It's time to throw some unsorted links at you again. Most of the stuff is in German - sorry for those of you who don't read it, but they are just too interesting to pass them up.

Anke Domaske is making fibres from milk that is leftover and spoiled - a brilliant example of upcycling, to put it that way. The fibres are versatile, and are getting used in a variety of ways already. (Article in German.)

Archäologentage 2018 are taking place April 12-15, and the topic is Migration. More information can be found here (info material in German and French).

Christa Schwab has tried to find out a good mixture for making a vegetarian sausage after a medieval recipe. You can read more about what she did, and how it worked, over at her blog (in German, but with pictures).

More food-related stuff - remains of Iron-Age feasting, or at least eating, have been found at the Cairns broch, Orkney, Scotland.

Not recent, but still interesting: an article about traditional Icelandic embroidery, via Medievalists.net.

It looks like there might be a cure for the Varroa mite problem that is threatening the European Honey Bees - I do hope that this will be a full success. (Article is in German.)

Sometimes, your colleagues have surprising hobbies - one of my archaeology colleagues, for instance, writes music and sings. In this case, an eulogy on a house from 1534 that was recently demolished. It's in English, too.

Also in English: Some new research on one of the tablet-woven bands from Hallstatt (Halltex 152) by Maikki Karisto, together with Mervi Pasanen and Karina Grömer. Mervi's blogpost includes the new pattern draft.

Textilis has a study of knitting sheaths from North Yorkshire.

And that's it for today - finally a few less tabs open in the brower!

It's a bit colder again outside, even though there was more sunshine to make up for it. I'm a little tired and a lot busy with all kinds of writing-related work, which sucks all the creativity out of my brain, so instead of a nice proper blogpost, you are getting today:

One gratuitous Cat Picture.

Here you go:

The inner bag is made from a bright green fleece fabric, consisting of a bottom circle and a fabric tube.



The upper rim of the tube has a stiff black band sewn onto it to keep it open. That whole thing was then stuck into the lion inside the foamed rubber tube, and secured to the bottom of the lion skin in the front and the back.

Then, a bit of the polywool filling went back in, at the front and at the sides of the little guy, to get him back into his rotundish shape.



As a final step, I sewed a band to the sides of the opening for easy carrying, and then stitched the fleece to the outer fabric in the front and to the pocket lining in the back. Two press buttons to close the top of the head when not in use as a bouldering bag, a bit of rubber string that helps the pocket lining to fold when closing the bag, and voilà - a very unique chalkbag:





When closed, it almost looks like before; the only difference is that the forehead is more receding now than it was originally - but that cannot be helped.

Can you tell I had a lot of fun making this?

Some scrounging around, and I got hold of a flexible strip of plastic that was large enough to bend into a ring - there was the necessary stiffener. After temporarily fixing it with tape, a few drilled holes and some kevlar sewing thread (yes, we have kevlar sewing thread, and it's really nifty!) make sure it will not fall apart in the future.



The ring is attached to the top of the tube with linen yarn and whipstitch. Of course I ran out of yarn three stitches before the round was closed...

Then it was almost done. Almost... but not quite. There's some nice, bright green colour missing, I think!

So the first thing the little limp lion now needed was some sort of lightweight stiffener for the chalkbag itself. Coincidentally, we had some foamed rubber lying around, so that got conscripted, cut into a fitting wide strip, and sewn together to make a tube.



You can see the lion is so excited about this that it has turned itself inside out! It was a very nicely made toy, by the way, with neat and sturdy seams all around.

The inner tube needed to be fixed to the inside of the lion to make sure it stayed in place. Some of that fixing was achieved with a few stitches right at the befginning, the rest was done by stitching the fleece liner to the bottom of the lion skin.

Next step was sewing and attaching a pocket to the inside of the lion's back. This also serves as lining for the inner back. The pocket is big enough to hold a phone, which is important as our friend likes to take his phone along and snap a pic or two when he's bouldering.



While mucking about with the lining, it quickly became clear that the foamed rubber will provide enough stiffness vertically, but that the opening would deform too easily... so some stiffening for the upper rim was needed, too.

You'll see that one attached... in the next post!

Last summer, I took home a plushy toy rat, and it miraculously turned into a chalkbag for bouldering.

A few days ago, a friend of ours, also a climber/boulderer, had his birthday... and just before the party, we found, by chance, this cuddly little lion in a shop:



It more or less screamed "miraculous transformation" at us. So our friend got a cuddly toy, and a voucher for its total transformation into a chalkbag. And this time I took a few more pictures of the things happening to it.

First of all, it had a little head surgery, opening up the seams on the top of the head, and then it lost its polywool filling.



Yes, all of it.

It was a huge bag full of filling... and then we had this limp little lion:



So. Things you want to have in a chalkbag? Space for the chalk itself, obviously; that should be some bag-like thing that closes off tightly to prevent dust from coming out, and should be fleecy on the inside, again to cut down on dust.

It also needs a handle of some kind to be carried easily, something to hold a brush or two, and some pocket to put in other small items.

Brush holders, in this case, were easy, as the little arms were already threaded with  elastic, so all I had to do was sew the paws to the body. The rest was a little more work... which you'll see in the next post.

I've finally gotten around to testing the 3D cake mould that we got presented with years and years ago... which bakes a little moose.

My mum has a rabbit mould (well, actually an easter bunny mould) and we used to make a bunny at easter, usually as a marble cake. These 3D forms are, though, usually rather small and I'm normally baking cakes that are... large. However, circumstances have aligned and it was time to try out a new chocolate cake recipe, and that in turn was sort of the instigator to also try out the mould.

As the instructions demand, I did butter it carefully, and it came out nicely when it had cooled:

[caption id="attachment_3603" align="alignnone" width="428"] Still in the second half of the mould...


[caption id="attachment_3602" align="alignnone" width="482"] It's out!


And because everything chocolatey is better with even more chocolate, I decided to coat it with choc. When finished, it looked like this:



The eyes are slices of cashew nuts, and the antlers have a lighter colour because I mixed a spoonful of peanut butter into the hot chocolate. Which is, by the way, utterly delicious.

Now we'll see how it tastes, and then I will decide if that recipe stays or goes...