Well, not quite - I'm still in the prep stage, printing stuff, sorting through things, re-stocking and packing up stuff so I can transport it to the wool festival in Backnang this weekend.

Tomorrow morning is a checkup appointment, tomorrow evening is the opening ceremony for "Vor 1000 Jahren", the exhibition in Bamberg, and Friday is set-up day already, so it does feel like it's almost the weekend. Which also means I'll be taking a few days off the blog - I will be back next week once everything is back home and (more or less) back in order again.

Go meet me in Backnang and say hello if you're in the area; you can find me on the stage together with Margit from Alte Künste and Frau Wöllfchen Heike.

The IMAREAL in Austria offers a series of lectures called "Materielle Welten" , and the one upcoming on November 6 is in English. The lecture starts at 17:00 MEZ and is titled "Seal Bags and Relics: The Case of Thomas Becket", held by Jitske Jasperse from Madrid.

You can join in for free; find out more about the series here (page in German) and about the upcoming talk here. 

I'm absolutely ready for the weekend to come - having successfully wrangled the tax paperwork stuff for the last quarter of the year*, it's now on to finishing the orders to be sent off, and then... weekend.

Next week will see the final prep stuff list for the wool festival in Backnang worked off (making lots and lots of distaffs has already happened), and then I will dive into a flurry of activity with the exhibition opening in Bamberg, the wool festival in Backnang, and then the Textile Forum.

Maybe I should start calling the time from mid-October to mid-November or end of November "Crazy Season"?

* Dutifully assisted by the cat, who came to sleep on my desk while I was doing it. Fortunately I was quick enough this time to take the stack of paperwork from her very-near-future resting place and put it to the side, so I could at least work on it. It has happened before that I was not quick enough and had to postpone tax work or book-keeping, as there's no way the individual papers can be pulled out from underneath the furry paperweight!

When I was small, I remember there being a regular children's magazine coming into our hose, and that included a "Bastelbogen" on the center pages (at least some of them did). So you could cut out and glue together a little house, or something else. They'd quite often find their way onto the train scenery that came downstairs from the attic around Christmas time. (I think the scale more or less fit, but frankly I didn't really care. The important thing was that I'd get to cut and fold and glue and then have a little something to put there.)

Later on, I once made a large cardboard castle... which then stood on top of a cupboard for ages, getting a little messed up and dusty and deteriorating a bit over time. These days, I usually pass when given the chance to buy one -  I still like the idea very much, and I'd enjoy the making, but then I never know what to do with the models. (I guess one could glue them to the ceiling and make an upside-down landscape there?) In case you also have a liking for those lightweight mini buildings, and don't mind having them stand around then, you might want to take a look at the Schreiber-Bogen website or, to be precise, their English shop. I've linked you straight to the churches, but there's also houses, ships, and whatnot.

Me, I always get a little nostalgic seeing these paper model sheets. One day,  though, when I have too much time...

I think I mentioned more than once that one thing that I really like about this line of work is that you can always expect something unexpected to come up. Case in point?

I've recently learned about a non-toxic stand-in alloy for quicksilver, and just ordered some for the upcoming Textile Forum. Why? Because there's a find of artificial pearls embroidered onto a tablet-woven band, and we're planning to try and find out how they might have been made.

There's an analysis of the remnants (which is mostly plaster and some protein), and there's a few surviving recipes from the late Middle Ages. Those quite often contain some base material like ground-up soft stone, egg white as protein, and... quicksilver. (Some also have fun stuff like the bones from the skulls of carp, and young doves to put the half-ready pearls in, then to be wrapped in bread dough and baked... but we'll stay with the simple stuff.)   

So. While I'm all for keeping as close to the original as possible, using real quicksilver for our trials was out of the question. On the other hand, though, the fact that it appears in a number of the recipes hints toward it having an actual function in them... so it felt like not the best option to just omit it. To my great happiness, there's a new alloy of different metals that is used to replace quicksilver these days. The trade name is "Galinstan", it's liquid at room temperature, it looks silvery, and we'll see if it will do the trick.

Now to organise and order the rest of the stuff that we'll need... and then on to the normal, boring housekeeping stuff like book-keeping. 

Yesterday's blog post fell by the wayside - I was away all day going to set up the loom for the exhibition in Bamberg... and it was great fun. (I also learned a lot! Including a new knot, which is actually a big deal for me, as I seem to be a bit of a knot dyslexic sometimes.)

The loom standing in the exhibition now was the result of a lot of thinking, planning, and the effort of many people. Our idea was to show something about weaving in the era around 1000. Now... that's the time when there's already an inkling of the horizontal loom, but we have next to no good evidence for that (as in "good enough to build a reconstruction from"). So we decided to make a warp-weighted loom.

The original plan was to have a regular one, but the building (which is old) does not allow for a loom to touch the walls. (That's also a possible security issue in an exhibition, as a loom only leaning might fall, and attaching it to the wall was out of the question, as the building itself is under heritage protection). The second plan, having an iron/metal holder for the loom, was out because of budget reasons, so we did end up with a free-standing wooden loom.

It's a proper, nice one, though, not looking as if somebody went collecting a few sticks in the wood and cobbled them together.

(The curious thing is that you can build a functional loom from mostly odd sticks from the woods, provided you make sure that the essential bits that need to be straight are straight. That's harder to do nowadays, though, than making one from cured, available, straight bits of wood, though. So that's what we have.)

The main thing that we wanted to do with the loom was to show that textile production at that time was a high-standing, important, and highly developed part of production, and the resulting objects were of high quality. So we found an expert in warp-weighted loom weaving in Sweden - Marie Wallenberg - who worked together with us to get the idea across to the woodworker, who made an almost perfect loom. One of the folks from Kaptorga made the loomweights (scaled down a little to be lighter, because that helps to not wear out the threads over time - the normal fitted loom is not intended to stay for months or years with the loomweights hanging), and Marie wove a fabric to fill the loom.

If you've seen warp-weighted looms in exhibitions, they are often a crooked thing, with a crooked bit of coarse weaving on them. While that may have happened occasionally, it is not what we would expect them to be in general - after all, they were used to make fine, straight, high-quality fabrics in the past. And that is exactly what we wanted to portray.

So once the loom had arrived from the woodworker and the fabric had arrived from Sweden and I had finished making the Rod of Many Holes to attach the weave to the loom's top beam, I set out to set things up in Bamberg, with Marie coaching me through the process. 

One of the things I really love about my line of work? Getting to work with professionals from adjacent fields and learning new things. Another thing I love is getting to work with many different materials - especially since I'm also working with textile techniques and tools, that does not just encompass the many different variations of fibres, yarns, and fabrics, but also other materials. Wood. Clay. Metal.

It has definitely proven helpful to have a little bit of basic skill working with these things, and a small but versatile selection of tools. One of my favourite ones: The so-called "Bssst". (You may guess why it's called that.) 

 I have this stand and another stand/holder for it, and it's been drilling holes and polishing things for me a lot. (My dad bought the original Bssst many years ago, and I've just recently had to replace it with a new one, as it absolutely refused to do anything anymore.)

This time, it was my little helper drilling many, many holes in a stick: