a million stairs and a million stares

Well. At the risk of provoking the ire of all my fibre mutuals.

I do understand the intent behind the rebrand, but I think it's missing the point. The solution to fibre crafts being seen as silly and unskilled can't be to insist that "it's not a craft, it's art!"

That just enforces that crafting really is dumb and useless and for women, while art is serious and respectable.

And that's just - not true. Insisting on this hierarchy is doing neither concept justice. Art and craft aren't opposed, they're closely related and often overlap. One is not lesser than the other.

Craft is not a dirty word.

Craftsmanship is skill, knowledge, and experience. Making something well-crafted is not easy, and getting good at a craft requires time and dedication. This is true for art as well, of course. However, what is also true: Art, and the quality of art, is subjective, while craftsmanship is not.

Art doesn't need to be beautiful, or functional, or solidly made. Or involve a great deal of skill. But in order for an item to be well-crafted, it needs to be all of these things.

Anyway. All of this to say: I think crafts don't have to be declared art to be valuable. I think there's very little artistic expression in making something from a pattern, but there is a great deal of craftsmanship involved, and to act like this is somehow an insult is a bit silly.

Knitting (quilting, crochet, embroidery, etc) is a craft. It is complex and difficult and requires hundreds of hours of practice to get good at. Just like any craft.

(I know, I know, it's already August. I went in July, I just procrastinated the write.-up.)

Another open-air museum; this time it is a reconstruction of a germanic stronghold/fortress. The original settlement was excavated during the 1970s and is dated to about 200 BC - 50 AD.

Main wall and lookout

The reconstruction of the buildings was done with materials, tools and techniques that would have been available to the people. Similar reconstructions exist, but none of this scale. The wall and towers were very impressive.

View from inside

There was a walkway along the wall, that would allow for people to patrol the wall or look out over it, and to my amazement, it was accessible to visitors! I ciuld climb the towers as well, very cool. Especially considering that they were built with no modern tools, out of only roughly hewn logs, and as a result, were very uneven to walk on.

I did find the occasional modern screw, but things were mostly held together with wooden pegs and rope.

View from one of the towers

This ladder was polished smooth by people climbing it, which was very cool. I wish I knew more about wood, then I could tell you what kind this was.

There were several kinds of buildings enclosed by the wall. The largest was a longhouse typical for the time, a house built entirely above the ground with wooden flooring, that would have had room for both people and livestock.

The other, smaller houses were built by digging a hole in the ground and then erecting walls around it. There is only a single room, but a sort of platform running all the way around, big enough to sit or sleep on. Very clever.

This was just one of them, you get the idea. It was a hot day when I went but the climate in these houses was very nice.

There was also this very cool woven willow storage shed, put on stilts to keep the vermin out.

You'll notice that the walls are single layer and don't have that mud plaster the other buildings have; this is to encourage air circulation and prevent mold.

There were some recreations of everyday items, like this hand-operated millstone (very heavy!), baking ovens, three(!) weighted looms.

This one was the best of the looms. This is probably a handspun warp, one of the other ones looked like it was warped with macramee cotton lol

There were also several outfits on display, but the less said about those, the better. Well, one set had some tablet-woven belts. Let's not talk about the cotton, the hand seams, the lack of layers, the cuts. Or anything else.

No but seriously, what the hell happened here.

There was also one house where some fibre processing was happening! Examples of plant-dyed wool, which I of course enjoyed, and the weirdest spindle I have ever seen. I'm not gonna say it's inaccurate because I simply do not know, but I could not figure this thing out.

The whorl was dried clay, permanently attached to the stick (but obviously not fired), this sort of drop-shape. The stick still had the bark on and everything, but had a vertical notch at the top? No idea how this is supposed to work. But I am not that good with a hand spindle, and certainly don't know anything about historical spinning methods, so what do I know. There were no distaffs either.

All in all it was very fun! Not that immersive, and the details were a bit hit-or-miss. If you're interested in this sort of recreation, I would actually recommend the Opfermoor Vogtei over it. It's less impressive, they don't have a wall or big towers, but the rest of the structures are similar, they have a small museum, and it's a lot more atmospheric.

But, otoh, one has to cut projects like this some slack. There's clearly not a lot of funding behind it, and I'd bet a lot of it is run by volunteers, and privately financed. They're doing their best. And I love that people are enthusiastic enough about history and archaeology to maintain projects like this.

They do workshops and little events/festivals sometimes, and it really is a very cool place to visit.