That was a really pleasant, wonderful and relaxing weekend - spent mostly at home, doing necessary things for the medieval gear (like cleaning and shining shoes and washing textile stuff) at a leisurely pace, eating yummy things (like really tasty asparagus and strawberry cream cake), reading and doing some fun weaving.

The fun weaving is in preparation for a tablet weaving workshop, scheduled for August. The workshop is meant to teach people already experienced with threaded-in patterned tablet weaves how to do free patterning and double-faced weaves in twill structure, by showing the underlying mechanics of the weaving process. And in preparation of this, I'm weaving a "play-band". A band like that - used for playing around with different turning techniques and developing patterns - is what we'll weave in the workshop, to each her (or his) own play-band.


The warp I made for my preparation thing is relatively thick, plied silk yarn in red and off-white. I used the opportunity to try some patterns I had drafted from other bands before proper playing, but the hours yesterday were spent with fun combining of turning sequences, pattern pieces and twill. The thing I like most about play-bands? First of all, there are no real mistakes. You can just do things. The worst that can happen is that either you get totally blown away pattern-wise and have to turn the tablets back into starting sequence, or that you end up on the back of the band with your pattern. Then you can either tablet-turn your way up again or you just flip the band and go on where your pattern has gone to. And occasionally, there's a real nice pattern piece in the sequences that turns up by chance... and on a play-band you can take the time and space to isolate this pattern bit by placing it on a twill background.

And I had an obscene amount of fun yesterday weaving this pattern bit:



Guess which of these three will win the race?

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.

Because the spiralled net was more or less a practice piece (to try out spiralling and to get my fingers back into netting) and because netting really is a surefire way to attract attention to textile works while keeping the mind unoccupied enough to chat with people, I started a new net right away in Freienfels.

It has the same huge 4 mm mesh size, but is worked with much thinner thread, so it's much closer to historical pieces. The thread might still be thinner, and the mesh could be smaller, but I'll take it slowly for a change. Plus it's not so easy to get superthin yet resilient silk thread.

Here you see the new net after nine hours of work. Cast-on went a lot smoother this time, since I stuck to the tried and tested method described by Therèse de Dillmont. Even though, it felt really fiddly due to the thin, fly-away threads (and since I did this out of doors, there actually was some wind to "help" from time to time). I'd say that netting with the fine thread does take a bit longer than with the thicker thread, even with identical mesh size and numbers, because the thin silk likes to crumple or curl up, and I'm a bit more careful with the fine net than with the sturdier one. Hence a little less work speed.


Cast-on loops are about 2 cm long, and cast-on was on a thick linen ply. A second loop of the linen thread serves as holding loop. I have switched completely to working with my new "Nähstein" now that I have finished making it. In case you didn't ever hear of that before, a Nähstein is a weighted pincushion that serves as the third hand to hold netting work or sewing work - and it's so practical! I'll post a picture of the Nähstein in action as soon as I get somebody to take it.

The new net is worked in YLI Silk 100, with the same netting needle and the same mesh stick that I used for the last one (hence the same mesh size). It is worked in the round, and on this picture you can or cannot see the meshes where transition into the next row takes place. Click on the picture to see it larger. Making one full round with the full number of mesh loops takes me about half an hour - so you can go ahead and try to calculate how long the whole thing would take with straightforward netting all through.


I used the hairnet with the embroidered arms as an inspiration - that is why you see the first rounds of blue netting on the pictures. I'm planning to put pearls on the net, in blue sections. The first test of getting a pearl over the mesh was successful, but it will still need some rows before I do it for real. I'm really, really excited to find out whether it works like I planned it!

The red-and-white hairnet that I've been working on is finished apart from the last finishing touches. I put in the last knots during Freienfels, and I started another one right away - same mesh size, but thinner thread. The plan is to put pearls in the mesh of the new net.

First of all, here's the photo of the finished piece. It turned out with a diameter of a little more than 30 centimetres when laid out flat on a surface, and it took 29 and 3/4 hours to get it to this stage, net working time since I work with a stopwatch. (I miscalculated during the weekend and told people a larger amount of time. I'm not happy about that, since I like to get my numbers right, but I'm still content that I erred on the side of longer work time. And everybody watching could see how long it takes to make the mesh...)
It is still lacking a band that will be attached to the mesh in front of the net and drawn through the longer loops on the back of the net - this allows some width adjustment when wearing the piece. It also still needs the finishing touches: a proper crown closure with silk thread (there's still the pink cotton thread in it that I used as a foundation loop), snipping off the rest of ends, and wetting it down to dry set over a bowl or something similar almost-head-shaped.



On this closeup, you can see the colour change between red and white, marring the impression that the net is worked in the round.


I'd say that an unadorned, simple net might well be worked in a spiral, since it will take very hard looking to see that: In the crown section, there's too much thread on too small an area, and the lower end of the net, if stitched to a band or sporting longer loops for closure, will not be easy to read. For any net that will show different size mesh, colour changes or embroidered patterns, spirals are out of the game, because they are just irregular enough to show. And according to my experience, netting in the round will not take much longer - there's only one slightly more fiddly point once each round where you transition into the next row; compared to the amount of time needed to complete the round, the slight slow-down there is not even worth mentioning.

Edit Jan 21, 2010: This is not correct - there is evidence that nets with colour changes and different size mesh and what-have-you were also netted in a continuous spiral. Please see update here.

After sleeping a little longer to make up for the lack of naps during the long weekend, I'm almost done with catching up on my mail and other backlog of stuff.

Freienfels was fine, with very good weather - lots of sunshine, and pretty warm during the day. I met and talked with lots of nice people, both visitors and participants, and met some folks that I only knew by name face to face for the first time. The only downside was the place of my tent/stall - right behind the stage, with a lot of very, very loud music. Since I'm mostly an info stall (workshop possibilities and, most important this year, book promotion for my thesis), music so loud that you have to shout to your visitors is not really helpful.

Still, I'm content. Now there's the usual post-event work to do: Sort out all the stuff, clean and wash what has gotten dirty, put the ordered things away again, and so on and so on. In my case, I'm also planning to build a proper stall for presenting on markets, since our tent is very nice, very practical to sleep in, but not suited to presenting clothes and textiles to people...

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!

There are things, persons, occurrences on markets like that last weekend that really warm the heart or make you see again why you sit and explain how something works for two days in a row, telling the same tales a hundred times.

One was the lady stopping by again on the second day. On Saturday, she'd seen my bone awl that I use for making eyelet holes and asked for an explanation, since she had one at home but didn't know what it was for. We also chatted about netting needles and tatting, since she described a tatting shuttle to me, asking what it could have been for.
On Sunday, she came to show me the tools we had talked about - and said that since she would not use the netting needles nor the tatting shuttle, she's giving them to me. So I came back from the market with three more textile tools - at least two of them very hard to get.

She made me very happy with these absolutely unexpected presents - and helped me to learn more about the size, form and shape of industrially produced modern (but not really contemporary) netting needles.


The other was the little girl whom the spinner brought over from the spinning booth with the words "And look here, the weaver - that's where the finished thread goes." So she got handed to the weaver for an explanation and demonstration of weaving on a four-shaft loom, and then she came over to me to look at clothes.
After showing her some seams and some garments, I took out a piece of fine silk cloth and explained that even cloth so fine as this was all worked by hand - and then I told her to imagine how long that must take, all those superfine threads, all made and then woven... and she stood in front of my tent for, oh, two minutes, looking totally stunned and saying no more than "Oh. Wow. Oh." while trying to get a grasp on this gigantonormous amount of time and work.

Little lady: Thank you. You really made my day by listening and thinking about what we demonstrated. Seeing you so awed makes me very, very happy.