It's been a rather grey day here, and that makes me long for a bit of colour. Fortunately that's easy - here, have some small bit of cloth coming out of a cochineal dye bath:

Isn't that a nice shade? I'm quite fond of cochineal - I prefer cooler, darker shades of red to the more orange tones of madder, so I'm more a cochineal girl than a madderwoman, actually. (The combination of the two can be gorgeous though!) 

If you like Origami and are thinking about an alternative to a Chrismas tree, you might find inspiration here: 

That's definitely a very nice idea, and a stunning thing... though I suspect we will stay with our minimal decorating here! 

NESAT will be taking place again next year - and I'm so very much looking forward to it already! It's always a wonderful opportunity to go somewhere and meet up with old and new colleagues. If you're not familiar with this conference, NESAT stands for "North European Symposium for Archaeological Textiles" and was started to make textile archeologists feel less lonely once in a while.

This means every three years - last one was the virtual conference (due to Covid) in Oulu, Finland, but now we're looking to meet up in person in Poland for the next one. To my great delight, the paper about membrane gold threads that Tracy and I have proposed was accepted, so we'll be able to talk about our project there in May!

In case you're interested, you can learn more about the upcoming conference, and the past ones, on their webpage. Registration is also open now until end of February.

It feels like we're nearing the end of the year alright - days are getting ever shorter, the cat sleeps more and more (though that is due to age, I think, and not just due to the time of year and weather), and I'm trying to get things sorted for the end of the year, and winding down a little. 

Getting things sorted includes sorting and labeling pictures, and here's one for you: 

That is a good amount of quite expensive ground-up lice about to be stirred into a beaker of hot water. It was really, really exciting to dye with kermes, and I'm feeling very privileged!

That said... the colour turned out very nice indeed, but it's not that you couldn't come close or imitate it with a good knowledge on how to handle your madder and cochineal. Though it may be possible that with some post-processing, it can go more into the purple-y shade, and that might be harder to get with madder and cochineal. But, well, who knows?

It would be really, really interesting though how many people in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age would have been able to actually tell if something was really done with kermes, or if it was just well-faked. My guess would be that a good fake is indistinguishable from the real thing today, and would have been back then. Similar, probably, with shellfish purple. But, hey, expensive! Prestigious! So definitely a must-have!  

Today's been mostly spent with odds and ends - packing away stuff, trying to sort out some more of the Textile Forum backlog (as in doing some colour documentation/checking and putting away the dried lake we made from the used-up dyebaths), packing up things to go into the post... and then realising that I'm about to run out of stock with the brass pins.

So I made some more. 

It's fun to make these, and it definitely got easier with practice. Also I find that getting exactly the "right" amount of windings cut off (which is two, not one and not three) is the optimum for going forward.

More windings are harder to get onto the shaft - and less than two increases significantly the probability that the head will not sit firmly enough on the shaft. So that, for me, is definitely a good set of reasons to try and get them headed just like the originals...

Well, you certainly can't say that the rose in our garden has not been trying hard until the end... 

She did manage to get one flower properly into bloom about mid-November, but the second of the late blooming attempts was really too late. So it got snowed upon and frozen out when it was just half open.

Still quite a feat, though, and somehow I find it very amusing. Shows that not just human beings can be a little too late...

In case you enjoy a bit of whimsy and don't necessarily stop that enjoyment at the end of the Middle Ages, you can have a look at this collection of fantastical animals. It's an online exhibition with text in German, but images will work in any language - and you'll see interesting critters from graphical artwork from the 15th to the 18th century.

Because we can all use some images of gryphons and dressed-up locusts, right?