I'm very, very happy about two wonderful prototypes... of shears!

Shears were more common than scissors for most of the Middle Ages, at least according to archaeological evidence. They are still in use for some things today, so you can relatively easily get simple shears in either a fairly large or a very small size - for shearing sheep, pruning plants, or snipping threads.

The medium-sized shears, though, they are hard to come by if at all. And if you're going for historically correct shapes of the blade and the overall form, well, here's none of them that will pass scrutiny. So for years, I have searched for someone willing to accept the challenge and make shears for me to sell.

Finally, I found someone. These shears are made just like the originals were: With steel cutting edges, welded onto the iron body, in the shape and size they should be (around 14 cm in length). A nice, rounded bow at the end, and a bit of decorative waves just before the blades start. They are sharp enough and well enough aligned that they will cut fabric nicely and cleanly. 

There will be a little bit of fine-tuning to make them softer to press together, as cutting at the moment requires a little more strength than is comfortable for doing more than just short bits, and then they will turn up in the shop at some point. And I am thrilled they will!  

It's not just textile work in the sense of handling fibres here - there's also tool preparation. Such as prepping distaffs for people who order my historical spinning kit with dressed distaff, or cutting notches into spindles.

The latter requires some nice, sharp tools, some courage, and a bit of patience. And, of course, spindle sticks to cut the notches into. 

There's not too many finds of complete spindle sticks from the Middle Ages, and those are usually without notches. However... we do have some finds with notches, and we have plenty of sticks with broken-off ends, which of course happens more easily if there's a weak point in the wood. As in... a notch.

So like in many, many other cases, we have a hard time finding things out for sure.

Personally, I am ambiguous about notches. Having them can be nice, and spinning with them is fun if you just sort of slot your yarn in without the need of doing a half-hitch. They are also very good to have if, for whatever reason, your yarn keeps slipping off otherwise. (When I did the membrane thread spinning, I found that no notch was a no-go for me; this is the one technique where I absolutely want a nice, deep horizontal notch to put my half-hitch in.) But they will limit you in other ways  - a horizontal notch means you can spin s or z, but you still need a half-hitch, and it will hold that securely even when you want to take it off for winding. A spiral or diagonal notch means you can spin without a half-hitch... usually. Unless your yarn is too thick, or you fumble, then your spindle will fall; plus this kind of notch limits you to one spin direction.

But there's plenty of people who will appreciate a notch of this or that kind, and I am thoroughly fine with that. So fine that I will happily provide the notches: 

 In this case, the long spiral ones, worked in the different kinds of wood. They look pretty, don't they?

The latest delivery of spindle whorls has arrived - just in time, as I was running low on some of the weight ranges. It's always making me happy to sort the new whorls into stock...

...and then send them off to new homes, one by one, as they get ordered. There's quite often some rummaging when I get requests for a specific shape or colour, or for both - so I might dive into the stash and not just the sorting boxes, but the boxes are very handy, and are also what travels with me when I go to a fair or market. Very handy - and it saves searching through a big box of whorls and weighing them several times!

Today's been mostly spent with odds and ends - packing away stuff, trying to sort out some more of the Textile Forum backlog (as in doing some colour documentation/checking and putting away the dried lake we made from the used-up dyebaths), packing up things to go into the post... and then realising that I'm about to run out of stock with the brass pins.

So I made some more. 

It's fun to make these, and it definitely got easier with practice. Also I find that getting exactly the "right" amount of windings cut off (which is two, not one and not three) is the optimum for going forward.

More windings are harder to get onto the shaft - and less than two increases significantly the probability that the head will not sit firmly enough on the shaft. So that, for me, is definitely a good set of reasons to try and get them headed just like the originals...

Today was set aside to finally deal with the yearly tax paperwork... and hooray, it's almost done. A few last checks to make sure nothing stupid has happened (like last year, when I managed to put a large number in the wrong field, messing up about... everything) and then it can go off, so that part of the yearly Bureaucracy Worship is done and dusted. 

Which also means that I'll be able to go back to all the other (nicer, and more interesting) jobs to do tomorrow. One of the other things I did today was harvesting the last of the woad seeds outside - after snapping a picture first:

I really like how they look, those seeds. They are somewhere between purple, black, and brown in colour, and they can even be slightly iridescent. The flowers are nice, but rather small and yellow, and the leaf rosette is pretty, but to me, the seeds are the most spectacular aspect of the woad plant. 

The only reason I don't leave them on the plant until they fall off is, obviously, the shop - because if you want to sell the seeds, you have to harvest them... and now this year's crop is available.  

There's actually new stuff in the shop - I've finally managed to take pictures and get the new kids in. It's fibres for spinning this time - first of all, two nice, naturally coloured types of wool, from the Bergschaf breed. The lighter variation is a nice, warm brown:

The second colour is a very, very dark brown - so dark that it can quite legitimately called black. I like both variations, but the black is my current favourite. 

And the third new fibre in the shop? It's.... cotton!  While that wasn't the most common fibre in the Middle Ages in Germany and the surrounding area, it was in use - for padding at first, but later also as the weft thread in fustian, for instance.

Because of a series of chance, I learned how to spin on a hand-spindle using cotton... which may have played a role in my persisting penchant for spinning thin yarns with high twist on heavy spindles... because cotton needs quite a bit of twist to make a stable thread, and I had limited amounts of fibre, and if you're a spinner, you can probably guess what happened.

Because after finding out about the pesticide use and water use of conventionally grown cotton, I've switched over to organic cotton or none at all, so this is (of course) also organic cotton. 

You can get all three from my shop, finding them among the spinning fibres, of course. 

It's been a good while now since I've run out of the brass pins in the shop, but somehow there was this and that and things didn't line up, and I never got around to sitting down and making new ones. 

Today, though, I really felt like doing something practical again for a bit, after all the website and writing things, and I got out the metal-working supplies and started a bit of pin-making.

It begins with preparing the heads, which are made from wrapped wire, then cut into bits: 

Then shanks are cut and hammered into the little head coils, and then I do some more hammering to make sure the heads are decently stuck on the shanks, and then the annoying bit starts: sharpening the tips.

The photo shows half-finished tips on some pins. I'm still not completely happy with the workflow in that part of the process, but at least I'm getting pins already. Some more grinding, and some more testing of possible methods to come... and soon, pins to come back to the shop. Yay!