I'm still not finished with my homework from the fair, I have to cut down on the time I need for my NESAT presentation (aaaargh it is way, way too long still, there are about 7 minutes to cut from it), and there are still a few website issues to solve... though I hope I have most of them done now.

The shop should be running smoothly again now, and I have finally changed the slightly weird ordering for the linen bands (in units of 10 cm) to "normal" ordering per metre, with the possibility to enter decimal numbers, so you can now get, for instance, 1.6 metres. (As always, if you have feedback, or find something that does not work as expected, please do let me know. I'm really thankful for that - I try to test things, but it is so easy not to catch glitches, especially with all these different browsers and screen formats these days.)

I've also finally added an option on how customers would like to be addressed - formally or informally. This is more of an issue in German language, where there's the informal "Du" with first name and the formal "Sie" with last name. In Living History circles, it's rather usual to use the informal address, but not everybody ordering in my shop is a LH person, and you can annoy people either way when addressing them in the wrong way (or the unexpected way). It's easy for me when someone goes "Hallo Frau Kania" in their mail, or "Hallo Katrin" - then I'll just pick the same style. Many enquiries, however, have no such hint, and I know even less which way to pick when I have a question regarding an order.

So if you have a customer account, you can now pick whether you want formal or informal address, and I finally have a way to tell what people expect from me. Yay! (Provided it gets filled out - because it's non-obligatory so as not to annoy people.)

Now there's just a few smaller issues to solve, like the backup only working under php 5.x instead of the 7.x which I'd prefer to switch to. Probably due to some other thing throwing stuff into the gears, though I have not found the culprit yet.

I also had an issue with this blog today - I suddenly lacked all admin rights, which was rather annoying. (Imagine entering your blog space and finding you have no access to anything...) Fortunately (haha) I already had this issue once before, so I sort of knew what to do, and a quick google and a bit of mucking around in the phpMyAdmin database later, here I am, blogging happily at last, if a little later than intended...

And now for some dinner. And then for some deep thinking on how to slim down my presentation. Twenty minutes, folks. Twenty minutes is just sooooo short...

Somehow life feels like a whirlwind right now - so many things happening, coming up, or being under way that I sometimes feel like a child in a sweets store, with a wad of money held tight in my fist, hardly able to believe the bliss.

There's the NESAT coming up, for one thing - which means meeting up with friends and colleagues, travelling to the Czech republic, and getting a visit to Prague along with the deal. To add to the excitement, I'll be travelling there and back in lovely company, with one friend stopping by earlier to spend the weekend here (shenanigans ahead!).

Then there's the Textile Forum casting its shadow ahead from its November date, and several exciting things to look at - if all goes well, there will be a unique twined shoe to ponder, and some test runs on indigo dyeing on silk, among other stuff.

The air date of the children's quiz show where I will chat about spinning is also coming up at the end of this month... and there has been a phone call from another TV station, asking if I would be willing to take part in another project. This is not in a stage where I want to tell more about it, but I am already quite psyched.

I'm also psyched about another project - we're only waiting for the official green light to go ahead and get started, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this will happen soon.

And on top of all that, a stack of small things - new boards for my shelf for the stock (more space, yay). The sun is shining today, and there are loads of flowers in the garden. There's my current knitting gauge swatch, which is almost finished (new pullover coming up!) so I'll get to measure and wash and re-measure soon... and then I can get started in earnest.

So. Whirlwind. A good one, though.

A while ago, I got a commission for a gold and silk band, woven on the rigid heddle. Which delighted me no end, since I just love working with these materials, and I love rigid heddle band weaving, and the band itself is totally stunning in its simplicity. So I did the calculations, and the test run, and everything looked A-OK. Green. All systems go.

I even made a boxloom for this, to have something to wind up the long warp, so everything would stay balanced and nice and tidy. You might remember this:



Well. It then evolved a bit (which was to expect)...



...and for the final run, because the laser had not cut all the slits perfectly and some had a rough spot, I decided to use a wooden rigid heddle (way too wide, but who minds, right?) instead.

The warp was warped, the ends were threaded through the heddle, weaving started... and I quickly discovered that while my calculations for the bandwidth were correct and I had plenty of warp (I'd made it a bit longer, just in case), there were problems.

Tension problems.

The threads, both gold and silk, are fine and smooth and slippery. This can cause an issue when not holding the band at the very same angle to the heddle all the time, because then it will curve (or zig-zag). This is not as obvious with the narrower test bands I did, but with 1.5 cm of width to weave? It suddenly becomes an issue.

The threads are also very, very different from each other regarding their elasticity - which means that though the warp was nicely tensioned at first, it very, very quickly deteriorated.

Well. Tools evolve, right? And when something like this comes up, you cope with it as best you can. Which, in my case, meant... unboxing.

See what I mean here:


There's a white cord temporarily taking my place, holding the woven end of the band (hooray for foldback clips). There's a red cord tensioning the main warp, through the whole room - twice, actually. This is how it looks from the other side:


Because it is easier to adjust the tension a smaller bit of warp at a time, there's clamps a bit behind the heddle:


...and you can see here, in the picture taken before I installed the final thingummygadget (made from a piece of string), that the difference in warp tension is really huge, only a relatively little way into the weaving process.

So here's the coup de grace for this issue:


Silk and gold warp separated, then tied together with a bit of string, and that is used to tension them. Voilà - equal tension for the two.

Next time I'll make something like this from silk and gold? I'll handle things a good bit differently from the very beginning!

Things happening here, in no particular order:

The cat is sleeping. Well, mostly - sometimes she wakes up and goes "meow". Sometimes she wakes up and has an itchy ear, which results in something like this:


The first seeds from the surprise seed mix have sprouted, and it's cress:


Also green, but a long way beyond being a seedling? My hippeastrum. It's blooming.

And just in case you are wondering what I have been doing, apart from taking photos and annoying the cat by waking her with the camera click - I've been doing some weaving. Proof here:


That is silk and gold thread, and I can tell you right now that the warp is a nasty thing to handle - the silk and gold are quite, quite different in their elasticity, and the gold especially needs careful handling. I did test runs with the materials, but with a shorter, narrower warp, and it does not scale without trouble, so I had some figuring out of solutions to do (and there might have been "aaaargh" sounds along that way).

For now, though, it seems like I've found ways to compensate for the different takeup of the two materials, and should I ever do this again, I'll definitely be smarter. Well, maybe. Hopefully.

I'm back home from teaching! It was lovely to be in Paderborn, and I really enjoyed the city in springtime - there was a blooming magnolia right in front of the place where I stayed, perfuming the air. I had glorious weather for the walks to the Uni and back, and for the evening strolls to and through the city centre. There's lovely ice cream to be had in Paderborn, and in contrast to the south of Germany, the supermarkets are open until ten in the evening (they close at eight here).

The course I taught was two half days and two full days, and it was, as these things usually are, really interesting for me. I don't know where I heard it, and it was ages ago, but I was once told that teaching something will lead to you really learning something - and I can say that this is actually true. Well, I don't necessarily learn something more about the subject I'm teaching (though this happens as well, from time to time, as questions or approaches or Wild Things that Just Happened shed some light from a different angle on the subject, and suddenly you realise why this or that works this or that way, or doesn't), but I always, always learn something about people. How they think. How they learn. How they look at structures, and movements, and techniques. That is, to me, endlessly and utterly fascinating, and there are so, so many different approaches and different personalities and different characteristics. It's also endlessly and utterly satisfying to provide instructions and explanations in such a way that all the participants in the course get it, and can work the technique. (Not always easy, and sometimes it's really, really hard or even impossible to find the right way of explaining. But when it works... it's a true "Yes!" moment.)

One of my "Oh wow, that is interesting"-highlights from last week was one person who was essentially ambidextrous. Which is a wonderful and really helpful thing - unless your brain, as happened to her with one technique, keeps getting hooked on working the technique in the direction best suited for working with the left hand... but with the right hand.

I also realised how much I rely on looking at the structures of a textile, both for analysis (where you have no other possibility) and for teaching. I try to teach the moves necessary to make something together with an awareness of how they work, and why - which makes it easier to see what needs to be done next, and to find and correct mistakes.

Brains, I can tell you, are awesome. And fascinating. Especially when they are doing weird things!

It's really warm and sunny outside, almost unseasonably so. Since it has been frost-free for a while and there has been some rain, that means it is warm enough, and there is water enough, to finally wash the wool from the last shearing of my brother-in-law's Valais Blacknose sheep.

This is how the wool looks, soaking for the first time happily in its little bath:


It's much, much whiter and cleaner once all the washing is finished and it is out to dry. Which the first batch now is - with the second one getting its first soak. I'm all excited that I finally get to clean this stuff, Valais Blacknose is lovely fibre, and I've been out of stock for it for quite some time, as the shearing before last was way too late, resulting in felted fleeces unsuitable for spinning.

I'm still trying to figure out what to do with these felted fleeces - though I have a few ideas, I haven't gotten around to trying any of them. But I'm sure in time something will turn up!

Today was a bit more productive than yesterday, when I got sidetracked way too much (with small, sensible tasks - but still sidetracked, and it still meant I did not get through my list of things). So now, the monthly newsletter is out (in case you don't get it yet but want to, it's once a month, in German, and you can subscribe to it here); the kitchen looks okay again; there has been some gardening going on in the breaks and I am about through with the first cleaning of the flower beds; the stuff that needed to be done for planning the next reconstruction project has been done; and I have finished off the test weave band.

That feels much better than getting sidetracked! Tomorrow will see me finishing the planning for the course I'll teach in Paderborn next week, and then it looks like I've about caught up. Can that really be the case?

(Probably not. But I think I won't look at my list of things right now... it just feels too nice to be almost on top of things!)