments for reverse engineering or estimating how thin needles were needed for this or that gauge. Only later I added the objects knitted after patterns of other authors, to show the variability of knitting in the past. In chronological order: Child's woolen sock from Egypt (nowadays in the museum in Manchester ), 2nd century CE. Nalbound, not knitted! A similar (and more famous) sock is  in British museum , but I did not have the yarn in right colours for that one. :-) Child's cotton sock from Egypt  (nowadays in the Textile Museum in Washington DC) ,  12th-15th century CE. This replica is a result of many hours spent over the detailed photo, combined with  the pattern found on internet  - and  yet, halfway through my knitting I realized that the jog in my sock is on...

I often demostrate tablet weaving at various historic events. After few years of talking to people about weaving and listening to their responses I realized that it is not enough to copy just the patterns to show the audience how skillful our ancestors were. Since then I try to use similar yarns to the original ones to show not only the complexity, but also the fineness of prehistoric and medieval weaving. In chronological order: Hallstatt (Austria), 800-400 BCE.  For my first attempt I used the finest wool I could find and I had to give up after few centimeters due to breaking threads. Therefore, I used cotton instead for my second attempt. Still, my band is 2 cm wide, while the original one was only 1.3 cm wide! Dürrnberg (Austria), 3th century BCE. Woven from the hand-spun and plant-dyed yarn for the book  Po nitkách do minulosti  ( Threads to the Past ). 29 tablets (triangular mostly), width: 1.8-2 cm. Lønne Hede (Denmark), 1st century CE.  Made as...

After creating my web www.pleteni-tkani.cz I realized that some information presented there can be of some interest to my foreign friends who do not speak Czech. As I have a bad experience with automatic translations*, I decided to set up this copy of my blog with selected posts translated into English. Why only selected posts? Because the posts about local events in the Czech Republic are not of any use to foreigners, and other posts are intended for Czech people, who do not understand English, to get an access to the knowledge from English sources. Therefore, I will concentrate here only on my research projects in the field of knitting, tablet weaving and their history. * The worst and at the same time the funniest translation was probably tabby woven band with tablet woven edge = mourovatá bavlněná kapela s tabletem bavlněné hraně Explanation for non-Czech speaking people: "Tabby" was translated not as "tabby weave" but as "tabby cat", "band...