The cat is sleeping on my desk again. It must be a wonderful place to sleep (maybe I should try that some time, too?)

The stock-taking is not quite finished, which is due to things being replenished as I find out I'm running low... and there's no sense in counting up things like the spinning pack before making some more, right? (They are counted now. I did make some more. Next up: More tablet weaving cards. And more spindle whorls...)

Humid weather means that washed wool takes an extra-long time to dry out far enough so that it can be packed away safely. Sigh. It's not looking like the humidity will go down soon here... plus the frame I'm using to dry the washed wool on is slowly disintegrating more and more. I might need to make another one. Or find out how to fix the old one. In a way that works better, and lasts longer, than my previous attempts to fix it.

There's actual palpable progress on the Renaissance Shawl knitting - it stayed at home while I was away on holidays, but I've happily taken up work on it again. I'm now almost past the part that I find the most boring one on this piece - the gridwork below the big holes.


It's not getting less boring by the fact that I added more leaves in the previous parts - as that means more holes. And thus more gridwork. It does look spectacular, though:


Well. It would look even better fully blocked... but that will take a little more time. I'm planning to switch back to the nightblue yarn after this grid bit is done. Then it's just one more chart to go, plus the bind-off - and the shawl will be done!

(After that... I have this wool for a sweater project all stashed up. I sense a sweater in my future.)

First of all: Poppies!


These guys are trying to take over the garden, and I actually do not mind at all...

 
And now a few links:

Jim Hines has done some gender-swapping of texts from classical SFF works, and a corresponding blog post about the differences between writing men and women.

If you need a geeky t-shirt for the summer, getdigital has a selection of geeky and nerdy stuff like this "Batoro T-Shirt", printed on fair-trade organic grown cotton. Yay!

In other news, I've been busy sorting out things, washing wool and making new distaffs. I've also made a bit of progress on the two-colour renaissance shawl:


I've finished with all repeats of chart E (I did one extra), and now I'm slowly working my way through F (who'd have thought?). I have also more or less figured out where I want to change back to the night-blue colour, though there's still a way to go. And I'll have to print out the final chart again, as I have all the other sheets (even though they look... mangled, and sport more than their fair share of stains and notes) only not the last one, which probably got re-purposed at some point.

Now the big question is - will I finish this thing before our summer break? Or not?

I've been knitting along in the evenings, and sometimes during my little afternoon break, and the two-colour shawl is progressing nicely:

[caption id="attachment_2484" align="alignnone" width="640"] Renaissance Shawl, Chart E finished once.


It's a beautiful knit, with a really well-written pattern, and I can memorise the sequences well enough to knit in front of the TV (if it's not too distracting, that is).  There's a second round of the chart E to go according to the pattern, and I will add at least another repeat if not even two for some extra length. I have more than enough yarn for that, and I'm not planning to block it very hard - I want the shawl to be cosy and warm, not lacy and airy. Hence also the sock wool, I do plan to really wear it!

I'm moderately happy with the place that I switched colours in; I could have done it a few rows earlier, in retrospective, that might have been even nicer. But it's non-obvious enough that I am basically switching colours inside a pattern, so I don't mind enough to rip back and re-knit.

[caption id="attachment_2485" align="alignnone" width="640"] Detail of the colour change part - a few rows earlier would have been even nicer...


One of the fun things of lace knitting for me, by the way, is figuring out the return rows. In this pattern, you're supposed to work back in pattern (that is knit all knit stitches and purl all purls), and Anne-Lise writes out the sequence in the pattern to help.

However... I am both lazy and a Combination knitter. Which means that, when I purl back, my stitches are aligned the other way around on the needle - instead of having the right leg of the stitch in front as would be the standard Western way, they have the left leg in front. This is no issue at all if you just knit into the stitch, or purl into it on the next row - you just stick your needle into it the right way, and your stitch will be untwisted and totally normal. It's also a non-issue if you do a standard ssk left-leaning decrease - you don't even need to slip the stitches, as they are already aligned correctly for the decrease. Just stick the needle in and knit both stitches at once.

Where it does become an issue, though, is for the k2tog (or kxtog) decrease. With the standard right-leg-in-front alignment, you just knit both (or x) stitches together. If the alignment is wrong, though, you need to re-align the stitches by slipping them individually and then re-transfer them to the left needle so you can work them together. Or you knit one, re-transfer it to the left needle and slip the other stitch (or x-1 stitches) over the knit one before re-transferring it back to the right.

All these maneuvers tend to annoy me, probably much more than they should. So what I do, instead, is work out where I have kxtog decreases coming up in the next right-side row... and when I'm working the row before that, I do a standard Western purl stitch there and only there. So my pattern sheets now have a lot of pencilled-in notes that look like this: P1, p3, k2, p7, k2, P2, p5, ... where the P with upper case means "do an awkward standard purl" and the lower case means "do the Combined knitting purl".

And this, I can tell you, is fun. At least for me. Because, one, the return row is less boring, and two, there is no re-alignment to be done for any of the decreases, which makes me feel extra-clever and pleases me no end...

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..

I've been showing video snippets of different textile techniques at my sales table at fairs recently (not medieval fairs, obviously, but modern ones), and one of these snippets shows spinning on the Great Wheel. From the comments, this is one of the most interesting bits, if not by far the part that people like to see most - and it is very, very short, so it gets missed frequently.

Yesterday evening, we took advantage of the fair enough weather to shoot a longer sequence of me spinning at the wheel. The videos have made it to my computer by now, but haven't been checked and edited yet (that is something for next week). There were bonus photos, though - and here are some of them:

[caption id="attachment_2458" align="alignnone" width="640"] Spinning the yarn...


[caption id="attachment_2457" align="alignnone" width="640"] ... and winding it onto the spindle.


[caption id="attachment_2456" align="alignnone" width="600"] The cat, meanwhile, remained largely unimpressed. (She did check the rolags at one point, though.)

If you are interested in late medieval embroideries, you might consider a trip to Frankfurt this summer to visit the Städelmuseum. From June 22 to September 25, the museum has a special exhibition called "Heaven on Display" with the stunning liturgical artwork from the convent of Altenberg.

The exhibition features not only the paintings and sculptural art, but also the linen embroidery, with the Altenberg pieces coming together from different museums - from New York to St. Petersburg. Getting all the pieces together again will allow a really outstanding impression of the interplay of the many different media used in early fourteenth-century church furnishing. The Altenberg ensemble is unique in that respect, and I'm definitely planning to go see this.

If you can't make it to Frankfurt, or if you'd like to have a closer look at the individual items first, there's also an accompanying book available, with texts both in German and in English.

Yesterday was a really long day - but it was absolutely, utterly wonderful, and a lot of fun. I left home at 7 in the morning, drove to Darmstadt, set up my table in the museum, and did the demonstration of neolithic textile techniques straight into the afternoon.

Here I am at my table, just before the museum doors open:

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="640"] In the main entrance hall of the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt. The green thing in my hands is a piece of willow bark, freshly stripped from the stem.


A lot of people stopped at my table and asked a lot of questions - including the usual difficult ones that are hard to answer because we have so few textile finds. I had many really interesting chats, and a number of visitors tried their hands at twining bast into cords. Two boys even tried to spin yarn after that (because obviously that must be much, much easier than twining bast - turns out it wasn't).

After the demonstration, I got to take a little stroll around the museum and meet up with a friend to enjoy a nice cup of coffee before driving home again. With the partly rather dense traffic and the oodles of construction sites along the Autobahn, that took a while longer than the same way in the morning, so I arrived home at half past nine - really a long day.

The car now sits in the garage, waiting to be emptied out. Also, I now have a plied bast string that is about 2 metres long... and did I mention that I had a lot of fun, and a wonderful time?