I'm blogging late because I have been busy proofreading and correcting the knitting pattern for the spirally slouchy hat! There are totally amazing people on Ravelry who have test-knit the hat for me, provided wonderful feedback and been very, very patient with my maths glitches (oops!).

So if nobody reports a last-second problem, the pattern will go live tonight or tomorrow morning - and it will be available for purchase from here, from my website and from the Ravelry store. And I am totally excited about this!

Here is a preview of the hat, graciously modeled by Christiane from www.aecht-fraenkisch.de:

This is where (and what) I'm currently at:

That is the Seriously Slouchy Spirally Hat (or does Slouchy Seriously Spirally Hat sound better? I can't decide...) all knitted, waiting for bind-off. In this picture, you are looking at the inside of the hem. The lower edge is folding up to give a nice, scalloped lower edge to the hem, and then it roughly looks like this before binding off:



It's made with a contrasting band and bind-off at the lower edge. The funny wobbly-crumply shape is the hat in its pre-blocking state - this pattern really needs some blocking after it is finished. It will look a lot better and much more impressive after bind-off and blocking, I promise. (And I also promise you a picture.)

This very hat, though, needs to be bound off first. Which is what I'm going to do now.

And then I only have to wait for the pattern testers to deliver their feedback to get the pattern ready for publishing. Hooray!

After all the paperweight is off my back for a while ( it will be time for taxes soon - more paperwork), here are some things that are not really spectacular, but give me a nice feeling of something actually moving forwards.

First of all, these dropped-off stitch markers

  - and yes, I use bits of knotted silk thread and an old, single earring - these dropped-off markers mean that I have progressed on my second slouchy hat (with better maths for the hem this time),



and am now almost into the first round of ribbing. This means slipping half the stitches to a holder and knitting the other half. Just what happens here:


Then, there's that other idea that I have had. And now I am swatching - not spectacularly either:


But other things have happened, too. Non-knitting things. Like this:


This is where the seam on the tent is today. Which is almost one metre from where it was yesterday in the early evening, and that means actually almost two metres of stitching done, half by me and half by the most patient man that lives on Earth (I'm sure he must be the most patient man on earth, after all, he lives with me). Only a few metres to go on that first bit! And it looks as if there would be sewing time tonight as well. And tomorrow.

And finally... something spectacularly unspectacular.


They have been fired for a while and are now finally in my workspace. "They" are the ceramic disks that are supposed to go on an equally unspectacular stick and there to serve as a spinning whorl.
For those of you who are not recognising these whorls, originally they were made as the reference whorl of the Textilforum Experiment, and they got a lot of praise for running extremely well. However, the experiment whorls were not intended to be sold, and they were purely functional, including all rough edges and unsmoothed surfaces. These are made for actual use - with smooth edges and smooth surfaces. The whorls are made from modern clay, and with a modern technique - I'm using a specially-made little cookie-cutter-like implement. But that modern procedure is what makes them exactly alike and as close as humanly possible to the weight and MI of the original 12th century whorl, which is what we needed for the experiment. I will weigh them today to make sure they are all on a par, and then they are going into the Marketstall tomorrow.

More proofreading today. Why on earth did I write so much? Yesterday didn't go so well in terms of reading progress, so I'm hoping for a much better "pages done" number today.

Inbetween and to keep me motivated, I'm knitting a second version of the slouchy hat to test the new maths for the hem/brim part. My prototype hat does fit, but only after vigorous blocking of the hem, which was not what I had originally intended to need - but I wanted that hat, and I wanted to wear it, and if it could be made to fit... well. I am (obviously) very, very much a product knitter, not a process knitter, though I do enjoy the process.
I'm working the new hat in much bulkier wool than the prototype, plant dyed by Sabine in a beautiful, beautiful orange that makes you wonder every second whether it's a friendly, warm and light earthy hue or a sparkling bright dot of colour... and that makes it very, very pleasant to work with. (In addition to that, I am very happy to find that thicker wool on larger needles really knits up much quicker than fine wool on fine needles - even if I still knit slowly, tightly and on smaller needles than recommended for the wool thickness.)

Meanwhile, back in the lair...
In addition to proofreading and several instances of planning going on in the background, I have finished the hat which is currently blocking (oh why does blocking take so long!) and looks very funny in its being-blocked state; the pattern has been updated and supplied with some more instructions for the fancy parts; photos have been taken of some bits of the process; and if the hat fits perfectly after blocking (which I hope very much), I will be a very, very content knitter.

Proofreading has also progressed nicely, though I have some last pages to read (and the images to look at). And I have caught up with things far enough to start getting back on track with plans for next season's market stall additions... which means a library day. Which means coffee with a good friend in the break. After I did my batch of proofreading...

However, while I am looking at black letters on white paper, I can glance up and see the hat being blocked (and hopefully drying extra-fast), and you can have a look at it, too:

Somehow, during the last few days, I've been saying "oh I'm so blogging this" to a medium-sized bunch of things, only to forget what I wanted to blog about by the next morning when I sat down to actually blog. Well.

I am, however, blogging this, because it's blue and teal and nice and I like nice blue and teal things:


Which is part of a hat I'm currently knitting. Or, to be more precise, part of the lower edge of a hat I am currently knitting. Which will hopefully be finished and blocked and fitting me well and flattering me and keeping my head warm and my ears extra-toasty very soon. (And just in time for the next cold period, since I already missed the first one due to too-slow knitting.)
If it does all of the above, I do intend to have the pattern (yes, I did make a pattern) test-knit and if test knitters don't all run away screaming telling me that is totally not possible, I do intend to publish it on Ravelry.

Oh, and you don't even have to knit a swatch for the pattern. Or graft. (Guess which parts of the knitting process are not my favourites?)

Somehow I have the feeling that blogging has gotten a little unhinged with all the gaps and holidays during the last weeks - I can't really remember any red thread running through the last time (except those off-blog), there's not much interesting going on here work-wise because I'm still in the taking-things-back-out-of-boxes phase. Well, there are two interesting things going on: Thing number one, we now have bought enough additional shelves that I can take the rest of my books (the work-related books!) out of their boxes and start the process of arranging things on the shelf space, and thing number two, I'm reading the first proof of the thesis-going-book. Nothing spectacular that is good to make a juicy blog post about, though!

But meanwhile, I have received a lot of interesting info bits in the mail or found it on the net.

So, in the hopes of getting back on track with things, here's an info dump...

There will be an international conference and exhibition about natural dyes in France, 2011: the conference webpage.

In March 2009, I gave a little interview for one issue of Huscarl On Air, the radio show from Huscarl, which is a forum and online magazine for the living history scene in Austria. The whole radio show is in German, but if you can understand spoken German, the podcast of this issue has recently been uploaded, and you can get it here.

There is a new database for radiocarbon-dated textiles, hosted by University of Bonn: "An on-line database for 14C-dated textiles (from early times until the end of 1rst millennium AD) is about to be finished. It is undertaken by the Dept. of Christian Archaeology of Bonn university
(Sabine Schrenk [responsible], Frank Albert, Anne-Sophie Lüttge; programmed by Eberhard and
Jan Orzekowsky), in collaboration with the KIK IRPA in Brussels (Mark van Strydonck). "
The makers of the database are actively soliciting data for their project. The database (and all relevant contact info, including a form to get your museum's data into the database) can be found at www.textile-dates.info. I think such a database is an absolutely wonderful idea!

And a last personal aside, I have finally caved and subscribed to Ravelry (because it irked me much too much that I would find patterns or photos referenced, but could not take a look at them). If you want to find me there, I go under the moniker "katrinknits" (yes, I know, very imaginative).