Sometimes, things turn out to be more difficult than anyone would have guessed. One of these things, as I've learned, is... getting a room.

Not a room at a hotel, or youth hostel, or such things; I'm perfectly capable of that, and it is generally not a problem at all (unless you wait until the last minute and then try to get something cheap in a town where there's a fair going on...). I was looking for a room to give workshops. To be even more precise, to give a tablet weaving workshop.

A while ago, when I was preparing for the weaving weekend in Belgium, I had figured out a good plan on how to place tables, chairs, and weaving warps so that the room available could fit the participants we'd planned for. I have since tweaked this a tiny bit, and I can comfortably fit twelve weavers using six tables. (And clamps, of course. I think there's no workshop where I don't turn up with my clamps.)

[caption id="attachment_4902" align="alignnone" width="979"] Table, clamp, band. I love this setup - it's quick, easy, versatile, and allows to have a wide choice on how to sit at the band.


For this constellation, I need a room size of no less than 6 by 9 metres, though - and it turned out that such a room for renting is very, very hard to find. Lots of people that I have talked to have expressed their wonder at this, and frankly, I would have thought it should be no problem either - before I started searching in earnest. Either there is such a room, but it is booked already, or the owners (especially churches) need it for themselves on Sunday, or it is not rented out over weekends, or it is completely unaffordable for me. I've managed to rent one room once, for my last workshop, but alas - this place is one of the "usually booked already" places.

Which means that, after searching for more than a month now, I was quite frustrated. So much that yesterday evening, I looked at our living room again... with a sharp eye, and a measuring tape, and the help of the Most Patient Husband of Them All (who really, absolutely, and utterly deserves this title - as my giving a full weekend workshop at home also means that our main living space is taken up).

There was then some drawing of available space, and some cutting of folding table mockups, and more measuring and thinking - and finally we came up with a method to fit up to eight weavers. Which is very good - and which means that I can finally, finally set the date for my next tablet weaving course, which will be a beginner's workshop. (It will be on March 7 and 8, by the way... description for the shop and booking possibility will come up tomorrow at the latest.)

There's a number of conferences I've gotten information on, so I will spread the word - here they are:

I will be presenting things at NESAT in Oulu, Finland - and I'm all excited about it! The conference will take place May 17-22. NESAT is only every three years, and it's like some kind of family reunion in a way, as the textile archaeology field is rather small, and after a while, you know most people in it. So I'm already looking forward to meeting friends and colleagues from all over Europe again, and to seeing a bit more of Finland and of Stockholm on the way there and back. I'm also already thinking hard about the best way of doing my tablet weaving demonstration...

Further ahead into the future:

There will be a Nordic Tabletweaving Conference at 11-13 September at Länsmuseet Gävleborg, Gävle, in Sweden. There will be courses held in Nordic languages and in English; you can learn more about the event and find the preliminary sign up here.

The EXAR conference 2020 will take place in the Archäologisches Landesmusuem Brandenburg (Paulikloster) in Brandenburg an der Havel, in Germany. Date for the conference is October 1-4, 2020, the CfP is coming next spring.

So, as promised, stories from my past weeks - let's start with the first of my two conferences, the one I only attended (as opposed to organising it).

When I heard about the symposium held by the TRC together with the Knitting History Forum (which you should totally check out, and maybe join, if you are interested in knitting history), to bring the Texel Stocking Project to its culmination and end, I had this inkling that it would be a wonderful conference.

And it was. It was... glorious. Like all the best conferences, it was full of interesting papers looking at the stockings, knitting in general, silk stockings in particular, and Citizen Science. There were things to look at, including (but not limited to) the exhibition about Socks and Stockings at the TRC. We got to meet the TRC collection's curator Lies van de Wege, who came in especially for our group and even let us poke at things in the depot, which was amazing.

There was coffee in abundance (necessary, too, to keep the brain awake), and there were cookies (lovely, buttery, crunchy Dutch cookies), and in coffee breaks and after the conference there was time for socialising (though, of course, there is never enough time to talk to all the people you want to chat with about all the things you could chat about).

Chrystel Brandenburgh did a wonderful job in organising all this, and putting together an amazing programme, which included a look at dyes, at the knitting process, at written data about hand knitters, and at the possibilities and challenges of Citizen Science projects. We were also lucky in that Leiden had a big special market just on the Saturday of the conference, which meant there were even more things to pick from for our lunch, and ample opportunities to sample local delicacies. (The Dutch know how to do delicious food, and delicious cakes.)

I did learn a lot at the conference - amongst the most important bits, for me, was hearing that it had been much easier for most of the knitters to use gummy silk (with the sericin still in it) to knit; after the stocking had been finished, it was then de-gummed and in some cases dyed. There were a lot of interesting conversations with colleagues around that topic, and it made me itchy to find out more about partial de-gumming, and how silk like that might feel, and how easy it would be to work with, and how well it would take dye, and how well that would wear.

Leiden was beautiful, too, and after Friday, even the weather was nice enough to have a little stroll through the city. Saturday evening was spent with a group that had formed after the conference, having dinner together, and I got the opportunity to try on a pair of the stockings (one of the two pairs used for wear-testing). They were amazing. Unfortunately, I was not allowed to take them home, but I am now thinking about making myself some socks from similar silk, and based on the pattern of the original stockings (which, by the way, is available as a Ravelry download, for a little under 9 Euro, and buying it will support the TRC).

So I was going back from the conference having heard a lot, learned so much, with lots of new impressions of all kinds, lots of new connections formed; having drunk entirely too much coffee and having eaten way too much of the local delicacies, and with about a million new questions and a hundred ideas for things that would be good to look at. Or do. (Which includes, by the way, thinking about stocking some gummy silk in the shop, in case someone wants that to knit or weave with.) And with some stroopwafels and chocolate in my pack. Obviously.

To put it shortly: In exactly the state you are in after a perfect conference!

I'm back home, and I am trying to catch up - there's a long list of homework I have brought from the Textile Forum (as always), plus the usual things that are on the list, so it won't get boring here soon.

The Forum was amazing - we had weaving, and tablet weaving, and there were tours of both the monastery grounds and the Lauresham Open Air laboratory; there was a museum visit; there was incredibly delicious poppy seed cake, and of course there was chocolate and coffee, coffee, coffee. My gran kindly lent me her large coffee-machine, so I could make four to five litres of coffee in the morning - enough to tide the group over until about lunchtime.

It was actually the tenth European Textile Forum. The tenth - our first one was back in September 2009, when I ran the Spinning Experiment. I have a hard time believing that it's been that long, and that often. We only had one single gap year since 2009, and that was in 2011, the year before we found our longtime home at the LEA in Mayen. It does look like we did not completely misbehave in Lorsch, as we've been offered to come back - which might be a smart thing to do for topics where we need looms for our Forum explorations.

Speaking of looms - one of the things I found out during that week: I can do a decent starting border, but I am not very good at tying loom weights securely to their threads; while I am comfortable making the warp crossings needed to weave tapestry inserts, my actual weaving of the ground fabric was not looking good (and I quickly stopped, so I wouldn't ruin the beautiful work that Tracy and Florian had done). So I'm probably a good minion to have in the workshop for the related works, but I'd need some training to be an actual weaver. It was great fun to minion, though, and I did learn a lot about warp-weighted loom work.

I'll tell more stories from my adventures, both at the Knitting Symposium in Leiden and from the Forum, during the next days...

To my grand delight, I will be part of the Knitting Symposium taking place in Leiden on November 2 - which includes an adventurous train trip there (with a night train! Yay!). The symposium itself features a number of very interesting topics, including information about current research in knitting history, dye experiments in regard to the silk stockings found in Texel, the experience of wearing such (reconstructed, obviously) stockings, and Citizen Science (which is why I have gotten the opportunity to join in, as I've been involved in Citizen Science before that was a term, it seems).

In case you are in the area, or can get there, and want to join, it looks like there are still tickets available. The Symposium is organised by the Textile Research Centre; you can read more about it (and download the full programme) on their website. You also find instructions for registration there.

 

I've spent this weekend teaching weaving to six wonderfully enthusiastic people - and I can tell you that while everyone enjoyed it (as I was told so) - I think nobody had more fun that I did.

Tablet weaving is one of my favourite teaching topics. It's simultaneously easy and brain-bending. There's simple rules to follow, and within those rules, you are completely free to do as you wish. Mistakes are easy to make, but they are also easy to spot, and after a while you make less and less of them. And for teaching purposes, with the system that I have developed for weaving both "normal" patterns and twill patterns, it's even not relevant whether someone has been doing tablet weaving before or not.

So everyone gets the basic explanations, then we get to work making a warp, and then weaving starts. Which, about inevitably, results in a room full of very quiet, very concentrated people, exploring the structures and possibilities of tablet-woven bands, conjuring up patterns. It actually was so quiet that I could hear a pin drop. (Yes, I actually tried. It was only just audible, but that was because the floor in the room was relatively soft, so the pin made very, very little noise.)

In my course description, I purposely did not promise that we'd get into twill, as this can be hard to gauge. While a weekend course is usually enough to at least touch the basics (the plain background, and the principle of how to weave a motif in that), I can't guarantee that more will be covered, as this very much depends on the individual group. In some groups, the weavers want more time to explore diagonals patterns, for instance, and that, of course, is a wonderful thing as well.

This weekend, however, everybody was keen on getting some twill shenanigans done, and so we did. I can tell you that for me as the teacher, seeing that first line in everyone's band move first there, then here - that is the most exciting simple line that I know. Also, it means that I get to tell one of my favourite teaching stories: The one about the little renegade tablet that wants to start a revolution.

That is another thing teaching in this style has taught me - if you work paperless, without drafts, stories and mnemonic aids are wonderful tools to help explain things, and to help remember them. I don't know how pattern instructions were passed on in medieval societies, but I could well imagine a teacher tell a story to the pupils to help them remember what needs to be done at a given place in a pattern. It would probably not have been the story about a little tablet being a revolutionary and turning everything around (which is something that would not have latched onto basic cultural knowledge and background as it does with today's people), but it might have been something else fulfilling the same purpose. Songs and stories make wonderful tools for keeping things in minds, and I thoroughly enjoy teaching with stories. And daring little revolutionary tablets that prepare their revolution in the underground, quietly, looking like every other tablet for a while... until, suddenly...

So what else is there to tell about my Dublin adventures? There was a talk about medieval textiles and textile crafts, which was very well received according to what I heard afterwards. I had the pleasure of sharing that panel with Jeannette Ng, who later during the convention accepted her award for Best New Writer (congratulations again!).

I also enjoyed my two other panels (proper panels, not talks, this time) about archaeology in SFF, and about costume research and documentation.

I also got to meet (and hold, for a short time) this guy:



and I got to meet a real Lady Astronaut, as Dr. Jeannette Epps was at the convention. Which was a "wow" moment as well.

There also was cake (because life is better with cake, even if it is only store-bought chocolate cake from Tesco's), and weird chocolate both from Ireland (Cadbury's Mint Oreo. Delicious, if you ask me.) and from Germany (I brought some Knusperflocken for people to try) and from New Zealand (which will host next year's convention) and, if you are generous in what you count as chocolate, choc-covered malty caramel Timtams from Australia.

Finally, one of the really nice things about WorldCon is how easy it is to meet people, and chat with them, making new acquaintances and learning things about their bits of the world. I was delighted to see again quite a number of people I'd last met in London, back in 2014 (one of whom saved my voice by bringing me a pack of Fisherman's Friends). Even though there's never a load of time to catch up, it was wonderful to see them again and chat. It was also totally delightful to see so many authors, whose work I love to read, and it felt like so many of them stopped at my table in the hall and enjoyed seeing (and, in some cases, buying) something completely different. (Which were the moments when I silently went "squeee!" in the back of my head. As you do. Right?).

All this would never have happened if not for Gillian prodding me to come to London in 2014 (because apparently, London is right around the corner from Erlangen, if you ask an Aussie) and for my wonderful Irish friend helping me out at the table, making it possible for me to sneak away to my programme items, the Escape Artists Live panel, and, occasionally, even to the toilet:



Thank you! (Also, I'm still bad at taking phone selfies. Obviously.)