The latest delivery of spindle whorls has arrived - just in time, as I was running low on some of the weight ranges. It's always making me happy to sort the new whorls into stock...

...and then send them off to new homes, one by one, as they get ordered. There's quite often some rummaging when I get requests for a specific shape or colour, or for both - so I might dive into the stash and not just the sorting boxes, but the boxes are very handy, and are also what travels with me when I go to a fair or market. Very handy - and it saves searching through a big box of whorls and weighing them several times!

 Insight of the day? My website is rather large, taken everything together (the years of blogging, with images, have added up, and so do the shop pictures). Which means that if I take backups of the site (a good thing), I should sort of keep an eye on where I put them, and at some point delete them again.

I've been pretty good at doing that on the website/server itself, as there's limited space available there and I would have run out long ago otherwise. Not so good at keeping track of the backup backlog and buildup on my computer itself, where I'll pull older backups (but not so very old) before deleting them from the server, just in case. Or, when there's a larger change on the website coming up or a migration is necessary, I'll pull backups down and do a local install. 

Migrations and larger changes usually mean a generous number of backups, too. And I've been rather happy to close the thing after getting everything up and running when I did those larger changes... which means that the backups stayed in their little corner of my computer. No problem and nothing wrong with keeping them for a month or two, mind you, until it's clear that everything is running smoothly with the new setup.

However... after a month or two, I'd totally forget about having them. Until I've recently come across some, neatly and nicely labelled (as opposed to others) and realised how much space they are eating up, all of them combined.

So I've been doing a bit of maintenance on the side. Just in case you now feel like that might be something you should maybe do, here's my two favourite tools for finding and deleting stuff that has served its purposes:

WizTree - this scans your drive and sorts folders by how much space they take up. There's also a nice visual to quickly show you what you have, and how large individual folders and the files therein are. 

Anti-Twin - this looks for duplicate files and lets you remove them (either by selecting them manually, or by folder, or other criteria). It has not been updated since 2012, but it's still downloadable and does work with Windows 10, and according to the site also Windows 11.

As always, make sure you know what you're doing before deleting things - but don't be like me and hold on to ten year old double backups, just in case! ; ) 

Lead is, as probably everybody knows, a toxic metal - so it's not an utterly good idea to use it where it's not absolutely necessary. 

It was, however, widely used in a lot of places throughout history, because it's not only toxic, it's also very useful for a lot of things. Lead is soft and malleable, it can stand a lot of stress before breaking (it stretches instead), it makes a nice white (lead white), and it has a very low melting point - all things that led to lead being used for projectiles, water pipes, roofing, ceramic glazes, lead crystal, stained glass windows, and a plethora of other stuff (fuel additive, if you're looking for a rather modern example...).

Today, there's good replacements for lead about everywhere. However, in some instances in conservation and restoration, lead can still be a critical element, without a good replacement. Sometimes matching the original materials is crucial to prevent unwanted reactions between the original and the reconstructed parts. 

However, due to the toxicity, there's the plan to ban lead completely from being used, in all of Europe. This has been petitioned against by conservators. One of the issues is the primary ban of lead, the second issue is the very hard limits on lead "pollution" in the workspace. The petition, which is supported by German conservators, is currently running and on the EU portal. You can support it by signing it (that will require you to register, for free, on the portal) - and I'd be delighted if you would do so, and spread the word to other people too!

The petition on the EU portal can be found here, under 0724/2023. You can read more about the petition in German on the page of the Verband deutscher Restauratoren. 

It's really interesting, and a little funny, how sometimes things come back into play that were done for quite different reasons, and a good while ago. Just like today, when I had a phone chat with a colleague and it turned to the topic of looms, and building looms.

That is a topic that I would like to get into a bit more, especially the early medieval horizontal looms. I've had chats with a number of weavers over time, and apparently there's a lot of different loom types, and they will behave quite differently and stress the yarns in different ways, so it would be extremely interesting to try and find out what would be best suited for medieval fabrics.

And now I am pondering how much one needs to know about looms and weaving to be able to build a loom. Is it sufficient to have good, exact plans for a functioning loom? Are there good, exact plans for a functioning loom? Or is it more a project where you'd need to adjust things no matter how elaborate your plans are, and have to know exactly what you are doing, and why, for it to work?

I've had issues with getting tools made before, when the tool-maker was good at their job, but did not know enough about the function of the tool. In my experience, it's unfortunately rather common for craftspeople to make adjustments to the instructions or measurements that you have given them, and that is rarely to the benefit of the tools' functionality afterwards. 

For a warp-weighted loom, there's not too many things that are crucial for the function, and I think I could list all of them without too much trouble. It's a relatively simple tool, after all. But I would not be as positive about knowing what to look out for when building a horizontal loom. And now there's that itch in the back of my brain saying... What would it be? How difficult would it be? How many tries would be necessary to make a good one?

Probably a good thing I don't have the space for a loom here, or the ambition to have one. Otherwise, that woodworking workshop in the basement might be very tempting!

Happy New Year, dear readers of this blog - I hope you had a good end of the last one and a glorious start into this year! Mine was partly spent with a rather obnoxious cold, so there was a bit more sneezing and a lot more sleeping than I had planned for.

Of couse I'm well again in time to get back to work... timing, right? But it's nice and interesting work that I'm getting back to, so that is definitely on the pro side. (Well, mostly nice and interesting - I just remembered there's tax paperwork to file in the next few weeks, too...)

There's also planning for some conferences and events in the current year. I will be at the Nadelwelt again in May, and then there's the NESAT conference in May as well. The museum in Syke plans a Bronze Age weekend event in August, where I will show things... but the next thing coming up is the Knitting History Forum conference on February 3. 

I will talk about spinning, twist, and its influence on knitting at that event, and some bits for that paper are still in the works. So here's a sneak peek for you:

These are knit from the same wool, spun once in z and once in s, with two threads held together (not plied). I've done this before, the not-plied-thing, with rather... interesting results once it got washed. This time, I'm also going to see about the differences in spin direction, including the visual ones. Next up will be the same knitting, but with plied yarns instead of yarns held parallel.

(I was hoping for the two bits to turn out the same size, but alas, the threads of one were a bit thinner than the others, or else I messed up the tension. Ah well.)

If you're interested in the outcome, consider joining the conference! It's online only, so you can attend from wherever you are. More about it, including the programme and the link to get tickets, can be found on the conference website. 

NESAT will be taking place again next year - and I'm so very much looking forward to it already! It's always a wonderful opportunity to go somewhere and meet up with old and new colleagues. If you're not familiar with this conference, NESAT stands for "North European Symposium for Archaeological Textiles" and was started to make textile archeologists feel less lonely once in a while.

This means every three years - last one was the virtual conference (due to Covid) in Oulu, Finland, but now we're looking to meet up in person in Poland for the next one. To my great delight, the paper about membrane gold threads that Tracy and I have proposed was accepted, so we'll be able to talk about our project there in May!

In case you're interested, you can learn more about the upcoming conference, and the past ones, on their webpage. Registration is also open now until end of February.

Today's been mostly spent with odds and ends - packing away stuff, trying to sort out some more of the Textile Forum backlog (as in doing some colour documentation/checking and putting away the dried lake we made from the used-up dyebaths), packing up things to go into the post... and then realising that I'm about to run out of stock with the brass pins.

So I made some more. 

It's fun to make these, and it definitely got easier with practice. Also I find that getting exactly the "right" amount of windings cut off (which is two, not one and not three) is the optimum for going forward.

More windings are harder to get onto the shaft - and less than two increases significantly the probability that the head will not sit firmly enough on the shaft. So that, for me, is definitely a good set of reasons to try and get them headed just like the originals...