I'm back from my gallivanting across the countryside, all the way down to the boot heel of Italy, and it was glorious.

I hadn't realised how much I had missed meeting up with colleagues for a conference and working together until I went to Vienna for a EuroWeb workshop and now to Italy. It was a three-day workshop about embroidery, and two days of travelling there and back each, and almost every minute of it was pure bliss.

Travelling took a while since I was not going to fly if avoidable at all, and it was avoidable by using a night train. As the direct flight connections to Brindisi or Bari were not convincing for her as well, I joined up with a friend in Munich and we travelled together, which just added to the fun. We had a night train from Munich to Rome, and then it's several hours again to get to Lecce and then Muro Leccese, where our workshop took place.

We had wonderful warm and sunny weather, delightfully delicious food, lots of Italian coffee, and incredibly nice people. There was a workshop on filet netting and embroidery, an exploration of Bronze Age embroidery stitches, an introduction to Punto Maglie (which is a kind of needle lace, which is something I'd wanted to do for ages and had never gotten around to), a number of presentations about embroidery-related research projects, many chats and discussions with colleagues, and oh, did I mention the food? I was in food heaven. 

I also worked on my appreciation of coffee without milk, or with very small amounts of milk - as I didn't want to be one of the touristy Germans who order cappuccino after breakfast. (When, on the last day, I discovered there was hot milk with the coffee break supplies, though, I did have a cup of coffee with lots of milk. And then a second one straight away. Due to remaining little bits of sense left in my brain, I didn't have a third one, though...)

I also learned a great deal and finally got to meet, in person, a few of the people I had met over Zoom beforehand, plus some new people. 

All things taken together, and the great hospitality of the local conference team (which even organised a little evening sightseeing trip to Otranto for us) added up to utter bliss for several days in a row. Utter, extreme, perfect bliss.

That was, by the way, the first time I've been to Italy. (I've been to South Tyrol before, but as both Italians and people from South Tyrol will tell you, that does not count as Italy. It's basically an extension of Austria where you can speak Italian, if you so wish, but German is spoken and understood about everywhere too.) I couldn't have wished for a better place to fall in love with the country.

My only problem now? My new favourite café is very, very far away from home...

A while ago I wrote about dyeing silk and different outcomes, depending on whether it had been degummed or not. My degumming try that I referenced back in that post ended up being not completely successful, as some of the gum had still stayed in. 

I finally got around to doing it again, with a fresh sample, and this time I made sure to steep it to death, or something very close - it stayed in the hot soapy bath for a full hour, and I used de-ionised water to avoid any hindrance by our rather hard tap water. 

And here's the result:

As you can see, there's four samples now. The one on the bottom is the silk dyed in the gum, the one on top is untwisted degummed embroidery silk dyed together with the gummy silk. On the small roll in the middle, the bottom one is the outcome of my last trial, partly degummed, and on top is the completely degummed silk. 

It's become very light in colour, even lighter than the silk that was degummed before dyeing. I had expected something like that - either a bit lighter, or somewhere around the colour of the embroidery silk. 

There is definitely more shine now, but it is also much more delicate; I've had several snaggy bits even though it's a twisted silk. 

So my current conclusions are:

If you want to work with silk that has next to no twist at all, leaving it gummy or partly gummy might be a good idea to up the stability. The sericin also seems to take natural dyes much better, so if you want to have really deep, vivid colours... leaving it gummy or partly gummy is, again, your friend. In case you want it to be utterly shiny, though, degumming is the way to go.

Though I had the impression that the thin strands of gummy silk, with about 20 den, are also looking quite shiny. More exploration might be necessary...

The Royal School of Needlework has celebrated its 150th anniversary by making a Stitch Bank - a website where you can explore and learn different embroidery stitches. It's up to 200 now, with the latest addition of 50 newcomers in January.

You can find the Stitch Bank here. The stitch entries usually feature a series of photos and illustrations to show you how the stitch is done, plus a video. If you are all delighted with this and would like to support the project, there's the option of donating to adopt a stitch.

On a related note, here's an article about the meaning of traditional Ukrainian embroidery patterns. 

A number of years ago, when Sabine and I ran the very first European Textile Forum, one of the papers was about the dyeing industry at Pompeii. Heather, who gave that paper, got together with Sabine the very next day, and some dyeing took place, and the paper and the dyeing and the ensuing discussions resulted not only in a friendship but also in a number of follow-up archaeological experiments looking into the influence of metal kettle materials on the dyeing outcomes. 

The basis for the presentation that Heather gave back then was her PhD thesis about the dyeing industry in Pompeii - and I'm very delighted to say that it has now, finally, been published by Archaeopress. It's called "Investigations into the Dyeing Industry in Pompeii. Experimental Archaeology and Computer Simulation Techniques" and you can get it as an e-publication or the printed version, either directly from the publisher or from the bookseller of your choice.

While I'm working on all the gazillion things that have to be done (including trying to figure out how to get the RSS feed for the blog set up properly), here's an interesting video about wool processing, from washing to spinning, in the Pyrenees: