The Hansemuseum Lübeck is up to great things - the first one in line: A conference about "Interwoven Societies", starting tomorrow.

For those of you interested in the conference, but unable to get to Lübeck for it, there's fantastic news: It will be streamed live on the EuroWeb YouTube channel! The conference programme is available here, it looks very interesting, and I'm looking forward to tuning in there tomorrow.

And then there's even more! 

The FGHO is celebrating their 30 year anniversary, and for that there's guided tours on Saturday - one of them including me. You can book your spot here on the museum website.

Finally, on Sunday I'll be giving a loopbraiding workshop. There's also still a few spaces left - you can join in!

I'm back from the weekend weaving workshop - which was (as these things tend to be) an enormous amount of fun, both for me and (according to their comments) the participants.

There was a lot of weaving done - quickly making centimeters on the bands on the first day. My weaving workshops always start with the very basics: Getting the hang of what different threading directions do, weaving stripes, the absolute basic principles on how patterns work. Then we do a little bit of doubleface to warm up, and then the fun starts.

That also means that the second is was devoted to more thinking and more looking at tablets, and more sorting things around, which slows down the weaving process. Let's say that it can be surprisingly hard to weave a simple monochrome surface... but all of my weavers did very, very well, and went away with a band and a learning curve that they can really be very proud of.

And I actually remembered to take a few photos! Though most of them are on a different camera than this very, very blurry one that I snapped with my phone, and have not transferred yet:

I did not promise twill in the workshop description, on purpose, but I usually get signals very quickly if the group, more or less, would like to try it. (They usually do.) And if that's the case, I try to get things arranged so everyone who wants to can get a little bit of the twill experience. 

That was also the case on the weekend, and we did manage to progress into twill weaving for the last part, to my great pleasure and to the great spinning of heads (in German you say "rauchende Köpfe", as in the brain is working so hard that smoke curls up from the head) on the weavers' side. 

I love weaving twill on tablets, and I really love teaching it. Twill is hard, though. You have to keep track of a lot of things simultaneously, and there's a stack of tablets that needs to be handled delicately and correctly, so some of your capacity is already taken up by the fine motor skills demands, and then (if you've done tablet weaving beforehand) there are things you always did differently and you have to do my way now (because of reasons, not because I like to pester people) so that eats even more of your brain or (if you haven't done tablet weaving beforehand) there are so many new movements that it's also eating up brain capacity, and that together means that it is getting hard to count to two.

There is concentrated deep silence during most of the time when I'm running a tablet weaving workshop. I have actually tried it once, where there was no carpet on the floor, and yes, you could hear the pin drop. That concentrated silence is even more obvious if twill is requested by the participants, though then you sometimes hear sighs, quiet mumblings (to keep track of the sequence in which things should be done) or, if something has gone properly wrong, a little cry for help or assistance.

As is also usual, only a part of the group went on to venture a little deeper into twill after the first bit of it. Twill weaving is not for everyone - you have to like this kind of brain-bending mental gymnastics, and some people do, and some people don't, and that is absolutely okay. The system I use is all logical throughout, and there's a stack of rules and little hacks and standard procedures that really help, but the challenge in the workshop is that you have to remember all of them at the same time, and a weekend workshop always means that there is limited time to let each new standard really settle into the brain and the hands.

I'd really like to try and teach tablet weaving for a full week some time, and see what could be done with a bit more practise before progressing to the next steps... but that would probably have to be at some weaving school or special event. Who knows, though - there's been so many interesting things and projects and jobs in the past that I'd never have dreamt of, the opportunity might arise at some place and some time.

For now, I have some notes to review, and some bits of my workshop script to tweak, a few little changes to make for the next workshop, and then I'll be waiting for the next opportunity to make some brain cells work very, very hard... 

Just before the presentation in Syke, there was an interview for the NDR (that is the Northern German Radio/TV), which is also online now. You can find it here - again all in German, of course. 

If you happen to be in London in the next months, you might consider going to see an exhibition about Kumihimo in the Japan House London. It will run until June, so there's still some time left. For those who want to get in the mood, or cannot make it but would still like to hear more about kumihimo, there is a recorded talk about the exhibition on the website as well. 

And just in case you'd prefer going for a nap, but have a hard time falling asleep: There's a Boring Books for Bed podcast. Though I'm not absolutely sure I agree with the title "boring" for something about embroidery. You can also listen to things about Egyptian Archaeology. Or Darwin's Origin of Species...

If you'd like to watch the presentation I gave in Syke - here you go! It's all in German (sorry English-only speaking readers).

It wasn't possible to do a livestream, but I'm delighted that there was the possibility to make a recording, and put that online. I hope you'll enjoy it - I certainly did!

A good while ago, I stumbled across a rather unusual centered decrease in Ravelry, dubbed "bunny-ears decrease". It's a centered decrease that reduces three to two knit stitches. The decrease is not hard to work, is perfectly symmetrical, and not very obvious in the finished piece. So it did become one of the tools in my knitting skillset, and I've put it to good use whenever something unobtrusive was needed as a decrease. Slants as in k2tog or ssk are nice, but only if you want a slanty decrease that is rather more than less visible, especially if you have technical reasons that will stack your decreases, or have them placed in a way that will look weird if they slant.

If that sounds interesting for you, I point you to the site of Naomi Parkhurst, String Geekery. You can find her detailed blog post with photos, drawings, and different instructions on how to work this lovely decrease here.  

I'm still working (of course) on the presentation for Syke, and it's really nice to revisit all the things that went on in that project. As usual, I'll have to cut some (or what feels like a lot, actually) of the things I'm putting into the draft of the presentation. There's so much that I could probably speak about it for half a day...

One nice thing about looking back on a project like this is that it's easy to remember all the fun bits and sort-of-forget about the annoying ones. At some stages, things just felt like they would never ever end... it was a lot of cords, and a lot of rings for the ends of the cords, and a lot of loops to sew onto the cloak. But it did end, eventually.

And because I've been revisiting pictures, here's one for you from the selection going into the presentation.

This is the end of the belt reproduction from the Egtved find. It has a tassel at the end, formed by cords finished in (you guessed it) rings. These rings are then gathered together so the whole thing forms a cone shape - surprisingly stiff, and quite stunning. The puny number of just 20 warp threads would, of course, not be enough for a nicely sized tassel like that, so the weaver solved the problem by adding in some more cords at the end of the belt weave. That's exactly what can be seen in this photo: The extra threads inserted, and there's already a few more wefts done to keep them in place.

After finishing the belt weaving, they were then corded, and then the belt provided me with the opportunity to get into ring-wrapping... but that's another story.

When I was in school, I used to love whenever there was a film to be watched. For one thing, it meant less lesson time, as setup of the film equipment would take time; then it was usually amusing to watch the stuff.

Most of the time, these films were already quite old, dating back to the 70s or even 60s. So these educational clips had their own peculiar charm - and I'm very much reminded of these by the films in the TIB.

The TIB is the information portal of the Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, and you can find a video collection there, among a lot of other resources. Which, for instance, includes this gem:

I haven't figured out what the woman spinning the tow does with that circular hand motion, but in one of the shots you can see a lot of debris on her skirt, so maybe it's trying to take out the debris? Towards the end, there's a very quick bit of distaff dressing as a bonus, one of the many, many different ways to get flax ready for spinning.

It's a lovely little film in any way, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!