Those of you that know me in real life will know that I have a strong fascination with fire - if I see a fire burning and have access to it, I can seldom resist from sidling up and poking a bit around in it.

So it's no wonder that I spent a good while (read: too long a while) on YouTube yesterday morning, looking at fire-making videos. I had actually thought about embedding one that shows basic firemaking in yesterday's post, but did not find one that suited my purpose. Instead, I learned that punk wood (rotted dead wood) makes wonderful tinder material, and that there is a technique called "floating hands" for using a fire drill.

There's oodles of videos about making a fire out there, but actually I always found that getting the spark to catch on the tinder material is the easy thing (just takes more patience when it's damp), and making a nest for the ember and blowing that into flame is also not really hard (might also take a bit of patience when it's damp, but we've done it successfully with half-dry grass); I found that the hard bit is to get a real fire going from the good and hot nest - and there was no video showing that. Getting a fire going from the embers is, of course, easy with the perfect materials and in nice, dry weather, with a ground and wood that is not soaked through and cold, but in my experience, that perfect setup is rarely there when I want to make a fire - so you have to use techniques that will even work in the cold and damp, and with less-than-perfectly dry wood. And that was just what I couldn't find.

Still was time well spent. And now I finally know how to mix up that scrambled egg or that pancake batter with a whisk twirled between my hands without having to stop every five seconds to bring my hands to the top of the whisk stem again.

It's utterly amazing how many small things that would be nice to have or get done can turn up during a market/camp weekend - things like a new bag for my flint and steel, making new tinder, a bag for small woodbits and even smaller kindling to make starting the fire easier, mending a dress and mending a basket, and so on and so on. And this time around, I have actually more or less kept track of a lot of those small things, and a few of them are already taken care of as well - like refilling the tinder box, and starting work on a bag for kindling. I've even made new kindling already, since I know that I'm not so keen on getting to work with the hatchet once I'm getting hungry and cold, so if there's not tinder, hay for getting the embers started, wood and kindling readily available, I opt for buying something to eat and either going to an already burning fire or retiring into bed. And while both of these are good, nice and valid options, I'd like to have the possibility to just start a fire when I feel like it, and maybe have a nice cup of hot, freshly brewed tea while I have it running. Plus, finally starting a fire properly and all the way through felt so good at Tannenberg, after I had not done it for ages, and I found I really missed it.

We started trying to make proper, medieval-style fire years and years ago, and our first tries were more than pathetic - it would take us more than half an hour, several tries and three to four people blowing on the nest of ember, coughing in the thick, dense smoke coming out of it, and doing all kinds of things with a slight touch of desperation. And it did take a long time until we figured out the differences between starting a fire the modern way (with a lighter or a match) and starting it the old-fashioned way (with embers).

First of all, there's a huge difference in how the heat travels. Flame heat travels upwards, so if you want to light something with a flame, you light it from below and put the kindling on top. But embers work differently - they glow their way downwards and outwards from their nest of kindling. So if you want to light something with embers, placing the something on top of the ember won't work as well as placing it below them.

After that piece of insight finally found its way into my brain, it only took a medium long time for me to start realising something else: When the nest of embers and the kindling below it sit directly on the cold earth, there's a good chance that the heat from the little nest will be far from enough to counter all that cold. And the ember will die before the kindling has caught. That was when I began to start building the fireplace by placing a large-ish piece of dry wood with a flattish surface on top under the kindling and stuff - preferably a slab of wood that is already charred partly. This helps tremendously.

So my current setup is something like this: Slab of wood underneath it all; then comes the kindling in the middle of the underlying slab, set up mostly like a log cabin (two bits parallel to each other, then the next two parallel bits at a 90° angle across the previous two, and so on), but growing gradually wider towards the top. Around this small inverted-pyramid-log-cabin, I make a slighty larger log cabin setup from fuel wood that reaches as far up as the inner kindling one. This is both serving as a kind of flue to direct air and as the fuel wood to catch the starting fire. Then I catch a spark on the tinder (charred cotton cloth, usually) and place it into a smallish nest of hay with some small wood shavings and maybe a bit of birch bark in it. I fold the nest and blow on the ember until the nest has flamed up briefly once, then I put it into the inverted pyramid, place a last bit of fuel wood on top of the nest so that it stays compact and doesn't pop out again - and ideally, then I can just lean back and wait for about ten minutes to see everything erupting into a nice flaming fire. (Non-ideally, there's still some need for blowing gently but firmly on the ember nest.)

Oh, and a nice added benefit to lighting a fire with flint and steel? If there's a strong wind blowing, that might blow out your flame from a match or lighter, but it will actually save you work when doing it this way. Nifty, eh?

Tannenberg usually is for me the last LH-event of the season, and since that is over now and we are back home, summer season is over.

This year's Tannenberg was a tad different from others - first of all, the old organising team has quit and used this year's event to show a new team the ropes. That also went hand in hand with a slightly different setup regarding the tent places. Then it was uncommonly warm for Tannenberg - I didn't feel cold once during the nights, and it was warm enough to just sit in a dress on Sunday. And that's the next unusual thing: we had a bit of light drizzle now and then on Friday, a bit more of drizzle on Saturday, and sunshine on Sunday - and you can probably estimate how uncommon that is for this event if I tell you that a lot of people commented Saturday's drizzle with "My, aren't we lucky with the weather!" (and that was no irony).

Apart from this, it was also a quite decimated event - many groups did not come at all due to not getting off from work, broken-down cars or a case of the 'flu, and those that did come were often much smaller than registered, like three or four people instead of seventeen. This all made this year's season finale a very laid-back and relaxed thing - and I actually followed through with my plan to have 80% holidays and just 20% work, having nice long chats with old and new acquaintances that weren't even all textile-related, sitting around our own fire or visiting our neighbours, and I even read a little in a novel I brought before going to sleep in the evenings, all things that I thoroughly enjoyed. So for me, it was a very nice and very relaxing season finale, and now I'm ready to tackle all those little chores that need to be done before putting away the things for the winter...

I was asked recently about my electricity needs for my market stall - for lighting in the evening hours. My electricity needs are described in a single word: None.

I have a very easy policy for late-night market hours. Evening or even night market hours are a phenomenon that seems to become quite common these days on events, especially on events connected to a town anniversary festival.
My policy is that when dusk comes upon the market area, I am slowly packing up the small stuff, and when dusk is fully come, I close my shop. Nobody is going to see anything in my market stall anyways in the dark hours, except if I install a floodlight contraption (which will not fit into my tiny little TGV and aside from this is not really historical). There's just no sense to shop for plant-dyed threads in the darkness, and there's no way anyone will be able to appreciate the gossamer-fine hairnets and the delicately manufactured needles and needle-cases in the evening hours.

And my shop is not the only one thus affected - which is why evening- and night-hour markets are one of my (albeit lighter) pet peeves. Would you shop for something at night? When you can't discern its details, or properly search for flaws? I cannot believe that back in the Middle Ages somebody would have shopped for something in the evening hours unless driven by dire need. And in all the years that I visited markets, I have never bought anything after dusk (except food or drink, of course). I have looked around and chatted with people, and I have said things like "oh, that's where his/her stall is, I'll have to come back tomorrow and have a look".

I can just see no reason at all to shop at night, and I think that it doesn't fit in with a "historical market" scheme. A few oil-lamps or lanterns are nice and add to the atmosphere, but will never give off enough light to properly shop by.  With lighting by oil lamps or lanterns also come the problems with fuel spills and other, flame-related, hazards. Thus, a lot of the late-hour stalls have electrical light installed. That is more or less hidden and more or less made to look like lantern light, but it is still electrical lighting and thus out of place in an otherwise historical stall. I refuse to buy something under electrical lighting in both cases: When it looks like lantern-light (because then it's too dark for my taste to see and properly appreciate the wares) and when it looks like a floodlight installation gone astray (because this just glaringly stands out of the historical setting so much it hurts).

I'm fine with food and drinks stalls, I like to sit somewhere and see people walk by, or perform something, or listen to some musician on the square and have a little chat with friends. And I can understand if incense or lanterns are sold after dark. But all the rest? Even if it is a merchant or craftsperson I know and trust, I want to see the things I'm about to buy in daylight to fully appreciate them. So why do we need to transfer our modern late shopping hours to a historical market anyway? Is it our modern taste for convenience? Is there anybody really shopping at night, spending money enough to make it worth opening shop for so long? Or do the merchants just stand around and look decoratively with their stalls open and lit?

During the weekend, we had one really strong gust of wind that lifted a few of the tents on the place slightly off the ground. Now an A-frame tent is not so very light, so it does take a strong wind to set it flying, and usually  our tents are securely anchored to the ground in addition to their structural weight. However, in Hanau, the tents we had were not fastened to the ground properly.

Why? Because the little town square where we had set up is paved with cobblestones - but the spaces between the stones are sealed with concrete. And that means most of our normal tent constructions, relying on pegs to keep the structure up, will not stand or stand badly there. Just like we had done last year, we wondered again why anybody would want to seal cobblestone paving like that, and like last year there was a lot of adjustment and make-it-work-somehow and shifting the places to set up tents because things would not work out as planned, and accordingly lots of swearwords. But this year, a nice lady that was born in Hanau told me why exactly we had all those problems: because of fashion.

In the 1950s and 60s, modern shoes for ladies featured stiletto heels. And on that cobblestone pavement of the town square, necessarily also crossed by fashionable ladies, that led to broken-off heels galore - because the heels, not fatter than the tent pegs or thick nails that we would have loved to use, would fit into the gaps between the stones. And if you wedge a stiletto heel into pavement well and tight, it will most probably break off.

The solution? Seal the gaps with concrete. Problem solved. Fashion influences even city architecture.

I came back late from the weekend in Hanau, which was nice weatherwise - spots of windy weather and rain broke the sunny weekend weather, but nothing too bad except for one really bad gust of wind that sent stuff flying all over our little market space.

Public interest in the market was, sadly, not as good as last year - at least not in the corner that I was in. Still, I had some very nice and interesting chats with visitors and inbetween nice and fun chats with the colleagues.

And of course I did not get a new hairnet started. Not because I wasn't trying - but because I used a not so suitable thread for the foundation loop; together with the extremely fine silk that I am using for the netting, that led to problems when working the second row, since the knots on the foundation loop were not sliding easily enough. In the end, I abandoned the started net after about an hour or so of work and will start again with a different thread as foundation loop - and this time, inside in quiet and most importantly without wind...

Instead, I worked on all kinds of other stuff after abandoning the net project - a little bit of goldwork, a little bit of sewing, some finishing work on weaving tablets, a bit of mending of a broken seam and a little fingerloop braiding. So altogether, I had a very nice weekend with lots of little odds and ends done!

The weather forecast looks mostly good for the weekend, with just a bit of rain on Saturday morning (and I'll just hope that this won't happen after all). My things are almost all packed and only wait for their transfer into the car, and then I will be on my way to Hanau.

I am usually not planning on any projects for a work weekend, but I hope to get started on a new silk hairnet - since somebody pointed out to me a while ago that the spiral is the way to go, I have planned to abandon the hairnet that I started with that is shown here due to a mistake in the cast-on loop count. So for this weekend, I hope to get started with a new, more accurate version of the net, again worked with very fine silk thread - and this time definitely worked in spirals.

Of course, if that should not be possible due to some unforeseen things, I have a few other demonstration craft pieces with me. Whatever happens, I will not be bored - and neither will the people stopping to have a look at my things!