One of the leads to more depictions of yarnwinders (from two people, independently, the Internet is a small place after all) was to the North Porch portal of Chartres cathedral. There are, among many other things, scenes from the active life as opposed to the contemplative life, and the active life shows women at textile work.

I had a little rootle around to find out a tiny bit more about the portal, and the sculptures, including their date, and quickly found that Chartres has a lot of info online. For instance, there's a very cool overview about the programme on the portals by Alison Stones, done in collaboration with the Uni of Pittsburgh, and which you can find here. The Uni of Pittsburgh also has a searchable database with images from Chartres, accessible here.

So if you feel like looking at some sculptures and some stained glass - enjoy!

Here, stuff is progressing. Coffee is being drunk.
I'm still hard at work on the Forum webpages, getting them into a nicer order and stuff on them easier to access. Putting more stuff in there, too - which means I might need to up my contract with my provider a notch, to have more space for the stuff.

I'm also trying to finalise a little survey about the Forum to see where we might be heading. I love the format of having one full week, and the combination of a lecture and some practical part, but it might pose too much of an initial hurdle to those not already straddling the line between theoretical or academic work and crafts practice and experience. I also have the suspicion that a full week is too long for quite a few people - so Sabine and I have talked it over, and Michael and I have, and we might do a bit of a change, this year or next, depending on how it goes.

The survey is not quite finished yet, but I hope to get it done and out and tested later today, and then it will be time for a newsletter and spreading it out, hopefully gaining a lot of insights. Ideally, I'll also get the site done and polished before it goes out, but I think I might not, and I'd rather have more time for the survey than less - so it all depends on how productive I'll be today. And possibly early tomorrow. So... I should get back on it, right?

If you're a numbers person (as in somebody who easily remembers numbers, lucky you) and a textile archaeology nerd in addition to that, the two numbers in the blog title might ring a bell for you.

If not, let me bring you up to speed: York Archaeological Trust has been publishing a lot of very nice, very helpful shiny books about various aspects and find groups of all the digs done there - and York has a lot of history, and has had a lot of digs, and consequently there's oodles to research, and to tell. York also boasts a number of textile finds and textile tool finds, which is a delightful thing.

To make all this good stuff even better, they've decided, once they run out of the printed copies of their books, to make them freely available as pdf online. I've posted about this at least once before, but that was a good while ago. Back then, I had downloaded those of interest to me, though the really, really yummy ones - about textile production and textile finds - were still available in print and thus not as pdfs.

Just recently, though, I searched for something else, and the engine threw me a link to one of these two books on the YAT website. Off I went - and to my great delight, both 17/5 Textile, Raw Fibre and Cordage from Coppergate 16-22 and 17/11 Textile Production at 16-22 Coppergate are available now. (Direct links to the pdfs - but do go and visit their page listing the rest of the volumes of Archaeology of York, there's many more.)

If you are trying to read things that are not in your language on the Internet, there's a few more or less helpful tools to use that offer machine translation. I'm sure you have all been victim of those already - as sometimes, things get quietly murdered translated and appear, for instance, in a facebook feed or on a shop webpage and you wonder about the curiously bad grammar and the utterly weird choice of words, or find it completely incomprehensible.

There's a new kid on the block, though, and it's called DeepL. I've tested it a tiny little bit, and so far, it has been really, really good - and perfectly comprehensible up until now, even if the English I've translated the German to is not always perfect.

So in case you need something translated from or into the languages German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Polish, give it a try. It's definitely a large step up from what you'd get on Babelfish and other machine translators.

Here's a stack of things you might find amusing or interesting - or at least I hope so:

There is a woven and embroidered Game Of Thrones tapestry, modeled after the famous Bayeux original. While the base design was made on Jacquard looms, details have been added by embroidery, as this article explains. What an interesting project - and it does show that the Bayeux tapestry is still a force to be reckoned with, influencing modern day textile art and pop culture!
The tapestry is on display at the Ulster Museum, if you are in the area and want to have a look at it yourself.

More textile stuff - there's a free ebook about textile terminology available! You can download the pdf version of Textile Terminologies from the Orient to the Mediterranean and Europe, 1000 BC to 1000 AD here. It contains papers from a conference about textile terminology, which is a really interesting and a really big topic - and one that still has lots of unsolved problems.

Even more textile stuff, though much more modern: Speed hooks for rag rug hooking - a really interesting tool shown in this video.

And now for something completely different: Better lettering for comic book/graphic novel letterers. If you like to read graphic novels, or typesetting, or both, these might be interesting for you!

The Library Digitisation Unit of the University of Southampton has a Knitting Reference Library with Victorian knitting manuals and other old and really interesting knitting reference books and instructionals.

They also have, under the section slightly misleadingly titled "Knitting Patterns", a lot of title pages of 1950-ish and onward printed knitting patterns, all of them for men's upper body garments. Unfortunately, it really is only the title pages, so there are no actual patterns to be gotten. However, it is wildly interesting to just take a look at all of the title page pictures with the garments modeled: Some of the sweaters and cardigans look really timeless, and you wouldn't be surprised at all to see them worn today, or a pattern for them sold, or a garment like that on a hanger in a clothes store.

Some others, though? To my modern eyes, they look really, really weird. Some of them remind me of Captain Kirk, some of them loudly scream "Nineteeneighties!!", and some of them made me think "That looks like a dressing gown or pyjama part, that was worn on the street? Wow!"

Mind you, though, when I browse through modern knitting pattern magazines, I sometimes also wonder who would actually wear this. Those things are looking weird in a different, more up-do-date way, though.

So - if you enjoy looking at slightly weird older knitted garments - have a rootle in the Knitting Reference Library's 164 "knitting patterns". You might be as delighted as I was.

We went off to harvest some cherries a while ago, and together with loads of them, we accidentally brought back this guy:


Which, the Internet helpfully tells me, is the caterpillar of Orgyia antiqua, the rusty tussock moth, or, in German, Schlehenbürstenspinner (it seems to go for unwieldy names in both languages). I've never seen one of these caterpillars before, but they seem not to be so rare.

When searching for what this might online, I found a nice site with quite a lot of caterpillar pictures to help identify their species: Schmetterlinge Westerwald. There's 152 different caterpillars there, and the photos alone are worth a look to wonder about the variety of shapes and colours that these tiny critters have!

The one in the picture, by the way, got set outside onto our own morello cherry tree - where it will hopefully be okay...