Sewing project update: The first buttons are attached to the sleeve of the red dress. I tried to snap a photo this morning, but found that I need either much more light or a tripod and was too lazy to get the latter. It's beautiful, though - the red is an incredibly lovely colour.

There's also a next project lining up for when the current one is finished - including an altar linen, something that is weirdly exciting to do. It's no spectacular work, just a very simple cloth, hemmed and pieced together in the middle, with no embroidery or other special effects, but the altar vestments are such an important part of religious life and thus of medieval culture that it is super-exciting for me to do.

We're also working on finishing up the paper about our dyeing experiments of the last two Textile Forums - one of them is a little late, but I'm (or we) are trying to make up for that with the second one.

For those of you who read German, there's a very interesting article on Archaeologik about how the public (especially that part going on treasure hunts with metal detectors) sees archaeologists. Not nice to read - but important to keep in mind: Sensational stories about treasures shift the impression of the public towards the find, not towards research.

Also in German: the guy behind Tribur is working on reconstructing the carolingian sword-belt-thingie.

Not in German, not medieval, but really cool: Geek Knitting Links and more of the same.

A while ago, I went to a monthly spinning meet-up for the first time. That was fun.

A month later, I went there again... and fell in love with some fibre. It's not that I do not own enough fibre for spinning. (Seeing that I have fibre to sell, that would be sort of weird.) It's also not that I don't have enough spinning projects already, or things and techniques I should (or want to) try out, or improve in. And I also own more than enough sock wool for the next few years worth' of sock knitting, seeing how slowly I knit. (Intermittently, and that is probably mostly to blame. Even if your actual knitting speed is not snail-like but only on the low end of mediocre, leaving a knitting project in a bag for a few months because there just is no leisure for it means that making a pair of socks will take ages.)

That fibre... it sang to me. It was dyed, modern-style, in blues and greens with a dash of teal and a dollop of grey in it, and it looked too, too lovely. Long story short, after a while of considering and getting a snippet of the fibre to test-spin, I caved. I bought the fibre and took it with me to spin it during our post-Christmas time with friends. (They know me. Neither of them did blink an eye when I turned up with my spinning wheel in tow.)

I divided the dyed top into three parts, length-wise, and spun each part in my normal thickness and my normal amount of twist (and that's lots). I plied it up three-ply, feeling very generous with my time and very modern, and came out with almost sock-yarn thickness. (It's about as thick as normal sock yarn if you stretch the normal yarn a little.)

When I was finished, I knit up a little sample... which I then tossed into the washing machine, the normal cycle that we use for our clothes. Twice. It came out a little softer than it had come in, but unchanged in size.

And then I started knitting socks from it.






I am insanely happy with this yarn (even though I could have added more plying twist in a few places, and even though the colours from the three plies don't exactly match up).





The different colours and the mixing of them, however, make for interesting patterning.





And I'm looking forward to the time when both socks will show a share of green and blue...


because at the moment, it looks a bit as if I were knitting one sock each from two different wools.





I don't really mind, though. I am very happy watching my hand-spun wool knit up, and looking forward to having new socks at an unspecified time in the future.

There are a few never-ending things in my life. The Neverending Spinning Experiment, for instance. Or the Neverending Quest for a Publisher for the English Version of my thesis (though there is some movement on that front recently, I have not given up!)

Now, I'm thinking of adding one more item to the list: the Neverending Skew Socks. Skew is a pattern that was published in Knitty back, oh, about four years ago.

It clicked with me straight away. Now, I'm not a big knitter, and I'm not fast, but I like socks. So I ventured out to knit me a pair of Skew socks... and found, quite quickly, that they do not fit my foot. At all. My instep is way too high for them as written.

However - I wanted those socks. Really badly. So I ripped back and fiddled and thought and measured and math-ed some and then some more, and at last I came up with a method that worked. I knit a pair of socks and placed the instructions to the side - for later use.

Time passed, our vacation came up, and I wanted to take some knitting - something small, half-mindless, and nice. I typed off the pattern and took a ball of sock yarn. I knit and knit... and there was that bit in the pattern where I wondered, huh, that looks a bit weird... but I knit on.

Back home, I found that I had skipped into the wrong line when typing the hand-written pattern into the computer. So I ripped back... both socks (two-at-a-time magic loop). Quite a bit. And I knit that part again... correctly, this time. And progressed into the part that I had had almost finished before.

Then I proceeded into the heel part. I knit a bit, and then some more, and then some more... but not much more before I realised that something was decidedly wrong. I was missing stitches. Not only 6 stitches (as before) - this time, it was twenty of them. Now, 20 stitches at sock gauge... that's a lot. A freaking lot.

I went to look for the missing stitches. Had I skipped a section when copying the pattern? Nope. After a goodly while of checking, I found it... I had written a sequence of pattern lines into my hand-written notes, marked them and smeared something like "This!" at their side... but not crossed out or corrected the old version. The old version that had, you guessed it, 20 fewer stitches. And when copying the notes, I had not looked beyond the valid-looking set of instructions...

So the next step in my Skew journey: Correct my digitised instructions, print them out again, and rip back both socks (again, gah!) to where the mini-gusset increase starts. Sigh. The Neverending Skew Socks. If only they weren't so funny...

I'm still feeling a little swamped by work, though pleasantly so - things are coming up that might mean really interesting projects in the future, there's some progress on the writing front (though there's never, ever as much as I'd like) and I may have figured out a way to find out whether the yarn I have is enough for a knitting project.


A good while ago, a relative gifted me with her old knitting stuff - an assortment of yarns, and among that three packages that were once intended for a sweater, pullover, cardigan or whatever you might name it. Now due to a lot of different reasons (most of them related to shape - my shape), I am not going to knit a given sweater pattern as written. I prefer a zipper to a button band (I'm just not a button person), I am probably going to shorten the whole piece so the hem falls where I want it, I am also probably going to shorten the arms, and I might fiddle with other elements. And the size - I normally fall between sizes.

With all these alterations, though, and yarn that is not available anymore (and not listed in Ravelry), how am I going to figure out whether it is enough yarn for the project? There's lots of guidelines on how much one needs, but somehow I don't trust them.

So here's a different possibility (that I hope will work out well):
Knit a swatch. (You wanted to anyways, right?) This should be at least the typical swatch size, as in at least 12 x 12 cm (or 5 x 5 inch) to let you measure the gauge correctly (since that may be necessary knowledge for altering the pattern). Do whatever you plan to do with the finished piece - wash it, feed it to the dog, ... you know the drill. (At least theoretically, I'm sure you know it.)

Then you calculate the area in cm² that your swatch has. You might want to leave out the very edges to be on the safe side - so 11.5 x 11.5 cm on a swatch that actually measures 12 on each side. Then you put it onto a good kitchen scale - diet scale will be a good idea, probably. You now have two numbers.

Next, you can roughly calculate the area in cm² that your finished piece will have. A sweater will typically consist of one body (roughly a tube) and two sleeves (also roughly a tube). For these calculations, I just took the widest width of the body part and the total length to calculate the body surface area and the upper arm width and desired sleeve length to calculate the sleeve surface area. (Don't forget that you will need two sleeves!)

Now you can divide the complete sweater surface area by the swatch surface area. This tells you how many swatches would be equivalent to your sweater. Now you multiply the swatch weight by this number, and you get an approximate finished weight for the sweater. (Approximate because shaping, armholes and neckline are not considered.) Compare that to the weight of your available yarn... and if your yarn weight is greater or equal, you should be good to go.

Somehow it seems as if winter (or at least the colder months) are my main knitting time - though judging from the output, you would not suspect that.

On my (small, but existent) pile of unfinished objects lies a pair of socks with shadow-knit cats and an almost finished pinwheel sweater. The socks are millimetering towards being done (inching would be too fast, you see?), but the sweater has been huddled into a heap, abandoned, for oh-so-long now.

I'm still in love with the concept of the pinwheel sweater (you take a round blanket, stick two sleeves in, and wear it), but even though I tried on a friend's version of it, I'm not at all happy with mine. It's knit in bulky yarn which may have been a bad choice, since that makes it really heavy; and in this version, it just does not fall right for me. It doesn't.

So I have decided to frog it. And now I've stumbled across a very nice how-to-fit-a-sweater tutorial that helps with choosing flattering projects. So I'll look for another thing, better suited to my shape and figure, to knit... some of these days, this means, I will sit down and cast on something. (And if I'm good, I will finish the socks first.)

For those of you who would like to insert zippers into your knitting but do not want to sew them in, I can recommend going to Techknitter's blog and taking a look at her solution... nifty.

Speaking of knitting: My pair of Alice's illusion socks is actually nearing their point of completion. I am planning very, very much on finishing them before New Year (or I will have been dragging them around for more than one year).
Somehow, this shows how little knitting I have managed to do this year. I hope next year will be a bit better, or one day I'll run out of socks...

A friend pointed me to the existence of a small book called "The Manly Art of Knitting", written by Dave Fougner. It seems to be available used only, and that to a steep price - 90+ USD from the Big River Store, at least.

However, for those of you just curious about the contents, like me, with no actual need to buy it, there's a very nice review on the Historic crafts blog. (They have since moved to a new location, here on blogspot, and it looks like a nice blog, but unfortunately with no new posts done during the last year.)

Anyways - manly art of knitting. The book appears to contain instructions on how to knit a hammock, among other things (I like that idea). A hammock would be just the thing to lie in during this summer heat we have here (though that would also mean we'd need two conveniently spaced trees... which are not to be had in our garden).

Other (not so manly) links - on Medieval Silkwork, there's a post about female undergarments in written sources.

And I should be working on my article now, the deadline is looming up...