We're definitely in autumn now - leaves are slowly losing their green colour, apples and pears are ripening, and the Crazy Season is starting. Or at least it feels like every year in the autumn, things are happening all the time!

Thus I will be off the blog for a few days while I am teaching in Switzerland. I will be back on Tuesday next week, and then I can keep you updated on my (hopefully not too frantic) work on my conference paper for the Instrumentum Colloque in France in October.

And after that, if we want to look as far into the future... the Textile Forum will try to eat up every little bit of brain I have. I'm already looking forward to that!

A long while ago, I chatted with Adam from Kaptorga, and the podcasting thing came up, and we both found that it might be fun to do a podcast at some point. 

Quite a bit later, that actually happened. (Fun fact: I do my recordings in our wardrobe. It's small and there's a lot of fabric in there, so acoustics are good. This time, I had the laptop outside to do the recording, and halfway through, it went out of juice... )

It's all in German, but if you do understand German - here it is:

...except the usual. Some more planning, some more prepping, some cake baking in preparation for the weekend, when there's a birthday in the family to be celebrated. 

But maybe you will find this video of a spinning mule from Leeds interesting as well: 

And you can read a little more about the machines here on the museum page. 

If you're a regular reader here, you'll know that I have a thing for coffee. (If you didn't, well, you know now.) I also have a thing for tableware, having grown up in a town where there was a lot of china production.

So I was rather delighted about the new virtual exhibition of coffee tableware from the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek - and it's also available in English for everyone not reading German to enjoy. There's a few pretty weird things in there, and I'm not sure if I've ever seen a Barttasse before. (That is a cup with a special little bar to protect your shaped and waxed moustache from your hot beverage. Probably, now that I think of it, not only to keep the coffee from deforming your whiskerage, but also from keeping your products involved in said shape from, um, enhancing the flavour of your coffee.

There I am, mid-September, and a certain November event is looming ahead. We'll do tablet weaving at the European Textile Forum this year, so I am currently trying to find out how much yarn of what type we will need, and how many tablets.

And that is the point where you suddenly, unambiguously, get shown again that tablet weaving is indeed, well, weaving.

As I like to tell people when I talk about spinning now and back then, one of the big differences is how much you'd need to produce. Many modern hobby spinners spin for their knitting... back in history, it was done for weaving. Big difference between knitters and weavers? Knitters talk about metres and grams, weavers talk about kilometres and kilograms. 

Similarly to "real" weaving, tablet weaving yarn requirements do add up quickly. Four bits of string per tablet, then at least 1.5 m of warp length (because you want some space, and the relation between loom waste or, in this case, tablet warp waste and weaving is always worse if you go shorter), and then some tablets, there you are.

With the added extra cherry on top that while there are quite a few bands that only use 20 or 30 tablets, we also get the big whoopers. With about 90, or 140, or even more tablets. And while, rather obviously I think, we will not equip everyone at the Forum with a 150 tablet band... having at least one to see how this moderately insane stack of tablets can be handled is definitely something.

I would also really like to go a little further into the rabbit hole of the twist-patterned bands, made from untwisted silk. 

The image shows a microscope picture taken from a broken part from Band D571 kept in Speyer in the Dom- und Diözesanmuseum im Historischen Museum der Pfalz. It's silk, it is untwisted (before the tablets twist it), and I think it would be really nice to do a little test during the Forum with similar silk. So that's my little pet side project at the moment: Find out if I can get thread just like that.

(Any hints are welcome. My suspicion is that it's not or not fully de-gummed, but reeled off in thin enough strands to retain shine, and then doubled up until desired thickness was achieved.)

Funny thing? Potato salad is sometimes said to be very typically German. However... while it is a dish (or side) often found in Germany, there's nothing typical about it if you venture outside your own home, or region. There is a plethora of variations, and also a few larger regional differences on how to make it.

I had a lot of fun reading this reddit post that I stumbled across, regarding potato salad (and yes, it includes recipes, and it's all in English). Because... yes, the only typical must-have ingredient for a German potato salad is... potatoes. Everything else can (and will!) result in hot disputes at least. 

Especially amusing, to me, was the one comment about feeling not so biased, then reading other's recipes and shaking one's head. That is exactly what happened to me - I thought I was cool with most variations, and then found out there's people adding boiled carrots, or peas! What! 

(I have a few variations I really enjoy, by the way - including one quick, served-warm one that is fast enough to make for normal weekday lunch.)

The sun is shining, and the weekend is approaching - some few more tasks to take care of today, though.

Today I learned that there is a Middle English Dictionary freely accessible on the web, and there's also a collection of Middle English romances that you can filter by certain keywords.  Unfortunately, the keywords do not include "textile tasks" and the fulltext is not searchable - but if you were looking to read plot summaries of famous medieval novels... that's your place to go. (Unsurprisingly, five of the keywords have something to do with, um, close interpersonal relationships of the commonly horizontal variety. Some things never change.)