Things going on here?

Sorting of pictures from Monday. I'm deleting the really blurry one, and sorting through the others. Not everything was caught properly, in spite of my efforts (and very enthusiastic hitting of the camera buttons); I've also discovered that focus stacking software might be my friend, and promptly got sidetracked into downloading and trying a number of programmes. (With limited success as of now... but ah, well, one shall see.)

There has also been some progress during the last days regarding the Sprang Thing - I've found that I am not able to do both layers at once in the end operations, so I've split up the two layers and am working them separately. The first one is actually almost done, though there are some errors (which I am opting to ignore).



The back is still waiting for its turn, and I'll probably use a different method for finishing that, at least for a good bit in. (The bit of wood is clamped there to help keep the two layers separate until I've finished the front.)



And last but not least, I've managed to get some seeds into soil. Most of them are already a little older, so I do hope they will trn out to be still viable, and result in lovely little plants. One of the rows holds the seeds for black cocktail tomatoes - we bought the seeds as a souvenir during our last summer vacation, and I'm very, very curious how they will taste. I'm hoping for somewhere between "nice" and "really, really good"!



And then I will definitely remember to take take more seeds to carry into the future!

Sorry for the unannounced blog silence yesterday - I was off on a research trip, and I had planned to blog on the train when going back, but then things happened. Good things, mind you, but they were solidly in the way of my plan.

Research trips usually take longer than one expects, and there's lots of photos and thinking, but there's also always something that gets forgotten. (I'm at the count of two things for the trip yesterday, currently. More might pop up.) I also usually get into a sort of "oh that is so cool" rush, and my brain goes on overdrive, and then, at some point, I crash. Completely. As in "brain to mush".

So yesterday's trip did go wonderfully well as these things go - I met with lovely colleagues, got to talk about different textile techniques, and had the wonderful opportunity to see three medieval tablet weaves up close. I then went to see a fourth one - the Ulrichsmanipel - together with my two colleagues, and so it got a bit later than I'd originally estimated. Which meant that the train home was no ICE, and thus had no wifi, and so my plan to blog something while on the train back did not work out.

By the time I was back home, my brain had reached the final state of complete mushiness, and there you go - instant blog silence due to too much textile overload. The best kind of instant blog silence, if you ask me!

Now there's the post-research-trip stuff to do: Sort through the impressions, sort through the pictures, delete all the very blurry ones, and get everything in a semblance of order. Bonus when going through the pictures: repeats of "oh, that is so amazing" might happen...

There's been a UFO sitting in my office for ages now, and it's finally, finally getting closer to completion - it's a sprang piece, and I don't even want to find out how many years it has been on the Un-Finished Object list. Eventually, it is going to become a bag... eventually.

The setup for this was circular, as I wanted to try this version, and wanted the bag bottom to be as stretchy as possible. This means that at the start, you have to carry the sheds around to the back of the work - which was tedious. Then there comes that glorious moment when you can work on the one side only.

My original plan was to make the shoulder strap/handle part of the bag narrower by using two or more threads at a time as one element. However, I tried that, and the way it looked didn't please me at all. So I decided that since this was a learn-and-practice piece, I might as well narrow down the strap by working double-layer sprang.

[caption id="attachment_5060" align="alignnone" width="436"] The double-layer part and its ever diminishing remaining shed...


Double-layer sprang, as the name implies, means you work two separate layers at once, handling one thread crossing from the back layer, then one from the front layer, and so on. So you don't have two sheds but one - and the only thing you have to be careful of is not to cross a back-layer thread into the front layer by accident, or vice versa. It also adds a little twist (hah!) to the crossing of the front layer threads, as you have to go around the back layer thread sitting on your one hand to do that.

Which is a little brain-twisting, but fun. There were a few smaller mistakes and a few ones bad enough that I went back a bit to re-do things. I did learn quite a bit, and working in two layers is much more fluent now than at the beginning, though I am still not out of the mumbling-to-myself stage.

You might be familiar with that stage - when you are learning a new technique, or a new pattern, and there's steps to do (or to repeat), and you sit there and tell yourself the steps. Over and over and over again. That telling can be something as simple (and seemingly daft) as going "one, two, one, two, ..." or "knit, knit, slipslipknit", and after a while it seems stupid to still need to be doing it, because how hard can remembering two or three simple steps be?

Well. I have learned, over the years, that it can be harder than one would think - after all, it's not just remembering two or three simple steps. It is also building up motor skills, and learning to recognise how things look when they are correct, and how they look when they are not, and learning how to correct mistakes. So even if it feels really weird to mumble the same things to me over and over and over again, for every single step, for what feels like ages - I know, these days, that it will just take as long as it does. Eventually, the voice gets more quiet. At one point, it disappears, and that's when you have the new thing down pat.

So there's a bit more to do on my piece (I go "front layer, back layer, front layer, back layer" with each thread manipulation, by the way). It is, however, getting very tight for my left hand... and that is some cause of concern for me. I've figured out how to do the thread manipulation the right hand needs to do with a knitting needle (as you do towards the end of sprang), but trying to replace the left one has, in the last few tries, always resulted in complete and utter failure of the row.

Which means it will stay interesting... or I will have to split up the layers and do them one by one soon.

I shall keep you updated. (Unless, of course, the thing manages to go back into UFO state despite my efforts... then I will keep you updated at a much later point in time.)

I'm off for the weekend - it's time for the Historical Sewing Meet-Up in Rothenfels, where I'll be having fun and coffee and the happy occasion of giving a few workshops... about brocading in tablet-weaving, fingerloop braiding, and tailoring.

There's also the presentation about medieval fabrics that will be having its first outing this weekend, and I confess I'm very, very curious about how it will be received. I've tried to pack in both the specific information requested by some of the Meet-Up participants and to provide some background to properly understand medieval fabrics. I've also found myself in the awkward position to include all the Bad News (TM) regarding the sources available, and the differences between historical and modern fabrics... so I'm fully expecting to see some sad faces following the presentation.

However, I do believe that it's better to know the facts and know where the compromises start (and how big they are) than to bumble on in happy oblivion. After all, many of us who wear medieval clothing at events are also passing on knowledge to the public - and, whether we talk to the event visitors or not, we're helping form their view of the Middle Ages.

Which means that every bit of knowledge counts double - and every little step towards a better representation of the current state of research regarding history does as well, even if that means facing sad truths, or letting go of much-beloved things from one's (re)presentation and kit.

I've finally managed to get the remaining two kinds of linen yarn into the shop system - a white one and a thicker beige one, both from organic Belgian linen. They've been wound and ready to go in for a while now, but I had not gotten around to writing the description and making the photos.

Which has both happened now - and I've taken the opportunity to do a comparison pic of all the thicker linen yarns in the shop, which looks like this:



From top to bottom, these are the thick linen yarn in unbleached and in white, the thick half-bleached organic yarn, the goldbeige yarn, and the white organic yarn. They are all Z-/ss yarns (which means they consist of two individual plies, both s-spun, plied together in Z direction), they are all strong, and especially the white organic yarn has a very nice, tight ply.

You can find them all in my shop in the yarn section, in case you now find yourself in need of some linen threads...

I've mentioned working on the fabric info thing - and one of the things I really want to include is lesser-known weaves. Well, weaves lesser known today, I should say, because back in their hey-day, things like samite and Rippenköper definitely were well-known.

Rippenköper is something that I wasn't really familiar with either; it only had a relatively short time where it was the Thing (or at least one of the things). It's a twill variation, made by changing over from 2/1 twill to 1/2 twill after a few wefts, which results in narrow stripes giving a pleated effect. Since this is a weave where you will see more of the warp or more of the weft depending on which side you're looking at, if you have warp and weft threads in different colours, it will also give you a colour stripe effect.

If you're curious about that weave now, Carolyn Priest-Dorman has written a blogpost about it a while ago, including a pretty picture of a Rippenköper she wove in the background of the page - you can go check it out here.

There's a stack of things happening here, though almost all of them are boring-type background things. There are some minor issues with the website, including some updates and some other small nuisances that I'd like to fix, but still haven't. In some cases, I'm not good enough at programming or understanding how the website innards work, and I just can't find where to tweak stuff so it works as intended. Most of these things are also not crucial, so I tend to have a go at them when they catch my eye, which they do once in a while, and after an hour or two of fuddling around, I put them to rest again. Sometimes I change a small thing only to find out (days or weeks later, if things go badly) that my things-look-better-now tweak actually was a things-look-better-here-now-but-shittier-everywhere-else thing. Sigh.

The most current problem was a deluge of spam coming via my contact form. It seems to have been solved now, at least mostly - I'll see if what I did was enough in the next few days. There's a plugin installed now that should keep bots from posting while doing nothing (and adding no extra steps) for regular, living and breathing human beings. If that will not stop the spamming, I'll have to add one of those wonderful "please answer this simple maths question" thingies - something I did want very much to avoid. But if the alternative is to get about 200 spam emails each day, plus the same amount in "Undelivered Mail Returned To  Sender" messages, that decision does get a lot easier.

There's also some more maintenance and ordering of things going on with the computer. Most of the transferred programmes seem to work fine on the newly setup machine, but there's a new backup procedure to be implemented, and it's a good opportunity to do some additional housekeeping, so that's also going on, and - as usual - it takes a long time and is a little annoying.

In other, more happy news: There's been some progress on the Ink cardigan, as can be proved by this very bad, very blurry photo:



I've progressed past the raglan increases and into the main body. Next step will be knitting the sleeves. I've found out with my first knit-it-all-in-one-piece piece that I absolutely hate knitting the sleeves as the last bit. There's just too much finished object to turn around with each round of the sleeve to make it comfortable... which means I'll do the sleeve-knitting right now, at the earliest possible part. That way I can also see if things fit, or if I have to go back a bit and adjust stuff.