Firstly, for all those of you who are planning to put in a visit to the V&A before they close down the textile study room, a heads-up: I have been sent additional information by two friends who went there and found that, without any further notice, the staff closed the study room at noon.

So they recommend that

any colleagues intending to make a special visit to the collection are *strongly* advised to contact the museum first to check that the room is likely to be open : they probably won't give any promises, citing the usual weasle phrase "lack of resources", but pointing out that the room will soon be closed anyway might help.

So please phone ahead if going to the V&A to save you a disappointment.

Secondly, there are more conferences coming up: The Braid Society meeting in 2012 and the Leeds Congress 11-14th of July 2011. I have made the mistake of looking at the preliminary programme up on the website, and now I'm totally lusting to go there. If only beaming were invented already!

Thirdly, I spent part of the weekend having a load of fun with the new "in" sports discipline, Extreme Hedgehog Wrestling. Here's photo proof of it:


And this is the hedgehog in rest:



The thing lying around on the table in addition to the needles and yarn is a count-down d20* that I use for counting knitting rounds. (For those of you not enlightened by roleplaying friends sharing their dice and knowledge, countdown dice have the numbers arranged so you can easily find the next one in sequence - as opposed to normal dice where you have to hunt for the next number.)



It's a pattern that was published in Knitty a while ago**, and contrary to my usual approach, I actually did not change anything when knitting it. Well, except using dpns instead of the recommended two circs, and messing with the needle size : yarn thickness ratio to get the correct gauge. (Hint: My needles are, to a normal knitter's mind, way too small for the yarn.) After I broke one needle tip during the wrestling session start, I sort of tried to err on the side of caution in regards to the number of needles (and therefor reduced stress on the individual needle).Hedgehog Wrestling then is the natural side effect of this.

* A 20-sided die. Which is plenty for most knitting purposes and a very standard type for a lot of roleplaying games.
** I won't tell you what it is yet, because it's intended as a gift, and you never know who reads this blog. I'll show the finished thing once it's been received, though.

The V&A, the museum with the wonderful public study room for textiles, has cut down on accessibility on the frames and will close the public study room completely on March 1, 2011; after this will follow the closure of all the other textile and fashion-only rooms during the course of the year.

Bad news, but it's followed by good news: The closing down is just to move all the precious items into a new facility, the Textiles and Fashion Study and Conservation Centre at Blythe House in Kensington Olympia. It's scheduled to open late summer 2013, so we'll have to wait two years for full accessibility again - which is a very short time to move one hundred thousand individual museum textiles.

If you want to learn a bit more about this, you can read ThistleThreads' blog entry, where I first got the information, or get your information fix straight from the Horse's mouth at the V&A website.

The blog post with the two boys from Hartenstein got a comment with questions from Bertus Brokamp. One of the questions can best be answered with a picture comparison - the effigy of the Hartensteiner that we worked from and the reconstruction that is now in the exhibition.

Here you see the effigy and the reconstructed Hartensteiner side by side:


As you can see (and can see even better when you click the picture to get a larger version), we tried to keep close to the look of the effigy.  The pictures are roughly the same size - the two men won't match exactly due to differences in their body proportions - and they are arranged so that the two faces are on the same line, for easier comparison. Some of the differences are due to the posture of the reconstructed Hartensteiner - the length of the short mailshirt sleeves seems different because they fall back onto the upper arms while putting on the helmet, and our reconstructed guy actually wears the gloves and the sword (not in the photo yet - we put that on him after I took the picture). But the layering of the gambeson (with riding slit, you might just be able to make that out in the effigy), mail shirt and breastplate with dagged fabric cover does match the ensemble in the artwork.

The helmet is not attached to one of the chains because he's just putting it on, but it would technically be possible to hang it from one of the chains. Dagger, sword and shield are not yet in place on the reconstruction. The coat of arms, by the way, is not the one shown on the effigy: The Hartensteiner has a fish-hook as his coat of arms (black on gold background), and that's why we gave him the fancy golden fish as his helmet crest.

For those of you who can't go there (or for those who would like a little preview), here are photos of the two "guys" standing in the Hartenstein exhibition. I took my camera to the opening ceremony, but had unfortunately not checked the batteries before, so I can only show you pics from the setup procedure - which means that the pictures show only the almost-finished state, with little details missing.

First, there's the miles from around 1200. It's a knight from the Teutonic order, and there were two possibilities for him for the exhibition, the warlike outfit and the courtly one. When we set up the exhibition, the warlike presentation was chosen, so he currently looks like this:


And this would be his courtly self:


He's wearing braies, a pair of cloth hose beneath the mail, a wadded gambeson, the mail shirt with mittens attached, a tabard and then either a half-circle cloak or helmet and mail coif.
Isn't it amazing how much of a difference this makes?

And as the second "guy", we have the master of Hartenstein himself, caught in the act of donning his Great Helmet:

He's wearing braies, cloth and mail hose, a gambeson, a mail shirt, armour covered with silk cloth, knee protectors and vambraces. And gauntlets. And two helmets, of course - the bascinet with mail attached to protect the neck, the great helmet with a fish as the crest. (I hope I got all the English terms right - I'm not so used to translating weapons-and-armour terminology.) He isn't equipped yet with his shield and his sword - he only got those after the photo.

(He's cut off at the knees because there are tools and paraphernalia at his feet. He does have feet. Really.)

Today is the opening ceremony for the exhibition on Burg Hartenstein, and from tomorrow, the exhibition is open to the public.

If you are around here, why not give the two knightly guys I made and clothed a visit? The exhibition is open on Thursday and Friday afternoons (from 15.00) and on Saturdays and Sundays (from 10.00).

And if you are not in the Nuremberg area, you can see one of the guys greeting you on the official homepage of the Freundeskreis Hartenstein e.V., the association that initialised making the exhibition.

Today, the two knights for the exhibition at Hartenstein will be placed into their final spots and installed securely (so they don't gallop off in the night or, even worse, fall onto an unsuspecting visitor).

Setting up for an exhibition, for me, it's always a very exciting thing and surely a cocktail of emotions. There's a little anxiety (did I bring everything? will it all fit?), a little stress (oh my goodness I hope it doesn't all take so long to set up as this item), an amount of fun (after all, things are finally coming together as they are supposed to do), a generous measure of pleasant anticipation and hope (ah, this looks really nice here, that will be splendid once we open, I hope everybody else likes it as much) and, of course, a dash of "oh no!" (oh no, a badly done tiny spot/a little fault/a scratch already!) to spice it all up.

And altogether, I like this cocktail very much... so I am really looking forward to today's session.

Making medieval garments is something nice and fun - but seeing them worn or seeing them in an exhibition is something else again. And two sets of garments are going on display very soon now:
In November (on November 13/14, to be exact), a new exhibition will be opened in Burg Hartenstein (Wikipedia in German, with picture of the castle) in Franconia - featuring two knights fully dressed, with garments that I made. One of them is the 14th century knight and lord of Hartenstein, the second man is a Teutonic Knight from around 1200.

Since the exhibition is not opened yet, I will post no pictures today - but it won't be long now... Meanwhile, if you read German, you can also pay a visit to the official website of castle and of the group organising and running the exhibition, the Freundeskreis Burg Hartenstein.