As spring is creeping in and battling hard with the remainders of the winter, the weather is getting nicer and nicer and season start is rushing towards us, I still have to finish my new market stall. It is coming along - yesterday was bathing day, and the main part of the tent - almost four metres on seven metres - took a hot bath in our tub.

Now that it is getting closer to being a tent, one of the biggest concerns (my German expression of choice would be "die größten Bauchschmerzen" - literally "the biggest stomach ache") is how to get it waterproof. Seriously waterproof.

We bought heavy linen fabric in the hopes of it being waterproof due to its nature - some heavy fabric, pure linen, can soak up water and then get so dense and tight that it can be even used as a bucket. Totally waterproof. Unfortunately, it became very clear very soon that our specimen of heavy linen fabric is not like that. Yes, it is heavy, but the fibres will not swell up enough when soaked in water to get it completely impermeable to water, and thus I need some additional waterproofing method.

And that's my problem. I want to have the tent/stall as accurate as possible, but I will draw a line at non-secure waterproofiness. I need my goods (and myself, but the goods for selling are more important here) to stay dry no matter how hard it rains. And I am willing to compromise if this needs some modern trick - though I would prefer a period way.

So there are some possibilities now that I have already found, among them using linseed oil varnish; using oil paint from linseed oil varnish with a pigment/filler mixed in to paint the tent much as an oil-cloth (with the added bonus of decorative possibilities); using store-bought waterproofing liquids; it would even be a possibility to buy silicone at the hardware store and "paint" the cloth with that. I'm still undecided, I would like to test each of the methods but I am shying away a little from buying all of those things for a small test scrap of fabric, and am generally feeling quite uneasy about this part of the project.
And I'd be very happy about any input that you might be able to give.

After the wonderful planning session in South Tyrol, it's back to the usual, and nose back onto the grindstone. I'm on the last bits of proofreading, having been very diligently reading about all day during the last two days, and I hope to finish today or, at the latest, tomorrow. Thankfully there are more pictures in the catalogue part than in the front bits, which makes reading ten pages go much, much faster.

On the other fronts, there has been some movement as well: The market stall sewing is progressing, and occasionally I even snatch a few minutes for knitting on the current design and planning for the next one. Once the more pressing matters - stall and proof-reading - are done, I hope to get one or two patterns out for test-knitting.

Did I ever feel unsure about being able to fill my time as freelancer?

While blogging on Friday went off into the 'Net without any trouble, things quickly went pearshaped from there - with the wlan on and off again and on and off and finally off only. And then something in the innards of Windows, in the regions where the little drivers sit and make their thing, digested itself. And it was not possible to put that Humpty Dumpty back together again - so I finally had to reinstall Windows.

Let me tell you: That is quite an experience. I think it must have been a dozen times that the computer booted and did something (always stating "setup is preparing your computer for first use") and then re-booting. After a while of this continuous rebooting game with things done inbetween, it cried for the supplementary driver CD (which it got) and then had some more quality boot-and-reboot time. And then it actually finished.

On the down side, that now means that I have to re-install the ten or so programmes that I had already installed. On the up side, the pre-configured and pre-installed computer came with about 30 Gigabytes taken on the drive C. Thirty Freaking Gigabytes! For the operating system! I remember those times - that are not so very long gone - when a whole hard disk with 30 Gigabytes was a huge disk, and a very modern (and expensive) thing to have. Maybe I have lived under a rock the last years, but do operating systems really need to have so much disk space? I had very much planned to use the extra GBytes for storing more photos and documents, not more system. Well, after the re-installation, the new system takes up only (only! hah!) twenty gigabytes. That's ten more for me (once I figure out if some partition magic programme can shift partitions on Win7, that is).
Oh, and the connectivity problem, by the way, is not completely solved yet - though we now have a better idea what might cause the problem. So there will be some more configuring fun in the next days.

On the non-so-software-front, not too much got done (obviously) - a little bit of sewing on the tent and a little bit of knitting. I hope to get the hat testknit finished today or maybe, if I can't find much time for that, tomorrow.

After all the paperweight is off my back for a while ( it will be time for taxes soon - more paperwork), here are some things that are not really spectacular, but give me a nice feeling of something actually moving forwards.

First of all, these dropped-off stitch markers

  - and yes, I use bits of knotted silk thread and an old, single earring - these dropped-off markers mean that I have progressed on my second slouchy hat (with better maths for the hem this time),



and am now almost into the first round of ribbing. This means slipping half the stitches to a holder and knitting the other half. Just what happens here:


Then, there's that other idea that I have had. And now I am swatching - not spectacularly either:


But other things have happened, too. Non-knitting things. Like this:


This is where the seam on the tent is today. Which is almost one metre from where it was yesterday in the early evening, and that means actually almost two metres of stitching done, half by me and half by the most patient man that lives on Earth (I'm sure he must be the most patient man on earth, after all, he lives with me). Only a few metres to go on that first bit! And it looks as if there would be sewing time tonight as well. And tomorrow.

And finally... something spectacularly unspectacular.


They have been fired for a while and are now finally in my workspace. "They" are the ceramic disks that are supposed to go on an equally unspectacular stick and there to serve as a spinning whorl.
For those of you who are not recognising these whorls, originally they were made as the reference whorl of the Textilforum Experiment, and they got a lot of praise for running extremely well. However, the experiment whorls were not intended to be sold, and they were purely functional, including all rough edges and unsmoothed surfaces. These are made for actual use - with smooth edges and smooth surfaces. The whorls are made from modern clay, and with a modern technique - I'm using a specially-made little cookie-cutter-like implement. But that modern procedure is what makes them exactly alike and as close as humanly possible to the weight and MI of the original 12th century whorl, which is what we needed for the experiment. I will weigh them today to make sure they are all on a par, and then they are going into the Marketstall tomorrow.

Quite a lot is going on behind the scenes here, not least of all the fact that we have started actual work on the new market stall. The first bit of cloth has been cut and now takes up space in our living room, lying around and looking innocent (as far as 30 square metres of cloth can look innocent, that is). Now we only need to sew one long line of about 7.5 metres before it's time to shrink and waterproof this part.
The wood is already in the basement (mostly - one bit is missing), and after the long piece we're at now is sewn together and treated, the wood structure can be inserted and the fixings made. But it will take a few more evenings of needlework until that is the case!

Another thing happening is my collecting of ideas for some more textile tools for the market stall. I'm thinking of more accessories and tools for goldwork and embroidery - so if you have any suggestions or wishes, let me know, and maybe I'll be inspired to include it.

My usual style of working slightly resembles a multi-front war: Tackling several items from the list at the same time, which means that I work a bit here and then switch to another thing on the list, and maybe later to a third one. This is partially due to necessary waiting between steps on single projects, partially because sometimes I think it's faster to answer an e-mail and do the corresponding bit of work on a project at once rather than mark the mail and get back to it later on, and partially because I like some variation.

This has, as everything in life, its upsides and downsides. An upside is that I get to work on the project that currently tickles my fancy rather than stick to "Plan A", and that I am very flexible - if some grand idea occurs for one thing, I'm used to switching and will continue with the grand idea and the things it brings with it. The downside is that of course time and energy is lost in translation from one project to the next - and even if the loss is small, it will be there.

In the past months, I have often wondered whether it would be worth trying to finish one thing with absolute priority first and then go down on the list - and frankly, I'm not sure I am willing to try this. Once a deadline approaches for one of the projects, I know I'm perfectly capable of putting that project up front, and everything else does take a back seat, but I don't know if that style of work would suit me and the rather big variety of topics and projects I have in planning, under way or in postprocessing at any given point in time. So for the moment - until I get an inspiration what to change and how, or any grand hints by you, dear readers - I will probably just go on like I'm used to, working on more projects more or less parallel. Which also means that I will have my usual seemingly slow progress with things.

Speaking of progress: There actually is some for several things - planning for the new market stall has done a quite big leap, and this project is now ready for the scissors, needle and thread phase. I have done enough progress on my new (very thin silk thread) hairnet to actually see the proper mesh and for better demonstration - the very first rows are somewhat unspectacular for the viewer. So my weekend was rather productive, and this feels very good.

Now, slowly, I remember the things that I was planning to tackle before the Forum took over completely - smaller things as well as medium to big things (like the website relaunch, finishing an instructional video for netting and finding out how much fabric is needed for the new small market stall).

Yesterday, though, was mostly spent with the experiment dataset. I'm still looking at and photographing each spinner's individual output and playing around with the weights spun to see if there are general tendencies. And there are, and yet not. While for example spinner A made a totally predictable yarn only influenced by the fibres - with one fibre smoother, thinner yarn than the other - other participants have two sorts of yarn, quite thin and very thick, and they have no obvious connection to either spindle or fibre. It does need a seriously wacky spinning instrument to throw them out of their usual yarn type and thickness range, though, and sometimes not even the wackiest of spindles will do that. So this is a very intriguing start, and I hope I will find some more connections or possible connections.