It has snowed again - a deep, white, totally beautiful cover on everything. It looks really nice and soft and fluffy and almost cuddly from inside here.
The cat, it seems, has finally come to the conclusion that she will really be allowed back inside even when there's snow on the ground, and has gone off for her morning round in the usual length of an hour or more.

She was abandoned sometime during last winter, and found last year in February, and would not go out into the snow at all at first, and then not  for more than a few minutes at a time - so we speculate that she had bad memories connected with the snow. Accordingly, we took extra care to both encourage her to go out and let her back in again as soon as she wanted to come inside. Which sort of still holds on, so now I'm getting up and checking for cat ears in front of the door rather frequently.

In non-weather-related news: there is progress on the writing front, for both projects. Not much of that is due to yesterday, though, because I had a rather nasty headache and did not get much done in consequence.

I have also done some more spinning on the Great Wheel. This has led to me coming more and more to appreciate how absolutely and enormously crucial the quality of the fibre and the quality of the fibre preparation is for flawless spinning on the wheel, at least if you are not really proficient at it. The search for the perfect-rolag-making technique is still going on here, but I feel like I have gotten much closer.

Since I started spinning with the Great Wheel, I have read about carding techniques and looked at carding instructions and people carding quite a bit, but the up to now best set of instructions is "Handcarding with a Light Touch" by Carol Huebscher Rhoades. It's available as part of an e-book offered by spinningdaily.com; the .pdf can be downloaded for free after you register with the site. (I did, and I do not regret it due to this article. They have a few other free instructional e-books as well. There is also a (not-quite-but-almost-daily) newsletter that they send out with info about new free e-books, though it also includes (and is mostly) advertisement for courses, dvds, books and other things they would like you to buy.)

I'm still struggling with data floods - I have solved a few small problems only to find more (of course there are more). Some of them, I guess, are the usual things - details so small that they are not listed in the normal tutorials because, duh, everyone knows that is how you do it. I know I have been guilty of the same thought in some instances, but alas, I also know the other side much, much too well.

And somehow, I can understand why there is so few statistics in archaeology or historical sciences in general, even where something like a statistical analysis would be good. The learning curve, oh, it is steep. (Or I am a little stupid - but since others agree with me, I'll go with the former assumption.)

As of now, the analysis and visualisation I've been able to do has not yielded any new and really evident things (apart from the usual - that spinners are individuals and quite, quite unpredictable).

Ah, what I would give for a few minions. One to do the boring scanning work that is now left to do. One to work out which programme best to use for the visualisation and give me an intro to it. One to finish entering books into my book database. One to make me coffee.

Okay - I can live without the last one. But the others! That would be so good!

I am wrestling with Excel, and it is winning. I have not yet made it to the breakthrough in R (I think I need someone to teach me R for dummies, as I am somehow shattering on the most basic things, like importing an Excel workbook with several sheets and saving that as a dataframe) but I need some quick results. Not much, mind you; not the full analysis... but at least something. Something! And I would know how to get it! But... I have made the mistake of saving the formulas in one workbook, and now I need them in another one. And due to the perverseness of my system, and that of Excel, and that of the worksheets... I get an out-of-memory error every time. No, the workarounds all do not work. Yes, I have tried them all (at least all that I could find). Arrr...


And since two people posed the same question yesterday: From what I remember of Swedish coffee (real Swedish coffee drunk in Sweden, from a cafe or a selling point for caffeinated hot drinks) they are large, they are strong (but not overly so) and they are delicious to my taste - with neither too much acidity nor too much bitterness. Not like the thing we termed "Swedish coffee" at the Forum - though of course there are different strength and quality coffee experiences to be found in any country.
German plain coffee roasts often have a tendency to be quite acidic, and the sourness is something I neither like nor can stomach well, so I am fond of the "milder" kinds of beans here, and I generally prefer the fancy coffees with lots of milk (latte macchiato, anyone?). And the coffee I tasted in the Czech Republic was not really acidic, but always quite, quite strong, plus the beans and/or roast and extraction must have been different, since it was very bitter (at least to my taste).
Your coffee-when-traveling observations are very welcome in the comments - I'd be interested to hear what experiences you have had!

Usually, for someone working with demonstrations and in connection with living history events, the late autumn and winter months are the slow season - the time to kick back and think about stuff for the next season to come. The time to pack away things, repair stuff, make new stuff (or plan to do it until it's time to frantically do at least a bit of all that work in the week before the new season, in time-honoured tradition and in tune with the old reenactor's joke "Winter is the week before the first event in the new season").

But this year around, I don't feel as if things were slowing down; on the other hand, there's plenty to do and some juicy projects and other things have reared their heads, promising interesting times and a chance of income.

So I am emailing and reading and writing and planning... while drinking coffee (always good) and eating highly motivating sweet substances (aka cookies and chocolate). After all, the brain needs sugars, right?

Link for today: Not a medieval dress, but a spectacular one - and it has been restored recently. It's the Victorian stage costume of actress Ellen Terry, and the article is brought to you by PastHorizons.

I'm still feeling a little swamped by work, though pleasantly so - things are coming up that might mean really interesting projects in the future, there's some progress on the writing front (though there's never, ever as much as I'd like) and I may have figured out a way to find out whether the yarn I have is enough for a knitting project.


A good while ago, a relative gifted me with her old knitting stuff - an assortment of yarns, and among that three packages that were once intended for a sweater, pullover, cardigan or whatever you might name it. Now due to a lot of different reasons (most of them related to shape - my shape), I am not going to knit a given sweater pattern as written. I prefer a zipper to a button band (I'm just not a button person), I am probably going to shorten the whole piece so the hem falls where I want it, I am also probably going to shorten the arms, and I might fiddle with other elements. And the size - I normally fall between sizes.

With all these alterations, though, and yarn that is not available anymore (and not listed in Ravelry), how am I going to figure out whether it is enough yarn for the project? There's lots of guidelines on how much one needs, but somehow I don't trust them.

So here's a different possibility (that I hope will work out well):
Knit a swatch. (You wanted to anyways, right?) This should be at least the typical swatch size, as in at least 12 x 12 cm (or 5 x 5 inch) to let you measure the gauge correctly (since that may be necessary knowledge for altering the pattern). Do whatever you plan to do with the finished piece - wash it, feed it to the dog, ... you know the drill. (At least theoretically, I'm sure you know it.)

Then you calculate the area in cm² that your swatch has. You might want to leave out the very edges to be on the safe side - so 11.5 x 11.5 cm on a swatch that actually measures 12 on each side. Then you put it onto a good kitchen scale - diet scale will be a good idea, probably. You now have two numbers.

Next, you can roughly calculate the area in cm² that your finished piece will have. A sweater will typically consist of one body (roughly a tube) and two sleeves (also roughly a tube). For these calculations, I just took the widest width of the body part and the total length to calculate the body surface area and the upper arm width and desired sleeve length to calculate the sleeve surface area. (Don't forget that you will need two sleeves!)

Now you can divide the complete sweater surface area by the swatch surface area. This tells you how many swatches would be equivalent to your sweater. Now you multiply the swatch weight by this number, and you get an approximate finished weight for the sweater. (Approximate because shaping, armholes and neckline are not considered.) Compare that to the weight of your available yarn... and if your yarn weight is greater or equal, you should be good to go.

Somehow it seems as if winter (or at least the colder months) are my main knitting time - though judging from the output, you would not suspect that.

On my (small, but existent) pile of unfinished objects lies a pair of socks with shadow-knit cats and an almost finished pinwheel sweater. The socks are millimetering towards being done (inching would be too fast, you see?), but the sweater has been huddled into a heap, abandoned, for oh-so-long now.

I'm still in love with the concept of the pinwheel sweater (you take a round blanket, stick two sleeves in, and wear it), but even though I tried on a friend's version of it, I'm not at all happy with mine. It's knit in bulky yarn which may have been a bad choice, since that makes it really heavy; and in this version, it just does not fall right for me. It doesn't.

So I have decided to frog it. And now I've stumbled across a very nice how-to-fit-a-sweater tutorial that helps with choosing flattering projects. So I'll look for another thing, better suited to my shape and figure, to knit... some of these days, this means, I will sit down and cast on something. (And if I'm good, I will finish the socks first.)