I am wrestling with Excel, and it is winning. I have not yet made it to the breakthrough in R (I think I need someone to teach me R for dummies, as I am somehow shattering on the most basic things, like importing an Excel workbook with several sheets and saving that as a dataframe) but I need some quick results. Not much, mind you; not the full analysis... but at least something. Something! And I would know how to get it! But... I have made the mistake of saving the formulas in one workbook, and now I need them in another one. And due to the perverseness of my system, and that of Excel, and that of the worksheets... I get an out-of-memory error every time. No, the workarounds all do not work. Yes, I have tried them all (at least all that I could find). Arrr...


And since two people posed the same question yesterday: From what I remember of Swedish coffee (real Swedish coffee drunk in Sweden, from a cafe or a selling point for caffeinated hot drinks) they are large, they are strong (but not overly so) and they are delicious to my taste - with neither too much acidity nor too much bitterness. Not like the thing we termed "Swedish coffee" at the Forum - though of course there are different strength and quality coffee experiences to be found in any country.
German plain coffee roasts often have a tendency to be quite acidic, and the sourness is something I neither like nor can stomach well, so I am fond of the "milder" kinds of beans here, and I generally prefer the fancy coffees with lots of milk (latte macchiato, anyone?). And the coffee I tasted in the Czech Republic was not really acidic, but always quite, quite strong, plus the beans and/or roast and extraction must have been different, since it was very bitter (at least to my taste).
Your coffee-when-traveling observations are very welcome in the comments - I'd be interested to hear what experiences you have had!

If you are interested in Vikings and Viking Archaeology, you probably know that there is L'Anse aux Meadows, a Norse or Viking settlement in Canada. This was the first, and up to now only, known proof for the arrival of the Norse in Vinland (that's how they seem to have called the fabled continent way, way over the sea).

Now I have stumbled over an article published in National Geographic, and there is a second settlement where finds very, very strongly indicate that it was not made by indigenous population. The finds are from Baffin Island, in Canada, far above the Arctic Circle and north of Hudson Bay. Archaeologist Patricia Sutherland looked at the finds, made in the 1980s by a missionary, in the archive of a museum in Quebec in 1999 - and found out that the yarn which was part of the finds is a match for thread finds from the Norse colony in Greenland. Since the indigenous people of Baffin Island did not spin, this is the first very strong hint it was a Norse colony.

Recent excavation in the place seem to corroborate this - they found whetstones. But isn't it nice that the yarn finds opened up the way?

On the website of Uni Innsbruck, there is a nice little spindle typology. It's bilingual, and it includes sub-sites with pictures and descriptions of spindles from about all around the world, plus some additional picture galleries.

If you enjoy looking at spindles, that site is really worth a visit!

I've mentioned the new Lab for Experimental Archaeology quite a bit on this blog already, mostly in context with the Textile Forum, and I hope to have reasons to mention it in the future at least as often. It's a wonderful concept that fits in perfectly with the Textile Forum and with a lot of the work regarding spinning and textile techniques that I have been doing, merging crafts knowledge and practical craft with scientific methods and archaeological research.

The LEA consists of two big workshop rooms, one of them fitted with installation for blacksmith work. It will have a special kiln for firing ceramics, there's a laboratory extractor hood for stuff you don't want to breathe, a smallish but comfy kitchen to eat, drink, and merrily conspire or read papers, a work/lab room that fits three desks and several cabinets with lab equipment and glassware, the office for the two people running the whole thing, a separate hall for papers, seminars or other things needing a large indoor space, and very generous space outdoors, partly graveled and covered, partly open. All rooms (well, except for the office, obviously) are multi-purpose, with lots of moveable furniture and moveable equipment to be able to make space where it is needed. And those working or researching a project can be housed directly at the lab: There are two bedrooms, each sleeping up to five persons, with lockers for valuables, and the necessary sanitary installations. Altogether, the place feels very welcoming too.

I've already posted that the opening was a big success, as was the experiment we did, which we hope to present at a conference as soon as possible. Meanwhile, you can have your own look at the premises of LEA (at least some of them) and at the things that happened at the opening weekend. A local TV station sent a team to film the opening, and here it is:



Both linked things (the LEA page and the film) are in German, but you can just look at the pictures... and you will see me spinning in the film as well!

Yesterday afternoon, I got to have half an hour of quality time with my favourite hand-spindle - one of my spindle sticks and a whorl that I bought somewhere, ages ago, and that remains my firm favourite for about any hand-spindle spinning tasks I get.

The results? Half an hour of concentrated spinning with spindle (and distaff, naturally, need I even mention that?) yielded 23.5 metres of worsted yarn.

Here's the two little balls of yarn side by side:


Next up: doing the same with my treadled spinning wheels...

I did the first of the spinning output tests yesterday, using the Great Wheel. I had settled on trying for half an hour spinning for each test, and that was quite enough for untrained me on the Great Wheel.

To have the material as alike as possible I will be using industrially prepared Merino top for all the tests (at least four of them, one with each spinning implement). That is, naturally, nothing really spinn-able for the Great One, so I transformed a portion of it into rolags for long-draw first, using my hand-cards.

And the result of half an hour spinning were 64.5 m of yarn (which would add up to 129 m per hour). I aimed for rather thin yarn (to match what I will be doing with the other tools) and for rather high twist (since that is historically more correct than low twist), and once the spinning tests are all done, I plan on plying each sample to have them in a more stable condition - I want to take them with me for demonstrations.

So. When you are reading this, please keep in mind that they are all very, very squishy figures - it's just one spinner, my tools and their quality are unknown to you as is my proficiency with each tool, and you only have my word that the wheel is functioning quite well and that I have not had much practice at all yet with the Great Wheel. (All of which, by the way, are reasons this post is not labeled Experimental Archaeology!)

A good while ago, I posted about the time I needed to ply close to 600 m of yarn on my old, small foot-driven spinning wheel.

That little wheel, bought during my teenage years, was sold to me as a young girl's spinning wheel. I learned how to use it, I learned a lot about wheels on and through it, I dragged it around and I spun and spun. But it's a small wheel with, accordingly, a rather slow spinning ratio. And with the years, I wanted to spin more strongly twisted yarns, and thin very high-twist yarns, and do so faster than the little wheel would allow me to, even when treadling very fast.

So I started to keep my eyes peeled for a production wheel, and finally decided to buy a double-drive wheel, second-hand, from a Finnish producer who had long gone out of business. And this weekend, I started tuning it - replacing the whorl with a new, much smaller one (thus upping the ratio from drive wheel to whorl) and glueing additional discs to the spool to bring that ratio up too and really close to the whorl ratio. (Really close, in my case, meaning nominally1:1 for the bigger of the new discs and almost 1:1 for the smaller one.) The fastest setting needs a little more running in, or a little more tweaking, but it does work already, and the slower setting works really nicely already and will yield a spinning output of high-twist yarn, my usual thickness, of about 120 m/hour according to my first tests. Spinning output, that is, not plying output. And I am planning on doing those speed tests... soon.