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"?

A few days ago (yes, I'm slow) I stumbled over the video of Susan Boyle singing "I dreamed a dream" in the talent show "Britain's Got Talent". In the following days, I read a bit about her (not so much to find) and Paul Potts, her predecessor-in-spirit. And this whole thing got me thinking about dreams and dreams come true.

As far as I can see, Susan Boyle tried to get onto stage seriously for ages. It was not her first public act, nor was it her first try for fame - she already appeared on another TV show some time earlier (but with no success). Now the media are in disagreement whether she can really sing or not, whether she is a nice lady or a bitchy person, whether she is loved because she's a singing nobody shooting to fame or because she's a star that just had to wait a long time to be born. And I just read an article by Spiegel Online (german news thingie) saying it's all a mass media super-hype and like Paul Pott, she won't make it after her first few weeks of fame.

I think the important thing is not whether Paul Pott or Susan Boyle will remain successful - or even stars - for a long time. The important lesson, for me, is that both had a dream and tried to make it come true. Only time will tell how well somebody shooting to fame can adapt to the new surroundings and the new style of life, and nobody knows whether Paul and Susan will one day regret their successful appearance on the talent show.

But that's always the thing with dreams, or with great plans: that nobody knows how it will turn out in the end. You just have to decide whether you want to risk failure or whether you prefer to go on dreaming forever. And once you have decided, you "just" need that dash of luck for a go.

And then? Once your dream is live, you can't stop. You can't let go, and you'll never be safe again. As long as it is only a dream, it's easy to forget about the little hitches in the process, the bad times, the sorrows, the dangers. You just imagine the upsides and maybe daydream about how you handle things, competent and sure the whole time. The dream come live might be a different thing entirely, and you will probably face aspects that you had not wanted. And because you can fail when living the dream, it is not safe anymore. You are not safe anymore.

The bigger the dream, the bigger might failure be. My dream was a lot smaller (and easier) - I only wanted to find out things about medieval garments. To find out how they were made, how it all connects, why medieval clothes look like they do. As stupid as that might sound, writing my thesis was fulfilling my dream. It hasn't brought me to fame, it won't make me rich (unless I win the lottery), but it made me very, very happy. When I started out, I met with a lot of sceptical comments and looks, and people even outright told me that a project like this wouldn't work. Still, it did. There's much left to find out about, and there always will, because clothing is so variegated and multifaceted, and there's so little left that we will always have to speculate - but I made my try, I feel it was successful, and my work will serve as help or starting point for others, which is an incredibly wonderful thing to achieve.

I had a dream, and I had a chance to go at it - I was incredibly lucky in having so much support, moral and financial, for my try. It took some time, and I'm not sure how it will all turn out in the end, but I feel very privileged because I could give it all a try. It could have gone totally and utterly bad, though, and something can still happen and cause trouble. And as long as my book, and therefore, the dream-come-true exists, something can always happen - maybe somebody finds out that everything I have written is complete and utter bullshit (which would be science, but unpleasant for me nevertheless). So in that aspect, I'll never be safe again. And I'll gladly give up this safety as a price to be paid, for my dream coming live. I'm happy with how it all turned out.

For Susan Boyle, I hope that she will be happy with her dream come live - that she will adapt to the new situation and still stay herself. That she won't regret her shot at fame and a singer's career, however it might turn out. And that she is willing to pay the price for a dream coming into existence.

Today is one of those days... where I just can't think of anything interesting to blog about. And maybe that is due to my decision to do money-related things today - finish off my taxes and take care of some other odds and ends.

So, for your amusement and mine, here is a half-related picture. In German, "Kohle" originally means coal or charcoal, but it is also used colloqiual to mean "money" (or dough, if you prefer the English colloquialism).

So here's a picture of me harvesting coal from a small charcoal kiln I ran together with some friends a few years ago. Making coal like that is quite a bit of work, but it's also a huge lot of fun! The coal in the basket I hold is the last remnant harvested, that is why there is so much straw mixed in.



It's dirty, dusty work, and that is why I am veiled like that. Coal is a good thing to have, but coal dust in the lungs not necessarily so...

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.

In preparation for the spinning experiment on the Textilforum, I need to figure out how much fibres to calculate for each participant. And to get a first impression, I spun with the carded and combed wool I have at hand - one hour in my normal thickness, and another hour as thick as I could manage.

Now I'm one of those people who have a very limited range of thickness when spinning. And (unfortunately for this purpose) it is rather on the fine side. So I ended up with two very different-sized balls of yarn; I wound them off today and weighed them with my letter scales.

The "Thick Yarn" weighs in at about 8 g for one hour's spinning time. It is pretty uneven, in spite of my trying oh-so-hard to spin a decently smooth and even yarn. Thick stuff is just not for me. Here you see the sorry results of my thick-spinning:



Beside the huge (haha), bulky and uneven ball of thick yarn, you can see what I spun as my normal thin yarn. The weight? Somewhere between one and two grammes. Both yarns spun with the same wool on the same spindle (which was about double the weight of the reference whorl for the experiment, and fitted with a rather heavy wooden spindle stick). When wound onto a ruler, the thick wool gives about 20 threads per inch, the thin one about 12 threads per quarter-inch.

So now I've outed myself as a thin-spinning freak, can any spinners of thick yarn out there give me a rough estimate of how much fiber in grammes they hand-spindle away in one hour? Just to check against my calculations? I'd be very grateful...