There I am, mid-September, and a certain November event is looming ahead. We'll do tablet weaving at the European Textile Forum this year, so I am currently trying to find out how much yarn of what type we will need, and how many tablets.

And that is the point where you suddenly, unambiguously, get shown again that tablet weaving is indeed, well, weaving.

As I like to tell people when I talk about spinning now and back then, one of the big differences is how much you'd need to produce. Many modern hobby spinners spin for their knitting... back in history, it was done for weaving. Big difference between knitters and weavers? Knitters talk about metres and grams, weavers talk about kilometres and kilograms. 

Similarly to "real" weaving, tablet weaving yarn requirements do add up quickly. Four bits of string per tablet, then at least 1.5 m of warp length (because you want some space, and the relation between loom waste or, in this case, tablet warp waste and weaving is always worse if you go shorter), and then some tablets, there you are.

With the added extra cherry on top that while there are quite a few bands that only use 20 or 30 tablets, we also get the big whoopers. With about 90, or 140, or even more tablets. And while, rather obviously I think, we will not equip everyone at the Forum with a 150 tablet band... having at least one to see how this moderately insane stack of tablets can be handled is definitely something.

I would also really like to go a little further into the rabbit hole of the twist-patterned bands, made from untwisted silk. 

The image shows a microscope picture taken from a broken part from Band D571 kept in Speyer in the Dom- und Diözesanmuseum im Historischen Museum der Pfalz. It's silk, it is untwisted (before the tablets twist it), and I think it would be really nice to do a little test during the Forum with similar silk. So that's my little pet side project at the moment: Find out if I can get thread just like that.

(Any hints are welcome. My suspicion is that it's not or not fully de-gummed, but reeled off in thin enough strands to retain shine, and then doubled up until desired thickness was achieved.)

Funny thing? Potato salad is sometimes said to be very typically German. However... while it is a dish (or side) often found in Germany, there's nothing typical about it if you venture outside your own home, or region. There is a plethora of variations, and also a few larger regional differences on how to make it.

I had a lot of fun reading this reddit post that I stumbled across, regarding potato salad (and yes, it includes recipes, and it's all in English). Because... yes, the only typical must-have ingredient for a German potato salad is... potatoes. Everything else can (and will!) result in hot disputes at least. 

Especially amusing, to me, was the one comment about feeling not so biased, then reading other's recipes and shaking one's head. That is exactly what happened to me - I thought I was cool with most variations, and then found out there's people adding boiled carrots, or peas! What! 

(I have a few variations I really enjoy, by the way - including one quick, served-warm one that is fast enough to make for normal weekday lunch.)

The sun is shining, and the weekend is approaching - some few more tasks to take care of today, though.

Today I learned that there is a Middle English Dictionary freely accessible on the web, and there's also a collection of Middle English romances that you can filter by certain keywords.  Unfortunately, the keywords do not include "textile tasks" and the fulltext is not searchable - but if you were looking to read plot summaries of famous medieval novels... that's your place to go. (Unsurprisingly, five of the keywords have something to do with, um, close interpersonal relationships of the commonly horizontal variety. Some things never change.)

Today was finally, boringly, mind-numbingly spent on maintenance and sorting (and deleting!) stuff. Old programmes, old private mails, old stuff here and there. It's not all finished, but it does look much better already.

Also, as there's now the end of Win10 maintenance looming over my head, too (and of course my computer is not able to do Win11 out of the box, big surprise), the find-a-new-photo-database thing has again gained a little bit more pressure. The Most Patient Husband of Them All, who's been using digiKam for a bit now and is quite happy with it, has worked some magic ask AI the right questions stuff and it looks like there's a possibility to have a script that processes the .csv with the export data into .xmp sidecar files that digiKam can use. 

So there's a high probability of that happening, since most of the other things I'd found have at least one killer problem. (Many of them are DRMs with the unstoppable urge to pull all files into their own folder. Collector's management systems will only support a few items in the free version, and are cloud-based. Same base applies to a lot of general DRMs. Tropy, which I had high hopes for, does not do the watch folder thing reliably.)

Now I only have to do some more clean-up and tagging in FotoTime and then the exporting madness can begin. With testing. On subsections and with template test exports first.

Sigh. Wish me luck. 

The spinning workshop stuff is packed away and sorted away again, the orders are, for now, all sent out, I have replies on most of my requests - so the next things are some more Forum planning, and preparing a two-day workshop I will give in September at the Abegg-Stiftung. I'm already looking forward to that a lot!

In the meantime, I'm trying to polish up my French for the conference in Clermont-Ferrant this October. To my delight, we found out that the DVDs we have of the old TV series Babylon 5 had French dubbing - the perfect training to watch. To my even greater dismay, we found after finishing season 1 that all the others are only German and English; there is a French dubbing, but it's not included in the German audio DVDs. Bummer.

Now I need to find some other interesting, yet understandable, French audio stuff to watch. Preferably also with French subtitles (makes it a little easier to understand sometimes). Recommendations are welcome (especially if it's on the 'Net and streamable without hopping through too many hoops). 

A little while ago, I asked here whether anybody knew where the bowloom tablet weaving scene was from.

And, of course... that worked. (I love it when that works.) Not only this, I also got a bonus heads-up of my blog comment function acting up and not accepting the comment there, so I got this info, plus the source of the image, delivered into my inbox.

A big thank you to Carolyn Priest-Dorman at this place -  who was smarter than me and looked a little further on an old copy of Viktoria's blog, who had posted the mystery image in 2009 (it originated in a yahoo group, she writes, by the way). I had found out that the post contained that image - however, I had obviously not found the right copy of the post on the wayback machine, because at some point other than where I looked at... somebody solved the mystery. 

Or, to cite the comment in question:

Tuija Ainonen said...

We found the mystery image! I happened to tweet the image (https://bit.ly/3h8Z9fO) & prof Henrike Lähnemann knew of your search. (As this is an older post, perhaps you already found the reference?).

The image is from Bodleian Library, MS. Douce 185, fol. 35v (Lower Rhineland, 14thC). The manuscript has just recently been fully digitized by #PolonskyGerman project (see https://hab.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/en/ ).

You can find the image at https://bit.ly/3vNk4c7 and the catalogue description of the manuscript at https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/manuscript_4553. The lower panel of the full page image depicts the education of the Virgin at the Temple, with her classmates being busy with various activities.

by Author

So thanks to Carolyn and her Search Fu, Vix's blog post, Prof. Henrike Lähnemann's knowledge, and Tuija Ainonen's comment, and actually also Beatrix Nutz who sent me the image and the "whereisit"-question... here we go. 

 I am, as I probably don't need to say, utterly delighted. 

I spent the weekend in Worms, at the Wollcraft Festival - meeting lots of lovely people that I get to meet way too rarely, and having a lot of fun. Some time was spent working - I had my own two spinning workshops to give, after all - but since it was the very first wool fair in my life that I actually went to without a stall, I also took the opportunity to just stroll around, have some ice cream, and look at everything.

For a while, I hung out with Cordula Becker, who had a "wind your wool for a good cause here" stall. You could use the skein holders and ball winders provided to wind your skeins into balls right at the fair, and I somehow got myself involved in helping some people who had not done that before to use the setup, and even wind a few balls for some folks. It was on give-what-you-want donation basis, and the donations will go straight to the current donation cause for kila mtoto.  Kila mtoto means "every child" in Swahili, and it's a small non-profit organisation with the aim of helping children in Kenya with projects that will give them a better life - such as providing them with school meals, hygiene items, books, and so on. The current donation run, however, is special: There is an ongoing collection for 14-year-old Sandra, who is in urgent need of heart surgery, at a cost of 12.000 € altogether.

Kila mtoto is a small organisation on purpose - because on that scale, the people running it can make sure that the things they work and collect donations for are sensible, sustainable, and what the communities there actually need. Cordula runs this with all her heart, and money donated there will always make a difference - so if you can, even though you didn't get to use the wool winders in Worms, please consider to help with a donation for Sandra, or maybe even by longterm sponsoring of a child.

(Or you could donate indirectly by buying the current charity yarn from Alte Künste, doadoa (sprinkled). (The Webpage is currently in German only, and there's no shipping to the US because of the tariff stuff, just like from my own shop, but if you're in Europe... there you go. I'm sorry if you happen to leave more money there than planned, but you're welcome.)