I'm off to teach a full weekend's worth of workshops - spinning, tablet weaving, loopbraiding, and sewing techniques, and I'm all excitement.

Especially about the tablet weaving course. It's been so long in the "I would like to do this" stage, followed by a very long planning stage, and then, a while ago, the test run. Then some more smoothing of rough edges and planning and updating the plan and the printouts... and now it's going to get its first run out in the wild. Proof of this? A huge stack of stuff sitting in the car, waiting to be ferried off. This is by far the most material-intensive course that I teach, because I use clamps to set up the warps (mimicking the medieval tablet-weaving stands).

[caption id="attachment_3447" align="alignnone" width="902"] Starting off easy - a few straight lines, a bit of doubleface, getting an understanding of how things work.


Since I'm currently also doing brain-bending exercises with free patterning, it's an especially nice feeling for me to be teaching a method that will allow the new weavers to do their own on-the-fly patterning, from a deep understanding on how these things work. At least that is my cunning plan - and the system I teach is quite robust in regard to mistakes, too.

Well. Let me put that a bit more into perspective. If you make a mistake, the system allows you to unweave the bad bits, then re-sort the tablets into their two packs as you un-weave the last correct pick that you made, then do the last pick again and work your way forward once more, hopefully correctly. You will not need a drawing or pattern draft to re-align tablets. You will need, however, patience and an adequate assortment of sighs, curses, or motivational beverages of choice, depending on your character. As always, the best thing is not to make the mistake in the first place...

[caption id="attachment_3446" align="alignnone" width="403"] Speaking of the brain-bender, here's the current status. As you can see, I have done my best to try out how to deal with mistakes. Those, by the way, are mostly due to my weaving in the evening at the moment, when I'm already a bit tired... as a robust system should be up to a tired weaver, right?


By the way, there will be a similar-ish workshop on patterning at the European Textile Forum, and due to last-minute cancellations, there are two spaces left once more...

The workshop planning for the tablet-weaving is finally, finally finished. I've done a testrun on Wednesday, with three lovely ladies volunteering to be my guinea pigs for trying out the concept and the materials - and it was a good thing, and a fun afternoon to boot.

[caption id="attachment_3229" align="alignnone" width="677"] All ready for the testrun!


The good news (for me, at least): the materials, setup things, and general concept are all sound, and they all did work as I had hoped them to. The timeframe of about 4 hours, a little more if necessary, also works.

Of course, though, there were a few issues. "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy", right? They were, however, mostly small, and to my relief, all of them can be fixed easily. One of the small issues was a sort of back-firing effect from handing out pattern sheets - they were intended to help with visualising the patterns, and as a reminder on how they are done for after the course at home. They turned out to be rather distracting, as they were either not understood easily or, in one case, were understood well enough to be used to tick off the wefts that were already done. Which is, of course, a perfectly valid method to approach one's tablet weaving - getting or writing a pattern, then following it - but exactly the opposite of what I want to teach, which is knowing what kind of pattern you want to do, looking at the band, and then seeing what needs to be done in order to get the pattern you want. This, admittedly, is a bit more of a brain exercise than reading a written pattern and following it step by step - but it does give you the possibility to weave without a pattern, and the flexibility to change things on the go without getting (too) confused.

Well, this is easy to remedy - I just won't hand out patterns. Saves paper, too...

The biggest issue was my intended approach to teaching the 3/1 twill structure. Tabletwoven twill is basically a doubleface with staggered colour sequence - when you turn all tablets into the same direction, you get diagonal stripes. When I learned how to twill, I got taught with the band set up to make a chevron pattern when all tablets turn forward, so you get V-shaped stripes.

[caption id="attachment_3230" align="alignnone" width="218"] Band with chevron stripes. This will still be done in the workshop - but not as the basic setup for the twill part.


This has the advantage of having a mirror-image in your band, so if you mess up on one side, the other side can help you in correcting your mistake. The problem for teaching a group with this method? You need a broader than feasible band in order to clearly see the twill structure, and get into the twill rhythm. When I did my concept and test-weaving, this didn't occur to me - I've done enough of the twill stuff to see the pattern emerge almost instantly, and with it the rhythm. With time, it becomes totally natural how the tablets move, and what you expect from them - and that is good and necessary, as twill patternwork will tend to twist your brain, so everything that is automatically done following a strict rule is one thing you don't need to pay attention to. (This is also why I have firm procedures when weaving and firm rules in how to set up the band - I need to know what direction of turning gets which diagonal, or my brain busts.) For the course, though, and beginners in twill, the areas worked in twill and in regular structure in this setup are too small, and things are following too closely on each other, and thus it gets too confusing.

Fortunately, this is also easy to remedy - with a different setup, and slightly different explanation with a different emphasis on what to look for. Which, with a few small changes to the handout, settles all my remaining problems with the course concept. Yay!

So now my script is updated, the handout has been changed, my list has been checked and amended with a few details, and the course is ready to take off. First instance, according to current plans, will be at the Nähtreffen (there's still spaces left, if you'd like to join us). And then - who knows? With about 4 hours, the course is fairly long to offer it at events like the Ravelry Meetup, but it's not completely out of question. And of course, it's always possible to book the course for a group of like-minded folks, either taking place here or where the group is based.

I had a lot of fun yesterday preparing for a tablet weaving workshop testrun - which, unsurprisingly, proves to be a lot of work. I last posted about this almost one and a half years ago, so it's been stewing for a really, really long time now. That is mostly due to logistics problems. One of the large stumbling blocks for me were the questions "How do you enable up to eight people to warp simultaneously?" and "How do you get the warps tensioned?"

The answer to both, in my case: F-clamps. I love those things, especially those single-hand F-clamps, and I've used two tiny ones for years now. I should probably say "abused", though, because, well, they are not intended to be clamped down onto something upside down and then get stuff attached to the stem sticking upwards. There's high-quality ones that will withstand this kind of abuse, though, and cheap ones that will eventually give up and come loose with rather little tension on their stem. Which means the sensible thing is to go for the higher quality tool... with the higher price.

Unfortunately, regarding my two questions, "F-clamps" is not the full answer. The full answer is "a shitload of F-clamps", and it has taken me a while to get to terms with that, bite the bullet, and invest. But I have found a good clamp, they have arrived, and I'm now working on finalising my teaching script, getting the handout (which will be a how-to-make-your-pattern cheat sheet) all done and lined up, and then there will be three nice guinea pig ladies coming over next week to try their hand and my teaching ideas.

It's all quite, quite exciting - and if it all works as planned, the course will cover warping in the "endless" method, the basic system and mechanics underlying all tablet weaving, how to read and write patterns, and how to do 3/1 twill on tablets, including how to work (and design) patterns in this method.

[caption id="attachment_3213" align="alignnone" width="4272"] One of the possible pattern bits that will be part of the workshop - and part of learning how to design swirls and stuff.


The course will then have its first proper appearance at the Nähtreff in October - which right now seems rather far in the future, but with the way time is flying, it will probably be happening before I know it!

There are a few workshop opportunities coming up in autumn - one of them is the spinning workshop that I'll be giving in Bielefeld at the Ravelry meeting. Courses are online now, and can be booked via the website bielefeldspinnt.de.

There's another workshop event, though, that I am very excited about - a while ago, I was contacted regarding a meet-up with workshop opportunities, and after a bit of calendar wrangling, Anja and I were able to fix a date, she managed to find a beautiful spot to run the event (it's in a youth hostel in a castle, how fitting), and now we're happy to announce that there will be a weekend of workshops on October 20 - 22:


I'm especially excited about the tablet weaving workshop, which is a concept I've been brooding about for quite a while.

If you're interested, all booking is handled by Anja, who is organising the whole thing (and I'm very grateful she does this, it is lovely to not be on that end for a change). If you have questions regarding the workshops, you can either ask Anja or me!

There's planning going on here - planning where your input would be more than welcome...

I've been discussing, with one of the organisers, the workshops at the Hochmittelaltertreffen Jerichow. I will definitely offer my spinning workshop and teach spinning with distaff and spindle, but there is ample room for more than one workshop during the week-and-a-bit that I will be there.

However, it's always hard to guess what people would like to see, or learn. I was thinking about a tablet-weaving class to teach brocading, or one that teaches the broken twill technique for tablet weave, but there's so many other options too... embroidery (including gold embroidery), loopbraiding, theoretically also netting (but only theoretically, since I don't have enough netting needles at the moment, and will probably not get more in time), ...

If you could have your perfect workshop - what would you like to learn? Or what would be your expectations? Please let me know in the comments, that would be really helpful for me. (And if you are going to the event, do tell me, too!)

Do you know that feeling that the plan of the year slowly emerges out of fog and nothingness? January and February are the two months when plans are made and dates are fixed, and the calendar becomes spattered and sprinkled with colourful spots all over. It's an exciting time every time it comes around!

And for 2014, there are a few things fixed that I am really looking forward to already.

As usual, I will be in Freienfels with my market stall. Freienfels this year is April 30 to May 4, and the market is open for all visitors during the weekend.

Next on my calendar is the International Museum Day on May 18, which I will spend at the Stadtmuseum Bietigheim-Bissingen, demonstrating spinning technique both with distaff and spindle and with the Great Wheel.

Right after that comes the NESAT in Hallstatt, a conference I've been looking forward to for, as usual, the last three years.

Next up is a semi-private medieval event in Herzberg, running from June 27 to July 6. The event after that is the exact opposite to private, however: Together with Margit Ströbele from Alte Künste, I will be running a dealer's table at LonCon3! I will also give a paper about textile techniques on the academic programme there. If you are at LonCon, make sure to drop by!

If you want to learn a textile technique or need assistance in tailoring a garment, I have course dates planned for September 6-7 and October 25-26. As usual, details and booking info can be found on my shop page.

And the last date already fixed and agreed upon for 2014 at the moment is our next Textile Forum, which will take place 3-9 November, again in Mayen (we love it there). If you want to keep informed about the Textile Forum, you can subscribe to our newsletter on the Forum homepage.

And if you want to keep informed about my upcoming events and dates, you can always check the list of them on my homepage.

As you can see, the year promises to be full of interesting events already, and I am looking forward to maybe meeting a few more of you this year.

The last workshop I gave turned out a little differently than planned - a little smaller due to some illnesses, and a little more open-themed, partly as a consequence of that.

The result of this change toward more openness, and more diverse topics, pleased all of us no end. So much, in fact, that I have decided to rethink my workshop/course structure in general. Since one of the issues for workshops is to get enough people interested in the course topic together, on that one specific date, having an open-topic workshop takes out this major issue, so it's easier for me to have a workshop. An added benefit? Participants can have a look at what the other participants do, and maybe widen their interest.

So while I will keep up the offer of courses catering to a specific topic - especially for groups or museums that want to have a course or workshop tailored to their topic of choice - I will also offer small, open-topic workshops hereabouts.

These will be small because it's not possible to run multiple topics in a large group. A small one, however, allows for it since all the textile work is a bit of instruction, a bit of working on it by yourself. So basically, the open-themed courses are going to work like this: you book your course spot, and we will figure out what you are going to focus on during the workshop. I will then prepare your topic accordingly, and you can work on it during the course day(s), getting the instruction you need and want, with the opportunity to soak up some extra knowledge from what other participants focus on. (Or even switch focus, if you want that.)

I'm currently sorting out dates for the next three workshops of this type and am writing up the info text for the shop... so it will be online soon. And I'm already looking forward to the first of these workshops - since the last one was such a nice experience!