The year 2009 is over, and I hope you all had a wonderful and smooth transit into 2010!

Last year was a year of beginnings and starts into new adventures for me. I made my first steps in the publishing process of the thesis, I joined forces with Sabine for some textile madness projects (including the Textile Forum in Eindhoven), and 2009 also was my first full year in the freelancing venture. I had an exhibition, I went to several conferences and medieval events I had never been to before, I did some research on new things. I planned and ordered things for the market stall, I planned some workshops, and I acquired skill in some new old techniques - like netting, brocading and a bit of goldwork embroidery. Hey, I even learned how to knit!

So looking back, 2009 seems to have been a good year. I say "seems", since a year of Beginnings is just that - fresh starts with no way to guess how each little thing begun will work out over time. And so I am curious to see what opportunities 2010 will bring to go on with each of these things... because ultimately, 2010 will decide just how good 2009 has been.

I hope we all have a wonderful, interesting and successful year. And to all the rest of things in a year one could wish for, I think nobody wishes it better than Neil Gaiman in his New Year Benediction:

 I'm off for the holidays now - meeting with the family and later with friends to start into the New Year. As I'm sure me and you will all be much too busy for blogs during these days, I'll see you in January 2010, on Jan 4, to be exact.

Until then have some wonderful, relaxing and stress-free days with your friends and families!

And if you are curious about which New Year's Eve tradition is most hallowed to me and my friends, you might want to know about the phenomenon that is Dinner for One (which even has a Wikipedia entry telling about its importance) and then watch it.

Best seen on New Year's Eve, along with countless Germans!

There is a German saying that goes "Wenn einer eine Reise tut, dann kann er was erzählen" (roughly translates to "Travels will always provide you with a story to tell"). This is certainly true about travel home from London yesterday, where we spent a few days to relax and take in the Christmas lights.
We traveled to London with the Eurostar, and it was a very pleasant travelling day, with windowgazing, knitting and reading the hours until we arrived in St. Pancras station. The way back, however, was not so smooth: Due to the train failures in the Tunnel, there was no train service yesterday, and according to the updates on the Eurostar website today, we would not have come home until tomorrow at the earliest.
We were alerted to the tunnel problems in time, luckily, and went back home using a plane - and again we had a good measure of luck, since our (evening) plane only ran two-and-a-half hours late, which means we arrived at our home in the small hours. Still, it could have been much, much worse.
It will never cease to amaze me that a metal contraption, made of several tonnes of metal and plastic, can take off into the air by sheer power. But comparing the journey to and from England, I liked the train journey better - and I hope that Eurostar will recover from this fiasco, both reputation- and finances-wise. (And of course I also hope that they will not try to keep their losses smaller by not paying for extra expenses of the travellers who got home by plane or ferry...)

Via the MEDTC-Discuss List, I got this information about a new exhibition catalogue:

Kusch, Claudia ; Patrizia Mignani ; Raffaella Pozzi (eds). :
Redire 1427-2009 : Ritorno alla luce : Il restauro del Farsetto di Pandolfo III Malatesti [Back to the light. The restoration of the doublet of Pandolfo III Malatesta]
Fano, Museo Civico, 2009. 24cm., pbk., 107pp. illus., most in color. (I quaderni del Museo, n. 2, 2009)
Price: $48.95 (Shamansky) also available through Italian bookdealers €22.50.


There's an article (in Italian) with two pictures, one a detail of the garment and one shot of the mummy in the grave. And I really want the book, though it could be a little hard to get it here - I haven't found a German distributor yet. So you are in luck if you are in Italy or in the US!

A few days ago, Bavardess had a very interesting blog entry about "beaver" as synonym for the vagina (something I had never heard before, though I can claim non-native-speakeriness as excuse) and how this word use probably developed from a medieval play on words. She links to a little video showing a girl having a girl day out with a beaver, all as advertisement for a new brand of tampons.

Which finally makes me write this little bit concerning tampons (or other disposable sanitary products) and green living. Tampons have been a sort of revolution and have become a normal part of modern female life in our part of the world. They are sold in all kinds of different sizes, from different manufacturers, each one claiming to be the one and only brand. But they all have one thing in common with each other (and with the disposable pads as well): They mean a huge waste of energy and material. All  the water and energy needed for production, the raw materials - plastic, cellulose, paper - for making and packaging them - the tampon or disposable tab is used and then discarded, and into the landfill they go. Not so good for our planet, actually.

So maybe it is time for the next revolution, yes? Some re-usable, environment-friendly product that can be worn like a tampon, safe, healthy, and durable? If that sounds like a good idea to you, you might want to buy yourself a menstruation cup. They are called something like Mooncup or Divacup, and they are a silicone cup that is inserted much like a tampon, catching the blood securely.  You can read much, much more about them on this livejournal devoted to the menstrual cups, and on lots of other places on the Internet - as always, the search engine of choice is your friend.

If you are a tampon-user, go try one. They are really wonderful and absolutely worth the money - in fact, not buying any disposable products anymore will save you more than a cup cost very soon. Or maybe it's even a gift idea for the holiday that's almost upon us?

I actually missed my blogiversary, which was on December 8 - that was Tuesday last week. And that even though I had marked it in my calendar, to be sure I won't forget it.

But then the internet-less time came, and the trials and tribulations of the move, and the stacks of boxes distracted me, and I completely forgot the blogiversary. Even though I think that it really is something worth celebrating - a year is quite a bit of time, after all!

When I started this blog last December, I was not sure at all how blogging would work out for me. I knew, however, that I did want the blog to offer something new regularly. Some blogs I had already read for a good while did inspire me to do the blogging-daily thing, and the most important of those is Kristin Nelson's blog Pub Rants. No, it has nothing to do with watering holes, selling beer and snacks, it's short for "publication", and I really liked (and still like) her style of writing and the fact that - with very few exceptions - I could have a few minutes every day, reading the news from Kristin, half-way across the globe.

And now, after the first year of blogging, I am really happy I tried it. I have a bunch of regular readers (and commenters), and getting feedback on the things I do and the texts I write does feel wonderful. Posting weekdaily is by far not as difficult as I had feared. Of course there's the occasional day where I can't think of anything much, but there are a few strategies that help with that: I try to cover one topic only per post and store other ideas in the drafts section, I try to have one or two "emergency posts" completely pre-written in the drafts section, and I am just generally on the watch for bloggable things - interesting links and webpages, for example. And then of course I don't blog on the weekends, and I will take time off* for holidays, events and travelling, things where blogging would be difficult or troublesome. All that together makes daily blogging a fun thing to do for me, a nice way to start off my day, and I hope that it will stay like this for at least a year or two more!

* All that time off results in about 203 posts during the one year, which is about 0.5562 posts per day, or one post every 1.79 days. Which sounds much less impressive than "I blog daily". You see me humbled.

After knitting that very first pair of socks (during which I discovered that nifty make-two-at-the-same-time doubleknitting thing), I had to cast on for the second pair of socks.

You can guess what I did, right?

That's quite at the start...

... and that is the same setup with the second sock toe pulled out of the first.

I now actually knit like that, with both socks hanging from the needles, one to the left and one to the right; I find it much easier that way. In addition, it's also easier to see if there's a crossover that connects both socks.

However, my technique is not exactly the same as the one described in Knitty.  Instead, I knit mirror-image: One sock (the "back" sock) is knit with regular knit and purl stitches, the other sock (the "front" sock) is done with mirror-image stitches - a purl-like stitch as "knit" stitch and a knit-like stitch as "purl" stitch. I always work the "back" sock first and think of the back and front stitch as one pair, inseparable - except by disaster, of course. (I'd give you a video of that, but the camera that can do videos is still packed somewhere.) This approach means I have less shifting around of threads for knit stitches, the front sock thread stays in front and the back sock thread stays in back. That makes it much, much faster to work, and less easy to do a cross-over (I had about three up to now). Purl stitches are a bit awkward at first, and I'm still working on proper tension for the purls, but I think that will come with practice.
This approach also adds a healthy dash of suspense to a sock project, especially a toe-up sock project, because since the outsides of the socks lie on the inside of the double tube, and since the socks are closed at the toe... you can't see how your sock pattern looks from the right side. There you are, instant suspense! And as an added benefit, this means you will learn how to read how a pattern looks from the wrong side. (Or you could be a sissy and only do cuff-down socks in this technique so that you can peek inside the open tubes at any time...)

I have progressed quite a bit already, so the socks are now almost at the heel.


It's a basic toe-up pattern with a short-row toe, mostly stockinette. There's a very simple rib pattern starting to come in (after all I have to practice purl stitches too), and I'm already looking forward to the heel. Initially, I wanted to do some mini-cables, but that did not work out so well, so I ripped back (good thing, learning to rip back with two socks at once) and decided to go with the ribbing only. I had to change to smaller needles because it turned out after the first few rows that I knit more loosely with this technique, probably due to the extra loops inbetween each sock's loops. That makes me wonder a bit if I will be able to get needles thin enough for smaller stitches - these are already 2 mm only. It really is fun, though, and I will definitely go for some more socks in this weird technique!