My eternal ink is finished, finally! I blame a number of things for it taking so long - among them, yes, the pandemic, as that seriously cut down on our opportunities to sit in a café and knit while enjoying some coffee. Travel times also were reduced greatly, though that was not as much of an influence, since the cardi is knit in one piece, and I have this rule about not taking along any projects that will not fit into my project bag. Which is rather small, because, you know, travel.

(I tend to lug along a plethora of things anyways, and usually way more than I will use or need, so it does make a lot of sense for me to limit myself.)

So here is some picture proof of the finished thing:



I'm very happy with it - the only thing left to do now is to sew in the zip so I can close it. The original pattern intends for it to stay open, and I've worn it a few times already now without a closure... but I like to have the option of wearing it closed, too. In case I end up not liking it with the zip, well, I can always take it out again.

The wool is very, very soft and nice to wear, and I also really like the colours. The stripes are not too blatant, but I think they add some interest, and the cables are also rather subtle but nice.



Also - I managed to tweak the pattern a bit while I was knitting so it fits me really, really well. Which is also a nice thing!

French shepherds in a particular region used to walk on stilts - and apparently, if you learn how to do it at an early age, you can be really good with stilt-walking.

Alex Makin has made a video about the stitches in the Bayeux tapestry:


And finally, in case you've missed it (I think I posted that before somewhere) - you can download Karina Grömer's book about prehistoric textiles "Prähistorische Textilkunst in Mitteleuropa" for free from this e-library. The English version is also available behind the link. Enjoy!

Archaeological Textiles Review Issue 63 has come out a bit ago, and - as usual - you can download the pdf version for free from the ATR website.

The issue has articles about Nubian textile fragments, Greek clothing terminology, Viking Age textiles and tapestries, and tablet weaving from Hallstatt, among other things. If you're interested in archaeological textiles, it's definitely worth checking out!

In case you're looking for something special, embroidery-wise:

My colleague Dr. Alex Makin has put together kits for Bayeux-style stitching!

Now... Alex is a textile archaeologist specialising in early medieval embroidery and a professionally trained embroiderer. Add those together, and the result is that her kits are not just any random bits of fabric and thread... obviously.

The Bayeux kit contains hand-woven fabric to the specifications of the original ground weave of the tapestry. The embroidery threads are wool, and of course they are hand-dyed in natural colours, similar to the colours used in the original. You also get a handmade bronze needle for the stitching, and a booklet with instructions so you can stitch your peacock... because that is the motif for this kit.


Which means that if you'd like to get a taste on how the original Bayeux tapestry was done, and how it felt to stitch it, this is the kit to get. You can learn more about the kits, and pre-order them, here on Alex' site.

 

A bunch of skeins is hanging out in the cellar, where it's nice and warm, and they are all drying. Actually they are almost dry - but I prefer to be really sure and leave them a little longer, if I can, than take them off sooner.



This is a little more than 2.5 km of yarn. I'm wet-finishing the skeins - soaking them in hot tap water (which has about 60° C here) for about 20 minutes, then stretching each skein, then hanging them to dry with a bit of weight to keep the yarn slightly stretched. It's not a lot of tension they are under, just enough to hold the yarns more or less straight.

I've marked each skein with a number, corresponding to the sequence they were spun in - and I'm very, very curious now to find out if the yardage has changed with the wet finish. Soon. As soon as they are completely dry...

Sometimes I have days (or is it still nights?) when I wake up way too early and cannot get back to sleep... so I usually get up and try to do something useful. Such as... work.

Today was one of those days - which means that it's now mid-afternoon and I'm feeling a bit more tired than I'd like to be, but there's still a stack of office work to be handled. (If you're wondering what I did the rest of the day, the answer is simple: For most of the time, I turned fluffy stuff into yarn.) It's no huge help that the cat is curled up on the sofa, napping and looking very cute and cuddle-able. There's visible progress, though. Yarn is happening! Not quite as quickly as I'd like it to, but hey, that's life.

Spinning speeds are something weird anyways. When I'm spinning for a project, I record all the time I spend on it, and I try to split time-keeping and -recording into the individual tasks to have a better overview in the end. So I will make notes for the time spent spinning, skeining, and wet-finishing the yarns. I did this for past projects as well, and I found that spinning speeds are not completely consistent. That is partly due to current form, partly depends on the kind of yarn to be spun and the fibre (and fibre prep), but there's also another factor: It's quite easy to fall into a slow, relaxed, dreamy pace even though I can draft faster. That will lead to slower spinning speed, of course, thank you Captain Obvious.

I'm not quite sure where that comes from - when I still only had my little wheel, the limiting factor was not the drafting speed, but the treadling speed. (There's only so fast that you can pedal.) With the hand-spindle, flicking speed and spindle turning speed is one limiting factor, the other is winding up speed. Winding up takes a lot of time, even if it's done quickly and efficiently. With the e-spinner, neither of these is there - so I can spin just as fast as I can draft.

In theory, that is quite, quite fast. I've done short test runs to find out how fast I can go, and it was significantly faster than with the spindle or treadle wheel - I think it was in the 140 m per hour range, or even a little higher. There are, however, limits to a sustainable drafting speed. I've learned that while I am able to go as fast for a short time, I'll fall into a slower rhythm when I am working for longer stretches of time. Which is okay - no sprinter is going to hold their speed for a marathon distance. The really evil trap, though, is when things start to feel so meditative and calming that spinning speed goes down some more, and more.

So when I'm production spinning now, I'm not only checking regularly for thickness, twist angle, overall okay-looking-ness of the yarn, progress on the bobbin and whether I have to move to the next bit of bobbin, and status of my tea cup (which includes heat and fill levels of tea), but also remind myself to keep up the good speed, and not start dawdling. I'm also wondering if people back in history had the same issues when spinning, and how they handled things. Did the medieval housewife care about whether she could be faster, or not? Was there more of a "it takes time, and will be done when it's done" mindset than we have today? I could well imagine that - but, of course, that is wild conjecture.

What do you think about the need for speed in medieval crafts, and medieval production? Is that a modern thing only? Did it depend? If so, on what? And if you're a spinner, are you leisure spinning, or production spinning? Do you have different spinning speeds? Have you ever tried to spin as fast as possible for a longer time? I'd love to hear about your experiences...

Here I am, with some more spinning done, and another three bobbins full.



Well, by now they have been emptied and partially re-filled. I also found out that my estimate of how much needs to be spun was a considerable amount lower than the final estimate is, after doing a test weave sample. It's the Law of Reconstructions and Reproductions, it seems, that if one mis-estimates anything, it's always a mis-estimate towards lower, quicker, easier, or cheaper than it turns out to be in the end.

Soon there will be a stack of skeins large enough that it will be time to draw a hot bath for them, and give them their settling soak. I've marked every skein with its number in the spinning sequence, so I can label them once they are dried - with the length in metres, the weight and grist. That will hopefully help to see how consistent the yarn is.

I'm also thinking about doing at least a partly re-skeining after washing and drying the yarn, to see if there's shrinkage. If so, I'd need to adjust the amount of yarn spun so it doesn't run out before the fabric is finished...