And this week has definitely seen good progress textiles-wise - yesterday evening was spent working on the new blue hairnet. I'm adding in two rows with double-length mesh and putting those to good use by beading them. Which means every second mesh gets a bead pulled over it before I go on netting. Which is, how shall I put it... a tiny bit tedious. More whining and pictures due to follow in the course of the next few days.

I've also ended (won, I'd say) my struggle against the article. Now I hope that the outcome is ok - that's the downside of writing about something for the umpteenth time. Even if the topic of the article is just a spin-off of The Topic, there's enough crossover left. And after some time, it really is hard to keep what you're writing in perspective; the fact that you have already explained it in depth and on paper somewhere else, after all, does not mean that the readers of Shiny New Article all have read and memorised it. So I hope that I managed to put all the important bits in. I'll be so happy once The Topic is finally off in print, and therefore, finished for a while... not that I don't love thinking and talking and experimenting about garments, but after more than four years of intensive work on that, I feel like wanting a break to concentrate on something else for a while.

I've almost won my struggle with the unwieldy article - just the pictures left to insert, a once-over on the text and bibliography, and then it's finished. Whew!

In other progress news, I did a bit more on the play-band yesterday evening, so the warp is almost used up now. Besides playing around with turning sequences and finally trying a few pattern variations I've wanted to try for ages, I have arrived at the conclusion that for weaving freestyle knotwork patterns, the "less is more" approach won't work properly.

I set up this play-band with twelve tablets only, because that is a number that will already allow to see some interesting patterning, can be divided into two small, easy to handle packs of six tablets when doing a split of direction in the middle, and is fast to work even in twill - since there aren't many tablets to shift from one pack to the other. Because the band is intended as a teaching tool/workshop helper, those were things I thought important (and I'm still sure it is a very good width and setup for learning how to do twill).

To give me a greater variation of things to try out on the band, I looked for pattern inspiration on other bands (both my own, older play-band sequences and pictures of bands on the internet). There were some simple knot-style patterns that I drafted for trying on my band, and to my delight I found that an astounding lot of patterns will just be possible to do with such a slim band.

However, when weaving those tiny patterns with knotwork elements, I found that while twelve tablets will technically work, it is utterly complicated... because there is so little time. I'd finish one of the red pattern lines, running from the outside to the middle of the band and going back into twill to have only that pattern line visible on the band. But the band is so slim that I can't get into a proper twill pattern there, because already a complete reversion of weave direction is needed, or I have to start out on the next pattern bit. And the other tablets also need attention because of go-into-twill, come-out-of-twill or some patterning in their sequence. That is just too much on too short notice and too little room - and I imagine that on a wider band with more tablets, there is much more time to let this section twill on quietly while you care for the pattern bit in the other section. Also, the sets of tablets going mainly this or that direction were too small. Try working a twill structure with 12 tablets divided into four sets - that is three tablets only per set; much too few to see the structure or get into the rhythm of the thing. And rhythm and structure both are very important to me when weaving, since I hate nothing more than following a pattern draft line by line and counting off tablets (first forward, second backwards, third and fourth forwards, yuck!)

Well, since the play-band is almost finished, and since I have some nice silk lying around for a wider band, and since I wanted to weave a slim belt for some fittings I still have around... I think I'll make the warp for the new band a tad longer and play for a bit, just to see if freestyle knotwork is better possible on a band with 40 tablets.

Planning for the spinning experiment is still going on - there are a lot of things to consider, including how to extract the data out of all those yarns spun during the experiment time. A part of yesterday was spent doing test spinnings with all the test whorls I have made for the experiment. I found them all to be more or less workable, though some felt really, really awkward.

Then there's a paper to finish that is somehow not really willing to be finished. I'm glad (for a change) that the deadline for this is coming closer and closer, so there's only so long I can procrastinate by taking care of the hundred other odds and ends on my list. Including the daily blog - so time to rush off to that word processor.

In preparation for the spinning experiment on the Textilforum, I need to figure out how much fibres to calculate for each participant. And to get a first impression, I spun with the carded and combed wool I have at hand - one hour in my normal thickness, and another hour as thick as I could manage.

Now I'm one of those people who have a very limited range of thickness when spinning. And (unfortunately for this purpose) it is rather on the fine side. So I ended up with two very different-sized balls of yarn; I wound them off today and weighed them with my letter scales.

The "Thick Yarn" weighs in at about 8 g for one hour's spinning time. It is pretty uneven, in spite of my trying oh-so-hard to spin a decently smooth and even yarn. Thick stuff is just not for me. Here you see the sorry results of my thick-spinning:



Beside the huge (haha), bulky and uneven ball of thick yarn, you can see what I spun as my normal thin yarn. The weight? Somewhere between one and two grammes. Both yarns spun with the same wool on the same spindle (which was about double the weight of the reference whorl for the experiment, and fitted with a rather heavy wooden spindle stick). When wound onto a ruler, the thick wool gives about 20 threads per inch, the thin one about 12 threads per quarter-inch.

So now I've outed myself as a thin-spinning freak, can any spinners of thick yarn out there give me a rough estimate of how much fiber in grammes they hand-spindle away in one hour? Just to check against my calculations? I'd be very grateful...

That was a really pleasant, wonderful and relaxing weekend - spent mostly at home, doing necessary things for the medieval gear (like cleaning and shining shoes and washing textile stuff) at a leisurely pace, eating yummy things (like really tasty asparagus and strawberry cream cake), reading and doing some fun weaving.

The fun weaving is in preparation for a tablet weaving workshop, scheduled for August. The workshop is meant to teach people already experienced with threaded-in patterned tablet weaves how to do free patterning and double-faced weaves in twill structure, by showing the underlying mechanics of the weaving process. And in preparation of this, I'm weaving a "play-band". A band like that - used for playing around with different turning techniques and developing patterns - is what we'll weave in the workshop, to each her (or his) own play-band.


The warp I made for my preparation thing is relatively thick, plied silk yarn in red and off-white. I used the opportunity to try some patterns I had drafted from other bands before proper playing, but the hours yesterday were spent with fun combining of turning sequences, pattern pieces and twill. The thing I like most about play-bands? First of all, there are no real mistakes. You can just do things. The worst that can happen is that either you get totally blown away pattern-wise and have to turn the tablets back into starting sequence, or that you end up on the back of the band with your pattern. Then you can either tablet-turn your way up again or you just flip the band and go on where your pattern has gone to. And occasionally, there's a real nice pattern piece in the sequences that turns up by chance... and on a play-band you can take the time and space to isolate this pattern bit by placing it on a twill background.

And I had an obscene amount of fun yesterday weaving this pattern bit:



Guess which of these three will win the race?

I have a huge backlog of things that I'd like to blog about, but most of them need a bit more than 20 or so minutes for a quick blog. And somehow it really feels as if time is going faster and faster each year (or each month, even) - must be me getting old.

I remember reading once that the subjective feel of time is really, really slow when you are young, so the time perception "middle of life" is about the twentieth year of life. That sort of explains why six weeks of summer holiday in childhood seemed like an eternity, but six weeks nowadays are so short. Hrmph.

I have a fresh to-do-list lying here, I've managed to cross some things off yesterday, but one of them is "finish, proofread and send off a paper" and that will probably take at least until Monday afternoon. The paper is a spin-off from my thesis and is mostly about the possibilities the experiments with garments offer - a more in-depth look at these compared to the thesis part, with some additional aspects. So I'm off to the text editor.

Because the spiralled net was more or less a practice piece (to try out spiralling and to get my fingers back into netting) and because netting really is a surefire way to attract attention to textile works while keeping the mind unoccupied enough to chat with people, I started a new net right away in Freienfels.

It has the same huge 4 mm mesh size, but is worked with much thinner thread, so it's much closer to historical pieces. The thread might still be thinner, and the mesh could be smaller, but I'll take it slowly for a change. Plus it's not so easy to get superthin yet resilient silk thread.

Here you see the new net after nine hours of work. Cast-on went a lot smoother this time, since I stuck to the tried and tested method described by Therèse de Dillmont. Even though, it felt really fiddly due to the thin, fly-away threads (and since I did this out of doors, there actually was some wind to "help" from time to time). I'd say that netting with the fine thread does take a bit longer than with the thicker thread, even with identical mesh size and numbers, because the thin silk likes to crumple or curl up, and I'm a bit more careful with the fine net than with the sturdier one. Hence a little less work speed.


Cast-on loops are about 2 cm long, and cast-on was on a thick linen ply. A second loop of the linen thread serves as holding loop. I have switched completely to working with my new "Nähstein" now that I have finished making it. In case you didn't ever hear of that before, a Nähstein is a weighted pincushion that serves as the third hand to hold netting work or sewing work - and it's so practical! I'll post a picture of the Nähstein in action as soon as I get somebody to take it.

The new net is worked in YLI Silk 100, with the same netting needle and the same mesh stick that I used for the last one (hence the same mesh size). It is worked in the round, and on this picture you can or cannot see the meshes where transition into the next row takes place. Click on the picture to see it larger. Making one full round with the full number of mesh loops takes me about half an hour - so you can go ahead and try to calculate how long the whole thing would take with straightforward netting all through.


I used the hairnet with the embroidered arms as an inspiration - that is why you see the first rounds of blue netting on the pictures. I'm planning to put pearls on the net, in blue sections. The first test of getting a pearl over the mesh was successful, but it will still need some rows before I do it for real. I'm really, really excited to find out whether it works like I planned it!

The red-and-white hairnet that I've been working on is finished apart from the last finishing touches. I put in the last knots during Freienfels, and I started another one right away - same mesh size, but thinner thread. The plan is to put pearls in the mesh of the new net.

First of all, here's the photo of the finished piece. It turned out with a diameter of a little more than 30 centimetres when laid out flat on a surface, and it took 29 and 3/4 hours to get it to this stage, net working time since I work with a stopwatch. (I miscalculated during the weekend and told people a larger amount of time. I'm not happy about that, since I like to get my numbers right, but I'm still content that I erred on the side of longer work time. And everybody watching could see how long it takes to make the mesh...)
It is still lacking a band that will be attached to the mesh in front of the net and drawn through the longer loops on the back of the net - this allows some width adjustment when wearing the piece. It also still needs the finishing touches: a proper crown closure with silk thread (there's still the pink cotton thread in it that I used as a foundation loop), snipping off the rest of ends, and wetting it down to dry set over a bowl or something similar almost-head-shaped.



On this closeup, you can see the colour change between red and white, marring the impression that the net is worked in the round.


I'd say that an unadorned, simple net might well be worked in a spiral, since it will take very hard looking to see that: In the crown section, there's too much thread on too small an area, and the lower end of the net, if stitched to a band or sporting longer loops for closure, will not be easy to read. For any net that will show different size mesh, colour changes or embroidered patterns, spirals are out of the game, because they are just irregular enough to show. And according to my experience, netting in the round will not take much longer - there's only one slightly more fiddly point once each round where you transition into the next row; compared to the amount of time needed to complete the round, the slight slow-down there is not even worth mentioning.

Edit Jan 21, 2010: This is not correct - there is evidence that nets with colour changes and different size mesh and what-have-you were also netted in a continuous spiral. Please see update here.

After sleeping a little longer to make up for the lack of naps during the long weekend, I'm almost done with catching up on my mail and other backlog of stuff.

Freienfels was fine, with very good weather - lots of sunshine, and pretty warm during the day. I met and talked with lots of nice people, both visitors and participants, and met some folks that I only knew by name face to face for the first time. The only downside was the place of my tent/stall - right behind the stage, with a lot of very, very loud music. Since I'm mostly an info stall (workshop possibilities and, most important this year, book promotion for my thesis), music so loud that you have to shout to your visitors is not really helpful.

Still, I'm content. Now there's the usual post-event work to do: Sort out all the stuff, clean and wash what has gotten dirty, put the ordered things away again, and so on and so on. In my case, I'm also planning to build a proper stall for presenting on markets, since our tent is very nice, very practical to sleep in, but not suited to presenting clothes and textiles to people...

I'm back from the long weekend (first of May is a holiday here) with really good news:
Finally, the long wait is over. The application for grant money was successful, and now VG Wort pays a large part of the costs for material and printing. After waiting and hoping for so long, we can now set to work again, preparing the book for the print run: Layout and pictures have to be fitted to the book format, the English summary put in, layout of the colour plates needs to be done, and so on...

This means it will still take time until pre-ordering is possible - but now we can be sure that we can offer the book with good paper and a good binding for a very fair price. Which is just what I had hoped for, hooray!