Yesterday was a really long day - but it was absolutely, utterly wonderful, and a lot of fun. I left home at 7 in the morning, drove to Darmstadt, set up my table in the museum, and did the demonstration of neolithic textile techniques straight into the afternoon.

Here I am at my table, just before the museum doors open:

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In the main entrance hall of the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt. The green thing in my hands is a piece of willow bark, freshly stripped from the stem.


A lot of people stopped at my table and asked a lot of questions - including the usual difficult ones that are hard to answer because we have so few textile finds. I had many really interesting chats, and a number of visitors tried their hands at twining bast into cords. Two boys even tried to spin yarn after that (because obviously that must be much, much easier than twining bast - turns out it wasn't).

After the demonstration, I got to take a little stroll around the museum and meet up with a friend to enjoy a nice cup of coffee before driving home again. With the partly rather dense traffic and the oodles of construction sites along the Autobahn, that took a while longer than the same way in the morning, so I arrived home at half past nine - really a long day.

The car now sits in the garage, waiting to be emptied out. Also, I now have a plied bast string that is about 2 metres long... and did I mention that I had a lot of fun, and a wonderful time?