I stumbled across a post about knitting cables (1/1 cables, to be exact) in different ways (which was, however, not very substantial), and that brought to mind again the many very detailed and very cool posts on the Techknitter's blog, and on a whim I looked it up again. I had noticed a long while ago that the blog seemed to be on hiatus. 

As many blogs who go off for a while do that to never return, that was sort of what I had expected. So I was very pleasantly surprised that the Technknitter is back! (I also discovered the reason for the hiatus.)

So if you're looking for knitting tricks such as how to make jogless stripes, or how to fix curling scarves, or how to handle several colours at once - go check out the blog. It is a fantastic resource, with really neat solutions for a lot of knitting problems, very well explained and nicely illustrated. Even if it's something I'm pretty sure I will not use in my knitting, I still enjoyed reading the posts about it!

I'm absolutely delighted every time I find a new manuscript fully digitised and freely accessible online - it makes research so much easier, and really helps to get a better overview of what was used and available in the Middle Ages.

Yes, not every book has illuminations, and of course not everything is shown in manuscripts, and also of course one needs to take what is shown with a grain of salt, or sometimes maybe even a teaspoon of salt. But still - the more different images you get to look at, the more chances you have at seeing something for the first time, or seeing something way clearer than before.

That all said, here's one of the richly illuminated books, online for your pleasure: St. Elisabeth's Psalter, made around 1201-1208. Click on the eye on the book at the right edge to leaf through the book. 

One of the goals of EuroWeb is making it easier to research textile heritage, and one of the steps for this was the development of a Digital Atlas. This has been launched recently, and you can now take a look at the Atlas here. 

It's of course a work in progress - and contributions are welcome.

And here is the launch, as the recording of the livestream:

The Germanisches Nationalmuseum has what they call a "digital story" about guilds and crafts in the Early Modern Age on their website. I'd have called it something like a digital exhibition, as there's a good number of topics to explore and quite a few nice images of artefacts, but whatever the name, it's worth a look.

You can find the English version "Guild and Crafts" here, and of course there's also a German version "Zunft und Handwerk".

I think I may have blogged about this before, but I can't really remember - and that means it's not a bad idea to revisit the "Projekt Tafelmalerei" of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg. 

The GNM has a very large collection of late medieval paintings on wood, and there's a project to research these paintings and make the information about them accessible on the Internet. The whole thing can be found at tafelmalerei.gnm.de and features 148 paintings, starting in 1260 and ending in 1520. So if you're interested in late medieval artwork, you might want to check it out.

The platform is German only; you find the paintings under "Objekte", and then there's preview images for all the items.

Especially interesting: There's a painting by the Meister von Uttenheim showing the Birth of Mary, and there's a lady dressed in a green gown that has a similar cut to one of the Lengberg dress fragments. Plus she's wearing a headdress with a geometrically ornamented inset - maybe something similar to a cap like that also found in Lengberg?

We were wondering about old-style recipes for cakes a while ago, inspired by some quite old (Art Deco) tableware, which had rather small plates for the cakes (or whatever else would have been served on them).

So I did as you do when wondering about stuff like that - I went into the Internet Archive and the Open Library and had a rootle around for recipe books from the end of the 19th century.

One of the books I came across was a really curious example, with a lot of advertisements, and a lot of recipes, but not just for cooking, no, for about everything from dyeing wool to dyeing hair to cleaning stuff to baking to curing sick horses. It's called the Brill's Family Recipe book. 

I'm not sure if I will actually try one of the cake recipes - but it was definitely very amusing to leaf through this curious mixture, and it does give an impression of what was considered important or necessary recipes back then. 

I've stumbled across Digital Mappa a good long(ish) while ago, and I might or might not have posted about it here on the blog, but it might be time to revisit that. 

Digital Mappa is a tool for digital annotation of manuscripts and images, with the possibility to link multiple different sources, highlight parts of them, and, in short, do a bunch of interesting and potentially helpful things when researching and comparing stuff. Back when I last looked into it, I didn't find anything where you could use the platform without using your own installation. Which I tried to set up, but failed. 

A while ago I received a note about an update to the platform software, and I put on my list to check it out and maybe re-try installing it. These days, I finally got around to looking into it - and I found this article about DM. With, to my utter and great delight, a link to an installation where one can register and then use an already installed, up-and-running version.

Hooray! I've not spent a lot of time with the DM yet, and it certainly takes a little while to get used to, but I have hopes that it will be very, very useful for me and some of my projects - including some collaborative projects as well.