While I was away having fun, things were going on back home. Garden things, mostly - the lawn growing like crazy, just like the willow fence. But also nicer, more edible ones:


The beef tomatoes (a variety I've had not much success with these past years) actually resulted in one plant with a decent yield. The seeds will be taken today, and I hope that there will be more of the same huge things in the future (note the rather large peanut included for something like a scale...)

Also, the peach tree is actually growing peaches this year, and most of them are still there, and growing. They will be ripe enough for harvest in a few days, I think - the first one has already fallen down, and it was still rather firm but already edible.


The other usual accumulated stuff? I'm still catching up on the last bits of it. Some of it was easy, like deleting a gazillion of emails from various social platforms and clearing out the junk folder; some were, as usual, quick to deal with through a short reply, and some need more work, so they are still sitting there, making the inbox a bit fatter than I like to have it.

There was also a rather large post-office run:


for which the Beach Rolly (originally bought for its primary* original purpose, which is canoe portaging) proved to be very helpful. Yay for multi-purpose tools!

*It actually has three original purposes as intended by the manufacturer: canoe portaging, hauling other stuff as a sack barrow, and serving as a comfy seat with backrest. It has seen use in all three of these, though the canoe portaging time is by far the smallest amount of the use-hours. Being used as a seat? By far the largest. It really is comfy!

Things currently going on? Lots.

Knitting is progressing, slowly but surely, so there might be a new sweater this winter. There's stuff for the next museum project hanging out here, waiting for the next step. I also have to take stock of the things in storage for the shop and re-order a few items.

Apart from that, planning for the next European Textile Forum is going on, which includes figuring out the programme, which will most probably include a nice excursion. (If you're interested in the Forum, or know somebody who might be - please spread the word, and if you are planning to come, register soon. We have a few places left, but not many, and having people register early makes things much easier all around.) Together with the planning, I'm trying to solve a few not-yet-issues at the website, which - as usual - takes way more time than it should.

Then, there's article writing and conference preparation for other talks - which is, fortunately, mostly under control at the moment (which means I'm not ridiculously behind schedule, and can still sleep at night).

To balance all this, there's cake, and tea, and coffee. Because everything is better with cake, tea, and coffee...

Birka is a rather well-known find place for quite a few textiles, including tablet-woven bands, and a frequently cited resource. The publications are not the newest, and in this case, it's in our favour - they are old enough to be offered as pdf files, for free, on the site of Historiska.se, the Swedish history museum.

You can find the Birka publications here, and if you have a bit of time, also check out their English homepage - which even features a test where you can find out which character from the Norse mythology you might be. (It tells me I'm Skadi... and something about me not minding deadlines, because I'm already done when they approach. Ah, if only.)

After a few small hiccups, it has finally worked, and I'm all psyched to announce that now, finally, my whole site is now running under the SSL protocol, as evidenced by the friendly green lock you should be able to see in your browser address bar.

This blog, by the way, was the main cause of the hiccups, and took most of the migration work - everything else was settled with three checkboxes checked, so just a very few mouse clicks. The blog, however, had to have URLs changed, and there was a remaining issue kindly and quickly fixed by support (thank goodness for IT support people, magicians with keyboards). So for now, everything is running, except one of the Wordpress plugins is not playing nice with SSL, it seems. So for you now no longer get a fancy lightbox to look at pictures.

While blog reading might not be enough of a security issue to warrant a few hours of work doing the switchover, the shop surely is. As of now, I've not offered payment methods that require me to save payment data, or you to submit your data to my server, due to not having SSL. But now, to my great delight, everything will be transmitted safely and securely encrypted... and this also means that eventually, I might be able to implement direct paying possibilities. That's something for the medium future, though, as credit card options or direct bank transfer needs some good research into options and costs before I can actually consider any of these.

For now, I'm happy that everything seems to run smoothly again - and shall celebrate for a bit. Yay!

There's some more mini stuff going on here at the moment, though this time, it is actually work-related... and weaving-themed.

When I explain textile techniques, one of the basic things that come up again and again is weaving - especially the topic of warp-weighted looms. Explaining the natural and artificial shed, and how weaving is done on that loom type, is easier done as demonstration, but obviously there's not always a loom available.

So, when in the situation of having to explain this stuff ages ago for a seminar, I cobbled together a small functional model of a warp-weighted loom. The "cloth" that I set up for it, though, was very narrow, and the heddles were not well done, and the weights were... well, let's say "cobbled together" does really just do it justice.

Now there's another explaining occasion coming up on the horizon (well, actually, on the pretty close horizon), and I decided to set the loom up again, properly this time. Which means actually doing a bit of maths to figure out a sensible loom weight weight (does that make sense?) and thinking about scale a little.

Scaling down textile stuff... it's a pain in the neck. One of the basic problems of scaling down things for models is getting the textures right. If we're thinking textiles and especially garments, this includes fall and drape of the things - and that typically means yo need to use a much finer, thinner material than the original is made of.

This can be possible in some instances, but when you have a fine, drapey fabric from the start, you'll run into the nigh-impossible very soon. This, by the way, is the main reason why I have never done garment reconstructions on a smaller scale than human-sized, and why I am not a fan of showing clothing (reconstructions) on dolls. It just won't work with the original material, and scaling down small stitches and seams is another can of worms I'd rather not open.

Another scaling-down problem is the size-to-weight ratios of things. Obviously, for a for-show-only thing, this is not relevant - but if you want a functioning model for demonstration purposes, it will bite your behind quicker than you can say "volume". If you take a cube with 2 cm side length, its volume is 8 cm³. Double its side length to 4 cm, and it will have 64 cm³ volume. Now if you want to scale down a warp-weighted loom and wish it still to function, you need a minimum tension for each thread, and you'll have more threads per cm on your loom than in the original fabric, so you will need more tension per cm - and you have less space for loom weights if they are supposed to look roughly in scale. Which means... you need a material with higher density than the original.

For the first instance of the loom, I just used wooden globes with a bore through the middle, giving just enough weight for the shed to open (albeit a little unwillingly). That does not look good, though, nor does it work really well, and especially won't really work for a wider weave.

Since I want to get sensible tension on the threads, though, I might find myself in a fishing tackle store later today, to buy lead weighs originally intended to lure carp to their doom. And then I can move on to get this loom set up - because right now, it looks like this:


...and that's a little unfinished, and a little sad. Also, I'd like to have it working properly on Monday... what was that quip about the last minute being so important, or else nothing would ever be finished?

In case you couldn't see the blog these days - I'm trying to switch the site over to SSl, and as usual, not everything is going all smoothly all the time. So - some figuring out on how to get this switch done is on  the agenda.

Other agenda things: Write up the article for the NESAT publication. There was some Bernuthsfeld work done today (there's always a few more details that need to be looked for); there was some knitting-related stuff (Margit is writing up a pattern for socks, and we're planning to offer a few of the patterns she is showing as testknits). Emails with requests were handled - in short, it was one of these days where lots of small things happen, but in the end, it feels like nothing much was done. (Which is not true, but can be really irritating at times.)

So... a fairly typical Monday, I'd say. And now I hope this blog post will be nice and visible, and the comment section will behave, too (I've been told it has been acting up, but I haven't found out why yet).

Here I am, slowly unpacking all the lovely stuff brought home from NESAT. Extra slowly, as most of my worktime yesterday and today is eaten up by doing the tax paperwork. Which is due at the end of this month - anyone hear that "whoosh" sound the approaching deadline makes? (I had wanted to do the tax stuff before NESAT, but with all the other things happening, that had not worked out, so I had planned on spending the start of this work week on it. Progress is according to plan, more or less, so all things are good.)

Anyway, let's return to unpacking, and I will give you a glimpse of the things I brought home from the conference. First of all, stuff from the conference bag - there was the book of abstracts, and the usual info material (a map and information about the city, and about Prague as preparation for our excursion), plus a nice little pen, a pocket programme (glorious idea!) and, woven in the university:


a cloth bookmark with the NESAT emblem, hanging out on the abstract booklet here.

With a bookmark, it is obvious that at least one book has to be bought, right? I made it two:


The one on the left is in Czech, but with a good English summary, and it has lots and lots of photographs of the finds from Prague... which include garment details (buttonholes, for instance). The second one, Chrystel's PhD thesis, contains a lot of meticulous research about early medieval finds from the Netherlands, and those include several hats and headdresses, which makes me really happy, and I'm looking forward to having a nice cup of tea and a read of this thesis.

Now... buying books at a conference is rather normal. It's also not entirely unexpected to find something nice in the conference bag, in addition to the usual things. What came as an utter surprise to me and all the other speakers, though: We, as well as those chairing one of the sessions (which means you are the one introducing the speakers and making sure they finish on time, plus, if necessary, keeping the discussion from getting too short, too long, or too hot), all got a present.

One woven in the university. After a find from the second half of the twelfth century... a piece of samite with gold thread pattern. (Made, in this case, from artificial gold thread and viscose, and not one hundred percent the size of the original, but very close.)

So I now have this:


and I am endlessly delighted with it! It will get a nice spot on one of the walls here, looking utterly beautiful!