I'm back home from a very big, very interesting fair - the Nadelwelt really was huge! There were a lot of stalls catering to all imaginable needs around modern textile crafting - buttons, bands, patterns (including patterns custom-made or customised to your measurements), threads, clasps, fabrics and inlays, quilting and patchworking ideas, sewing machines, embroidery machines, needles - you name it, it was probably there.

There were also a few other spinners, such as the Handspinngilde, and of course several places selling knitting yarns, though I think Margit was the only one selling naturally dyed yarns - and I was the only stop for historical supplies. We stood out a little with that... as we usually do when at a fair.

I managed not to buy lots of things there, in spite of all the tempting things. I bought a few clasps for stitch markers (I have beautiful handmade glass beads for these)... and, because I really, really don't need any more yarns...


... I at least did my shopping close to home. At home in our own stall, so to say.

I've been in love with Margit's colourway "Kürbis" (pumpkin, guess which one of the colours that is) since I first saw it and realised that I can actually wear that colour. So this time, after hanging out right beside these skeins for two days.. I gave in.

These three guys are going to turn into a two-coloured Renaissance Shawl, and because it's only half as bad to buy more yarn if you do it for a specific project and cast on straight away, I did:


I'm knitting it with 3 mm needles, so it's fairly tight - but I want to actually wear this one, and use it for warmth when needed, so it suits me well. And the yarn is wonderfully cushy and soft. The middle part (with the leaf pattern) will be knit in the wonderfully bright orange Kürbis colour, and the start and end in the nightblue in the picture.

Now I only need more knitting time..

It's amazing how a few days can lead to a huge heap of emails in the inbox, and some increase of length of the to-do-list - but it was wonderful to have these few days off over Easter and spend time with friends as well as outside for some hiking.

Not only emails have piled up, though - there are also a few interesting links that came in during the last few days!

First of all, and very exciting - you might know that the Incans used textiles to keep records: khipus, which are strings marked with knots. The exact method of how these strings were knotted, and how to decipher them, are yet unknown. There's a little hope that this might change, though. In an excavation about 100 km south of Lima, archaeologists have found several khipus in a storage house, in some cases buried under the produce they were possibly documenting. Research on these khipus and how to decipher them is now going on, and the storage khipus might be helpful in deciphering the non-mathematical content of this very special type of textile records.

Also textile-related, but modern: There's a crowdfunding project for a business going on to bring a twisting machine to the Hebrides, helping knitters turn wool singles (spun for tweed weaving) into plied knitting yarns. If you decide to support this and get a reward, you might consider upping your pledge to account for shipping, as my suspicion is that shipping costs and reward materials will cut considerably in what is left after the campaign.

Now it's nose back to the grindstone, the cat is back on the desk "helping" (take your paw off the touchpad, please, little cat), and purring contentedly. Hm. Maybe she'll do some of the email sorting for me?

 

Remember when I said there would be a hat in my future? The future, it has come, and the hat is finished!

I spent a while knitting up the sides, finally reaching the next interesting part - the brim...

[caption id="attachment_2231" align="alignnone" width="640"] Knitting the double-layered brim...


which is folded over and then cast off to make the double layer, using a three-needle bind-off.

[caption id="attachment_2230" align="alignnone" width="640"] Closeup of the brim in progress. The really interesting part is not yet started, though!


Binding off, for me, is always a little weird. I'm sort of feeling three things at the same time - happiness that the item is finally finished (or almost finished, with the end very much in sight), a little bit of sadness that it's over and I don't get to knit longer or more with the lovely yarn, and annoyance because binding off always takes a good long while (or at least it feels that way to me).Then the hat was finished... and looking very blobby.

[caption id="attachment_2229" align="alignnone" width="640"] It's finally finished! Though still looking very unspectacularly and blob-like.


So it went off to take a little bath, and afterwards it became great friends with a dinner plate, and the two got very close and hung out together.

[caption id="attachment_2228" align="alignnone" width="640"] Cute couple, the hat and the plate, right? (The plate is standing on a glass jar, by the way.)


[caption id="attachment_2227" align="alignnone" width="640"] The hat on the plate, seen from the top. I really love these spiral patterns!


And now it's dry... so yay, new hat! And it is still cold enough outside to wear it!

 

I posted a while ago about the exhibition on knitwear used during WWI, but I didn't mention in that short blogpost how the exhibition idea originated. The reason for this knitting project was a film about two young men going off to war. The film is based on a true story of one family.

The film has been all finished now, and it's available through vimeo, where you can either rent or buy it. There's also a trailer (free to watch, of course) that is already featuring quite a few bits and pieces of beautiful knitting.

Speaking of knitting - my own hat knitting has only progressed very little over the weekend. I'm working on the sides of the hat now, and there's still a good bit (about 12 cm or so) to go before I can get started on the brim (which is the most fun part of the whole pattern).

[caption id="attachment_2210" align="alignnone" width="640"] The hat in progress. Sloow progress... as it's often the case for me.


The one single earring in the knitting marks the edge of the flat crown and start of the cylindrical part, the other ones are my usual stitch markers. I really like to use earrings (the small hoop type) as stitch markers - they are small, they are pretty, they are available in different designs so you can mark different spots, they can be opened and all that gives me a perfect excuse to buy some from time to time. (I like the look of them. I even had my ears pierced ages ago, but I'm not a wear-earrings-daily type of person, and wearing them occasionally only always led to pain and infection... so I stopped wearing them altogether, and now I'm getting the earring-fix through knitting.)

Back at the Textile Forum, one of our participants, Micky, brought some of her wool along to sell - and of course, there was the siren song of indigo-dyed wool luring me in. Being utterly fond of anything blue, one skein went home with me... and then it sat there while I was trying hard to decide what to do with it.

[caption id="attachment_2199" align="alignnone" width="592"] One 266 m skein of gorgeous blue wool with a little variegation... hand-dyed.


Now I've figured it out. There will be another Spirally Hat in my future - and I'm already almost past the first stage, thanks to a bit of knitting while watching TV in the evenings:

[caption id="attachment_2198" align="alignnone" width="600"] The upper part is almost done - it still has its little starting belly button, though.


 
Now the big remaining question is: Will I finish the hat before it is too warm outside to wear it?

There is a lovely stack of wonderfully teal-coloured wool sitting around here, waiting to get turned into a sweater:

[caption id="attachment_2175" align="alignnone" width="600"] These two have more friends, of course. One sweater's worth of them.


They're not going to get cuddly and up close to knitting needles just yet, though - there are a few other things that need finishing or taking care of first (such as the sprang thing that is still waiting on its frame, happily, for instance). I've done the swatch already though, and picked out a pattern - the wool will, eventually, turn into a nice cardigan.

Eventually.

Speaking of turning yarns into knitted items, I've been following @WoolsackUK on Twitter for a while now, and one of the recent tweets linked to an article about knitting with a specific technique in Yorkshire, called "swaving". From what the Knitting Genealogist writes on that blog, the technique is lost today - but it does sound like a fascinating field of study. If you're interested in old knitting techniques, you might enjoy that article (and possibly others on the same blog.)

It's the start of February, and Doug has curated all the Blog Carnival entries for the Archaeology Grand Challenges. It's 60+ posts from all over the world, and from a lot of different perspectives - from sex and gender over personal identity challenges to funding, finances, and archaeology and games. If you like to read about archaeology, go check out these blogs - you might find something to put on your reading list!

If you're more interested in knitting, there's a project called "Centenary Stitches" focussing on the knitting done at home for WWI soldiers. The project has also resulted in an exhibition currently being shown at the National Archives in Kew, Surrey (ending March 19).