Many years ago now, we went on a cycling holiday to England, and it was lovely - but you could tell from how the car drivers behaved how close you were to London. We didn't venture into the place itself and were happy to be further away from the city again, but from a more recent visit there I could tell that things have changed quite a bit in favour of bicycles.

And this video does support this - plus some interesting information about ebikes. (Spoiler alert: No, they are not cheating.)

If you are a wheel-spinner and want to amuse yourself, go and insert "peggy davies gentle arts spinning" into your search engine of choice. (Mine is DuckDuckGo, by the way.)

The "Gentle Arts" series was one depicting women at certain tasks, and one of them was spinning. So you get a ceramic figurine with an extra little model spinning wheel... but now when it's sold as antiques, the people shooting the photos never manage to arrange both items correctly. The spinner is sitting with her hands a bit to one side, and she has one foot sticking out from under her dress, so it's quite clear the pedal should be close to the foot, and the spinning orifice close to the hands.

Well. Go see the pictures, and have a quiet giggle, an eyeroll, or both. I'm somehow tempted to try and get my hands on one of them just to see how well it would fit if somebody turned the wheel around to the correct orientation. But then, I'd have another little dustcatcher here, so I'll probably pass.

Still. It's a little annoying that not one single one of the photos of the sellers gets it right!

Part of today's work was preparing for a spinning workshop - I will be at the Wollcraft Festival on August 30 and 31, and you can still join in either the Saturday or the Sunday workshop on distaff spinning!

The festival is in Worms, and you can find out more about it (and book tickets for my or other people's workshops) via their website here.

I'm all back from summertime adventures, big and (mostly) small. We had a lovely time going for a cycle tour in Denmark, where there's even more sun than in Germany. 

It was beautiful, and we had a lot of fun and saw a lot of spectacular nature. Both of us were not so much in the mood for the classic tourist-y sightseeing things, which meant that we went into one and a half museums during the whole trip - one of them about ships stranding (it was a day of rain, and we were not in the mood to do a normaly cycling day that day) and one where we visited the shop to buy some local goodies as thank-you for our catsitter. 

To the Most Patient Husband of Them All's delight, Denmark is rather big on marzipan baked goods, which we of course tried to consume in suitable amounts. There was also fish, and cake, and chocolate, and some ice cream. Not so much coffee, because there were surprisingly few open coffee shops where we passed, and the price they asked for a cup of cappucchino made it more a luxury item than something one would want to consume daily.

We also managed to time the whole trip so that we had hot and dry weather (almost too hot to cycle, but we were close to the sea most of the time, which made it bearable) while Germany was having a rather wet two weeks of July.  (By now, it's again ridiculously hot here, and dry as well.)

The little cat had her usual trustworthy ersatz staff to care for her while we were away, and she's still well, despite her age. She's also still extremely fluffy and quite vocal, and getting a bit quirkier now and then as she ages. Her food supply is also stocked up again. The garden hedgehogs are also still being fed, though they seem to find enough at the moment, the food station goes unused most nights. (We had one hedgehog visitor last week who nested for a sleep right beside the empty bowl, but unfortunately he had a broken spine, and the best we could do for him was have him a peaceful, painless end.)

During the time I was not gallivanting across the northern countryside, I tried to fix up some stuff in the shop (half successfully) and catch up on stuff I wanted to do forever (also half successfully), as well as do some more prep for the things coming up. As always when planning things like that, there's additional tasks sliding in gracefully, and additional issues suddenly rearing their not so graceful little heads, so no, I'm not all caught up.

I also had my one-year checkup for my medical shenanigans I had last May, and was very happy to hear that everything looks good and checks as "normal" again, except for one last little value that is slightly below the reference frame. So all is well so far, too, which is very nice to hear.

But, well, nevermind. Today was spent sorting things, and tomorrow will see a post run so I can deal with the orders that came in while I was away. And then there's the spinning workshop to prep for that I will give end of August at the Wollcraft festival... plus the last bits of work to do on the sprang headwear.

It's certainly not getting boring around here!

It's time for a summer break!  

I will take a break from the daily stuff to relax, visit with family and friends, and take care of some behind-the-scenes tasks that I never get around to doing during normal work time.

That means I will pause the blog and the shop for a bit; both will be back on August 18. 

Have a lovely, relaxing, not too hot summer time!

There's finally some rain falling outside, and I do hope it will be more than the scant litre we got the last two times. And of course it's raining now (because I lugged cans of water to the fruit trees this morning...)

In other news, there's not much news - I'm working on shop stuff to get everything that needs attention done before the upcoming summer break, the cat needs a new batch of food mixed (scheduled for tonight) and I have some prep and/or planning for upcoming events and workshops. So all is well so far.

(I also have a new filling in one of my teeth. So the others are not so lonesome. Which they wouldn't have been anyways... This is one thing where I, personally, am not of the opinion "the more the merrier" but unfortunately I didn't do well in the genetic lottery in regards to tooth material. That said - at least I live today, and can benefit from modern dentistry, making everything only a little annoying instead of really awful, incredibly painful and potentially life-threatening, and as an archaeologist, I've seen enough jawbones with gaping holes from tooth drama in them to be really grateful and appreciative of that.)

When I was posting about sprang recently... did I mention the density issue?

Really, really high density of some threads in a system seems to be a recurring topic for me. Brocades when tablet weaving is one of these things. The Lengberg sprang piece is another example.

Obviously, you will need to have the right size of threads (and the first piece I made had a little too thick threads, I think). But then, still, you have to achieve that really, really high density.

So just for my own personal fun, I made another trial piece setup, this time with slightly thinner threads. They are not as densely plied as the original, but I wanted to get going and not do some yarn hunting and plying first. First try with these was also a non-success, wit hthe rows running too wide. But now, I might be getting there: 

In the original, ten rows are about 1.3 cm. This is not just ten rows yet, but it's also under one centimetre wide. Which makes me hopeful, actually.

The trick was to work with very, very little tension on the threads for a start. After each row, I press in really, really hard with either a weaving sword or a c 1 cm diameter dowel. Both seem to work similarly well, with a little difference in how it feels when handling. 

I'm about 8 rows in on this piece from about 190, so it will definitely take a while longer to see if the results are consistent. But for now, I am quite amazed in how tight it is at the moment!