The time has come to think about the cover of the book, and I'm not all sure what direction to choose. It should have something to do with tailoring, preferably - so do I try to find a medieval picture of a tailor's workshop? Or do I use a photograph of modern replicas for tailoring - pins, needles, shears, fabric, spools of thread? As a still-life or in action, with more or less of somebody working visible? Or a collage, mixing a medieval picture with the photograph?

Any suggestions, gentle readers? What would you expect or prefer on a book whose title says something on the lines of "Construction and sewing technique of secular medieval garments"?

And this week has definitely seen good progress textiles-wise - yesterday evening was spent working on the new blue hairnet. I'm adding in two rows with double-length mesh and putting those to good use by beading them. Which means every second mesh gets a bead pulled over it before I go on netting. Which is, how shall I put it... a tiny bit tedious. More whining and pictures due to follow in the course of the next few days.

I've also ended (won, I'd say) my struggle against the article. Now I hope that the outcome is ok - that's the downside of writing about something for the umpteenth time. Even if the topic of the article is just a spin-off of The Topic, there's enough crossover left. And after some time, it really is hard to keep what you're writing in perspective; the fact that you have already explained it in depth and on paper somewhere else, after all, does not mean that the readers of Shiny New Article all have read and memorised it. So I hope that I managed to put all the important bits in. I'll be so happy once The Topic is finally off in print, and therefore, finished for a while... not that I don't love thinking and talking and experimenting about garments, but after more than four years of intensive work on that, I feel like wanting a break to concentrate on something else for a while.

I've almost won my struggle with the unwieldy article - just the pictures left to insert, a once-over on the text and bibliography, and then it's finished. Whew!

In other progress news, I did a bit more on the play-band yesterday evening, so the warp is almost used up now. Besides playing around with turning sequences and finally trying a few pattern variations I've wanted to try for ages, I have arrived at the conclusion that for weaving freestyle knotwork patterns, the "less is more" approach won't work properly.

I set up this play-band with twelve tablets only, because that is a number that will already allow to see some interesting patterning, can be divided into two small, easy to handle packs of six tablets when doing a split of direction in the middle, and is fast to work even in twill - since there aren't many tablets to shift from one pack to the other. Because the band is intended as a teaching tool/workshop helper, those were things I thought important (and I'm still sure it is a very good width and setup for learning how to do twill).

To give me a greater variation of things to try out on the band, I looked for pattern inspiration on other bands (both my own, older play-band sequences and pictures of bands on the internet). There were some simple knot-style patterns that I drafted for trying on my band, and to my delight I found that an astounding lot of patterns will just be possible to do with such a slim band.

However, when weaving those tiny patterns with knotwork elements, I found that while twelve tablets will technically work, it is utterly complicated... because there is so little time. I'd finish one of the red pattern lines, running from the outside to the middle of the band and going back into twill to have only that pattern line visible on the band. But the band is so slim that I can't get into a proper twill pattern there, because already a complete reversion of weave direction is needed, or I have to start out on the next pattern bit. And the other tablets also need attention because of go-into-twill, come-out-of-twill or some patterning in their sequence. That is just too much on too short notice and too little room - and I imagine that on a wider band with more tablets, there is much more time to let this section twill on quietly while you care for the pattern bit in the other section. Also, the sets of tablets going mainly this or that direction were too small. Try working a twill structure with 12 tablets divided into four sets - that is three tablets only per set; much too few to see the structure or get into the rhythm of the thing. And rhythm and structure both are very important to me when weaving, since I hate nothing more than following a pattern draft line by line and counting off tablets (first forward, second backwards, third and fourth forwards, yuck!)

Well, since the play-band is almost finished, and since I have some nice silk lying around for a wider band, and since I wanted to weave a slim belt for some fittings I still have around... I think I'll make the warp for the new band a tad longer and play for a bit, just to see if freestyle knotwork is better possible on a band with 40 tablets.

Planning for the spinning experiment is still going on - there are a lot of things to consider, including how to extract the data out of all those yarns spun during the experiment time. A part of yesterday was spent doing test spinnings with all the test whorls I have made for the experiment. I found them all to be more or less workable, though some felt really, really awkward.

Then there's a paper to finish that is somehow not really willing to be finished. I'm glad (for a change) that the deadline for this is coming closer and closer, so there's only so long I can procrastinate by taking care of the hundred other odds and ends on my list. Including the daily blog - so time to rush off to that word processor.

I have a huge backlog of things that I'd like to blog about, but most of them need a bit more than 20 or so minutes for a quick blog. And somehow it really feels as if time is going faster and faster each year (or each month, even) - must be me getting old.

I remember reading once that the subjective feel of time is really, really slow when you are young, so the time perception "middle of life" is about the twentieth year of life. That sort of explains why six weeks of summer holiday in childhood seemed like an eternity, but six weeks nowadays are so short. Hrmph.

I have a fresh to-do-list lying here, I've managed to cross some things off yesterday, but one of them is "finish, proofread and send off a paper" and that will probably take at least until Monday afternoon. The paper is a spin-off from my thesis and is mostly about the possibilities the experiments with garments offer - a more in-depth look at these compared to the thesis part, with some additional aspects. So I'm off to the text editor.

I'm back from the long weekend (first of May is a holiday here) with really good news:
Finally, the long wait is over. The application for grant money was successful, and now VG Wort pays a large part of the costs for material and printing. After waiting and hoping for so long, we can now set to work again, preparing the book for the print run: Layout and pictures have to be fitted to the book format, the English summary put in, layout of the colour plates needs to be done, and so on...

This means it will still take time until pre-ordering is possible - but now we can be sure that we can offer the book with good paper and a good binding for a very fair price. Which is just what I had hoped for, hooray!

Somehow, work with due dates seems to attract other work with similar due dates. While I was not exactly ahead of schedule, I was not too much behind either - until last week, when some additional writing work with a due date came up. Yes, I got a good start on the addition already, which helps.
Still, now I am behind schedule - so no long, elaborate blog post for today!