If you're a numbers person (as in somebody who easily remembers numbers, lucky you) and a textile archaeology nerd in addition to that, the two numbers in the blog title might ring a bell for you.

If not, let me bring you up to speed: York Archaeological Trust has been publishing a lot of very nice, very helpful shiny books about various aspects and find groups of all the digs done there - and York has a lot of history, and has had a lot of digs, and consequently there's oodles to research, and to tell. York also boasts a number of textile finds and textile tool finds, which is a delightful thing.

To make all this good stuff even better, they've decided, once they run out of the printed copies of their books, to make them freely available as pdf online. I've posted about this at least once before, but that was a good while ago. Back then, I had downloaded those of interest to me, though the really, really yummy ones - about textile production and textile finds - were still available in print and thus not as pdfs.

Just recently, though, I searched for something else, and the engine threw me a link to one of these two books on the YAT website. Off I went - and to my great delight, both 17/5 Textile, Raw Fibre and Cordage from Coppergate 16-22 and 17/11 Textile Production at 16-22 Coppergate are available now. (Direct links to the pdfs - but do go and visit their page listing the rest of the volumes of Archaeology of York, there's many more.)

First of all - I've again managed to not mention Talk Like A Pirate Day on this blog in time, and it has whooshed past, like dates (and deadlines!) tend to do. And that even though my Pirate Roberts hat pattern has been featured in a blogpost on the Interweave Press site - together with a bunch of other pirate-themed patterns. So if you are feeling pirate-y, or know someone who is in touch with their inner buccaneer and would care for such a knit, check out the link (there's also a free pattern for tiny colourful parrots)!

In other news, I'm busy (what's new, though) preparing for the next fair, which is in Weikersheim. That included sorting the new spindle whorls, and that led to my finally upgrading my sorting/storage boxes for a bit more space to pile up the whorls, and preventing them from mixing when the box is tilted.


(The mixing was previously prevented by stuffing the lid with paper, but that, obviously, cuts down on storage space...)

Having the whorls pre-sorted into 2 g wide slots is an enormous help for me - and it is so much fun to whip out one of these boxes at a fair when a customer is asking for a specific weight or weight range, and offer the whole selection.

I still tend to weigh the whorls again before sending them out for a shop order, trying to get as close to the gram weight requested as possible - but that's just my personal obsession with getting it as perfect as I can.


It's also interesting to see that I seem to have a preference for a certain weight range each time I make whorls, and that weight range does change from batch to batch. This time, it seems to have been at 16-22 g of whorl weight, which is not bad, though I could have used a few really heavy ones too.

Finally there's more restocking - such as restocking distaffs, and distaff DIY kits as well. Bands have already been cut...


...and now they need to be hemmed on one end, and then mounted onto the distaff stick, or packed up with the rest of the bits for the DIY sets. Nice work for podcast catch-up!

Bielefeld spinnt is over, and I've sort of regenerated a bit - thanks to a nice, relaxing day off work yesterday. It's sort of funny to turn a Tuesday into a personal Sunday, but nice in its own way. Plus you can go shopping (which in Germany is not possible on a real Sunday, as all the shops are closed.)

The fair was lovely, but altogether also quite a trip, and quite exhausting. Going to a fair with a booth is always a wild ride, with a lot of delight but also a lot of stress. (In case you are interested, I can give you a rundown on my days - let me know!)

In Bielefeld, Margit and I were in the larger hall of the main building, on the ground floor. That meant we were smack dab in the middle of a light, airy room, and right beside a coffee booth too. It's always good to be near a coffee source!

[caption id="attachment_3386" align="alignnone" width="1223"] View of my bit of the fair - the table all set up and ready for the fair!


With the courses that both Margit and I gave, together with alternately manning both booths when the other was teaching, we did keep busy all weekend long.

[caption id="attachment_3385" align="alignnone" width="1306"] Margit's stall and mine, side-by-side or whatever you call it when two stalls form an L-shape...


So busy, in fact, that I didn't get to knit a single stitch the whole weekend, including the evenings. Which means that neither the Baton Rouge jacket nor the Moyen Age sweater are finished yet.

But after all, I can knit at home and all the time, but at the fair, I had the opportunity to meet and chat with lots and lots of nice people, and I sold so many distaffs and spinning kits that I have to make more straightaway to have a bit of a selection to bring to Weikersheim. That's part of the obligatory After-Fair-Homework. (There is no fair without homework. Never. There's always something you discover that needs mending, or changing, or some other kind of attention - and that's on top of the usual after-fair work such as taking stock and doing the book-keeping.)

So thanks to the organisers for all their hard work, and thanks to all the helpers at the fair - I had a lovely time, and I'm looking forward to the next German Ravelry meetup!

 

Talk Like A Pirate Day is drawing nearer again (September 19!), and that is a good reason to pull out the Pirate Robert hats again and take some more photos - especially since the hat pattern is going to be featured in an article soon (and I'm utterly excited about that!).

Some things, though, are notoriously hard to take good photos of. Gold embroidery, or gold brocading, for instance - the glittering gold has a tendency to mess with the exposure time calibration of cameras, and this tends to result in really bad pictures.

While knitted hats are usually not suffering from exposure time problems due to gold thread, small cables also have a tendency to look really obvious in real life, just to suddenly and quietly disappear into invisibility on a photograph. Human eyes and human brains are just really, really good at seeing 3D and making the most even of small differences of light and shade.

So I was very happy about having two nice little photo lights, and a good tripod, and some time for fiddling. And some more time for fiddling. Then some more. There were also some, um, alternative supports for the two photo lights so that I could adjust them juuust so - a few millimetres, or a few degrees of the head angle, already made a huge difference in the outcome.

[caption id="attachment_3367" align="alignnone" width="816"] Lamps, a styrofoam head with the hat, a camera on a tripod. And some motivational coffee (not shown).


In the end, though, I did get a few decent pictures - so I'd say the fiddling was well worth it!

Part of category "fun things I get to do under cover of my day job": filming. In the most current case, filming a short explanatory video about the oil light swimmers that I carry in the shop - to show when I'm at fairs.

I'm still completely delighted with the fact that a company in Nuremburg has been making these oil light swimmers for way more than a hundred years. I absolutely love using them as the eco-friendly (and cheap!) alternative to tea lights. No aluminum waste, no pricey beeswax tealights, and there's vegetable oil in the kitchen anyways, so also no extra space required.

The concept of this kind of lighting, though, has been out of common use and knowledge for so long that the little round and tri-bladed thingies need a lot of explanation when they sit on the table in my market stall - so I've played with the idea of making a bit of an explanatory video for a good while now. Finally, this has happened, and it ate most of yesterday's work time.

Just like taking good photos of things, it's not as easy as it seems to take a good video of things. It can be astonishingly hard to keep everything inside the frame - good thing I've been doing theatre stuff before, so I knew about the magic that can be wrought by a few bits of tape at key places.

[caption id="attachment_3366" align="alignnone" width="451"] Video setup. It's not looking very spectacular, is it?


Also there was a problem with the SD card I used in the first go, so I got to take all the shots again. Sigh. Now the video-ing part is all done, and only (hah!) the cutting and text-setting part remains - which will hopefully not take a lot longer, so I can take the video along to Bielefeld...

I still have a fairly large selection of spindle whorls hanging out here, but some weight classes are running low, and especially the disc-shaped whorls are almost gone again. Which means it's time to go into the basement, fetch the clay and assorted whorl-making tools, and a while later, more spindle whorls have been made, and are now quietly and happily drying out.

[caption id="attachment_3357" align="alignnone" width="507"] Re-stocking in progress, with both biconical/roundish whorls...


[caption id="attachment_3356" align="alignnone" width="514"] ...and the flat ones.


Even though I have a form to make the flat whorls, they never come out exactly alike - there's always small differences in the thickness, even if I try very hard indeed to roll the clay out exactly to the right thickness, and exactly plane. Last batch was a bit too thin altogether, and I hope this won't be too thick because of overcompensation.

The other whorls are different in difficulty, because they don't need to be exactly a weight or thickness; I try to make a range of sizes and shapes every time, but sometimes I tend more towards lighter ones and sometimes more toward heavier ones. Which is sort of an issue when I should be re-stocking a certain weight range as a priority, and I end up making whorls that are, erm, not inside that range.

My theory why the biconical whorls are quite common, by the way, is that it is very easy to form a biconical shape when rolling a ball of clay in your hands - way easier than getting a perfect sphere, for instance. My main problem then is that the tips of the cones are usually a little outside the centre, which makes getting the hole into the whorl in a way that will not cause it to wobble slightly more interesting. Also, whorl-making is actually a pretty boring process (a feeling that is, by the way, shared by the lovely guy who makes the wheel-thrown whorls for me, as he told me when I ordered the most recent batch). I try to overcome the boringness by listening to EscapePod, which usually sort of works, but somehow I still feel it's more mind-numbing than spinning.

Which is actually weird, because it is no real mindless job. Getting the whorls an approximate size and a suitable shape is not really hard, but it does take a bit of concentration; getting the bore hole into the middle so that the whorl does not wobble too much also needs some attention. I give each whorl a whirl on the stick I use to make the hole, and while a bit of imbalance is practically un-avoidable at least for the larger whorls, if it feels too much out of centre, I get to knead it up again and try once more.

The larger and flatter the whorl is, the harder I find it to get it right, as a little off-centeredness in shape and in hole position will have a large impact. There's also some times that I get them all almost perfect just like that, and then, a while later, it feels as if I can't get even the easiest and smallest whorl done in an acceptable way.

So, to sum it up: spindle-whorl making, in my very personal opinion, is harder than it looks, and while I love those nice little tools, making them is a singularly obnoxious task. And even though I have wonderful drawings with cross-sections of actual prehistoric and historic spindle whorls that definitely show they were not perfectly symmetrical, or perfectly centred at all, having mine a bit wobbly always makes me fret, and feel a bit unsure whether the ones I produce are good enough for the spinners that buy and use them (even though I haven't gotten complaints yet). Which also plays a part in making this task feel a bit harder. Weird, huh?

What I totally love about the whorl-making process, though, is picking the still warm, very dirty freshly fired whorls out of the ashes and seeing the many different shapes in  black, light grey and various marbled mixes of them - that is always like unpacking a present!

Here's a stack of things you might find amusing or interesting - or at least I hope so:

There is a woven and embroidered Game Of Thrones tapestry, modeled after the famous Bayeux original. While the base design was made on Jacquard looms, details have been added by embroidery, as this article explains. What an interesting project - and it does show that the Bayeux tapestry is still a force to be reckoned with, influencing modern day textile art and pop culture!
The tapestry is on display at the Ulster Museum, if you are in the area and want to have a look at it yourself.

More textile stuff - there's a free ebook about textile terminology available! You can download the pdf version of Textile Terminologies from the Orient to the Mediterranean and Europe, 1000 BC to 1000 AD here. It contains papers from a conference about textile terminology, which is a really interesting and a really big topic - and one that still has lots of unsolved problems.

Even more textile stuff, though much more modern: Speed hooks for rag rug hooking - a really interesting tool shown in this video.

And now for something completely different: Better lettering for comic book/graphic novel letterers. If you like to read graphic novels, or typesetting, or both, these might be interesting for you!