There hasn't been that much knitting in the past days and weeks as I'd have liked, but somehow other things happened or were done or taken care of. (Including some mending of socks and t-shirts...)

There is, however, some progress now. I'm getting closer and closer to the point where the sleeves will be finished, and I'm very much looking forward to that - and the fact that I will then be able to continue with the body of the cardigan. Hooray!



(Yes, that is Madam the Cat's tail in the picture.)

Working both sleeves at the same time using magic loop does work nicely in reducing my personal "Aaargh!" factor. It's a little awkward at times, as the two strands of yarn tend to do things they should not be able to do (as in they wrap around one of the sleeves, or suddenly are not both on the same side of the cardi anymore), but that is a relatively minor nuisance.

And soon, it will be over, and I'll go back to nice and brainless back-and-forth for a little bit, until the increases and the pattern shifts start. Already looking forward to that!

There's a stack of things happening here, though almost all of them are boring-type background things. There are some minor issues with the website, including some updates and some other small nuisances that I'd like to fix, but still haven't. In some cases, I'm not good enough at programming or understanding how the website innards work, and I just can't find where to tweak stuff so it works as intended. Most of these things are also not crucial, so I tend to have a go at them when they catch my eye, which they do once in a while, and after an hour or two of fuddling around, I put them to rest again. Sometimes I change a small thing only to find out (days or weeks later, if things go badly) that my things-look-better-now tweak actually was a things-look-better-here-now-but-shittier-everywhere-else thing. Sigh.

The most current problem was a deluge of spam coming via my contact form. It seems to have been solved now, at least mostly - I'll see if what I did was enough in the next few days. There's a plugin installed now that should keep bots from posting while doing nothing (and adding no extra steps) for regular, living and breathing human beings. If that will not stop the spamming, I'll have to add one of those wonderful "please answer this simple maths question" thingies - something I did want very much to avoid. But if the alternative is to get about 200 spam emails each day, plus the same amount in "Undelivered Mail Returned To  Sender" messages, that decision does get a lot easier.

There's also some more maintenance and ordering of things going on with the computer. Most of the transferred programmes seem to work fine on the newly setup machine, but there's a new backup procedure to be implemented, and it's a good opportunity to do some additional housekeeping, so that's also going on, and - as usual - it takes a long time and is a little annoying.

In other, more happy news: There's been some progress on the Ink cardigan, as can be proved by this very bad, very blurry photo:



I've progressed past the raglan increases and into the main body. Next step will be knitting the sleeves. I've found out with my first knit-it-all-in-one-piece piece that I absolutely hate knitting the sleeves as the last bit. There's just too much finished object to turn around with each round of the sleeve to make it comfortable... which means I'll do the sleeve-knitting right now, at the earliest possible part. That way I can also see if things fit, or if I have to go back a bit and adjust stuff.

 

You have probably guessed correctly that I have, of course, started a new knitting project since finishing the Cat Hat - it's "Ink", by Hanna Maciejewska. I have a beautiful, soft, dark-blue-to-purple wool for this, in sock wool thickness, and it does knit up nicely.



I'm not very far along yet - the pattern starts in the middle of the neck with the collar, then progresses on to increases for the raglan-style sleeves, and that is where I am now. There is not so much knitting going on at the moment, too, as it's the time of year for the baking spree...

While I did write about learning how to do stranded knitting, I've never posted pictures - so here, finally, proof that it happened:



The pattern is "Cat-oween", and it's mostly stranded knitting with two colours in a row. There's some purl action, and in the crown part, you have to juggle three colours in a few rounds.



That was... awkward, but I did manage.

The pattern was nice to work, the yarn was pleasant (it's smooth and not very elastic, but feels really nice against the skin), and I had a blast knitting this. Bonus: The recipient really liked it, too, and it did fit. Yay!



I even managed to finish it before Halloween... and now I'm tempted to make another one of these with the leftover yarn (which might be juuuust enough for one more). Eventually.

I got to meet a lot of old friends at the Texel Stockings conference, and I also got to know (or know better) a bunch more people. Among them some of the absolutely and utterly amazing volunteer knitters who knitted an entire stocking reconstruction.

An entire one. It's not a sock, mind you. It is a stocking - more than knee-high. We're talking about a piece knit from fine silk, with about 200 stitches to cast on, and about 83 stitches per 10 cm. It took the volunteers between 170 and 350 hours to knit one stocking... no wonder these things were precious. My full and utter respect, and admiration, to the group of volunteers that, up to yesterday, handed in twentyseven complete stockings for the project.

You are heroes for science. Truly. Thank you so, so much for giving such an enormous amount of your time, your skill, and your love to a science project that could not have been done without you. People like you make the world of textile archaeology a better place, and I know from my own personal experience that all of the academics involved in the project will carry you forever in their hearts - like I do my volunteers from the Spinning Experiment that I did ten years ago.

Words are not enough to express how important your work is. Your contribution. Archaeology, especially experimental archaeology and textile archaeology both, are low-budget disciplines. Researchers often work all on their own, trying hard to make projects happen, and there's a constant struggle to source the correct and fitting information, workspace, tools, and materials. If you are very lucky, you can get financial support from an organisation, but a lot of archaeology projects are just fund-your-own research ventures.

Sometimes, this means you are working all on your own for a long while. It feels lonely, and it can be hard. Not only because you feel like there is so much to do, so much to find out, and so little time - but sometimes, as you muddle along crunching data and looking for pictures and written evidence and try to find solutions, it happens that you wonder if your work is interesting or important to anyone else.

Your volunteer support is not only helping us do science. It is also showing us that we are not writing for a dusty stack of paper, to be forgotten in some corner of a neglected library somewhere. It tells us, not only with words but with your actions, that what we are doing is interesting. It is relevant. It helps us find out things about the past, about textiles, about human work and human crafts and human lives - and you, too, are interested in this, and in the connection we today still have. In how our lives are similar, or different. Maybe also in how we can make the world a better place tomorrow, learning from yesterday's techniques, from yesterday's successes, from yesterday's mistakes.

Thank you so, so much. You are wonderful, and I am honoured to have seen, touched, and even tried on some of your hard, meticulous work. I hope you are proud of your work for the project, and that it will continue to warm your heart as it has warmed mine, and that of so many of my colleagues involved in the project.

So, as promised, stories from my past weeks - let's start with the first of my two conferences, the one I only attended (as opposed to organising it).

When I heard about the symposium held by the TRC together with the Knitting History Forum (which you should totally check out, and maybe join, if you are interested in knitting history), to bring the Texel Stocking Project to its culmination and end, I had this inkling that it would be a wonderful conference.

And it was. It was... glorious. Like all the best conferences, it was full of interesting papers looking at the stockings, knitting in general, silk stockings in particular, and Citizen Science. There were things to look at, including (but not limited to) the exhibition about Socks and Stockings at the TRC. We got to meet the TRC collection's curator Lies van de Wege, who came in especially for our group and even let us poke at things in the depot, which was amazing.

There was coffee in abundance (necessary, too, to keep the brain awake), and there were cookies (lovely, buttery, crunchy Dutch cookies), and in coffee breaks and after the conference there was time for socialising (though, of course, there is never enough time to talk to all the people you want to chat with about all the things you could chat about).

Chrystel Brandenburgh did a wonderful job in organising all this, and putting together an amazing programme, which included a look at dyes, at the knitting process, at written data about hand knitters, and at the possibilities and challenges of Citizen Science projects. We were also lucky in that Leiden had a big special market just on the Saturday of the conference, which meant there were even more things to pick from for our lunch, and ample opportunities to sample local delicacies. (The Dutch know how to do delicious food, and delicious cakes.)

I did learn a lot at the conference - amongst the most important bits, for me, was hearing that it had been much easier for most of the knitters to use gummy silk (with the sericin still in it) to knit; after the stocking had been finished, it was then de-gummed and in some cases dyed. There were a lot of interesting conversations with colleagues around that topic, and it made me itchy to find out more about partial de-gumming, and how silk like that might feel, and how easy it would be to work with, and how well it would take dye, and how well that would wear.

Leiden was beautiful, too, and after Friday, even the weather was nice enough to have a little stroll through the city. Saturday evening was spent with a group that had formed after the conference, having dinner together, and I got the opportunity to try on a pair of the stockings (one of the two pairs used for wear-testing). They were amazing. Unfortunately, I was not allowed to take them home, but I am now thinking about making myself some socks from similar silk, and based on the pattern of the original stockings (which, by the way, is available as a Ravelry download, for a little under 9 Euro, and buying it will support the TRC).

So I was going back from the conference having heard a lot, learned so much, with lots of new impressions of all kinds, lots of new connections formed; having drunk entirely too much coffee and having eaten way too much of the local delicacies, and with about a million new questions and a hundred ideas for things that would be good to look at. Or do. (Which includes, by the way, thinking about stocking some gummy silk in the shop, in case someone wants that to knit or weave with.) And with some stroopwafels and chocolate in my pack. Obviously.

To put it shortly: In exactly the state you are in after a perfect conference!

For those of you who are now intrigued by the stranded knitting thing and holding yarns thing, here's a youtube video demonstrating several ways of how you can handle your yarns when knitting with two colours:


It's rather long, but it also includes some information on how to do colour changes. The maker of this video, Suzanne Bryan, also has instructions on how to catch yarns over long floats:


Also very interesting because she looks at dominant colours and the difference between stitches made with the yarn in the left hand and stitches made with the yarn in the right hand.

(I have made a little documentary video of my learning how to do purl stitching with one yarn held in each hand, by the way. So if you want to see about five minutes' worth of awkward needle movements - let me know!)