As spring is creeping in and battling hard with the remainders of the winter, the weather is getting nicer and nicer and season start is rushing towards us, I still have to finish my new market stall. It is coming along - yesterday was bathing day, and the main part of the tent - almost four metres on seven metres - took a hot bath in our tub.

Now that it is getting closer to being a tent, one of the biggest concerns (my German expression of choice would be "die größten Bauchschmerzen" - literally "the biggest stomach ache") is how to get it waterproof. Seriously waterproof.

We bought heavy linen fabric in the hopes of it being waterproof due to its nature - some heavy fabric, pure linen, can soak up water and then get so dense and tight that it can be even used as a bucket. Totally waterproof. Unfortunately, it became very clear very soon that our specimen of heavy linen fabric is not like that. Yes, it is heavy, but the fibres will not swell up enough when soaked in water to get it completely impermeable to water, and thus I need some additional waterproofing method.

And that's my problem. I want to have the tent/stall as accurate as possible, but I will draw a line at non-secure waterproofiness. I need my goods (and myself, but the goods for selling are more important here) to stay dry no matter how hard it rains. And I am willing to compromise if this needs some modern trick - though I would prefer a period way.

So there are some possibilities now that I have already found, among them using linseed oil varnish; using oil paint from linseed oil varnish with a pigment/filler mixed in to paint the tent much as an oil-cloth (with the added bonus of decorative possibilities); using store-bought waterproofing liquids; it would even be a possibility to buy silicone at the hardware store and "paint" the cloth with that. I'm still undecided, I would like to test each of the methods but I am shying away a little from buying all of those things for a small test scrap of fabric, and am generally feeling quite uneasy about this part of the project.
And I'd be very happy about any input that you might be able to give.

After the wonderful planning session in South Tyrol, it's back to the usual, and nose back onto the grindstone. I'm on the last bits of proofreading, having been very diligently reading about all day during the last two days, and I hope to finish today or, at the latest, tomorrow. Thankfully there are more pictures in the catalogue part than in the front bits, which makes reading ten pages go much, much faster.

On the other fronts, there has been some movement as well: The market stall sewing is progressing, and occasionally I even snatch a few minutes for knitting on the current design and planning for the next one. Once the more pressing matters - stall and proof-reading - are done, I hope to get one or two patterns out for test-knitting.

Did I ever feel unsure about being able to fill my time as freelancer?

Here I am, in reading land, working my way through the thesis again. This is the second proofread in preparation of print, and I do hope that nothing untoward will happen with the text when those last corrections and layouting tweaks are done - it would be heavenly if the next step would be for me to happily say "Yes, that's all print-ready, I found nothing more!"

However, I am glad to report that this time around, reading goes much, much faster, since I don't double-check things anymore. And maybe I was utterly out of proofing practice, too. I'm not so sure that I can finish all within the week, but at the moment I'm already a very good way into the stack of printed paper (and I hope that it will go a little faster in the catalogue part, too - with all the pics taking up real estate on the pages).

In other news: I have made the newspaper - there is a little snippet about me in the arts & entertainment section of the regional paper, the "Erlanger Nachrichten". Newspaper articles - or journalistic articles in general - are always an exciting thing in two ways. For one thing, it is of course exciting to be able to tell or show more people about what you do, and maybe why it is so great/important/wonderful, but the second part of the excitement is that you can never be sure if the article will actually sound like you tried to sound.
Well, in this case, I am more than happy with the little piece. I love the writer's voice, and I think he did a wonderful job in writing it. The article is online, and you can have a look at it here. If you don't read German, there's at least a photo for you.

In other other news: I'm still bitten by the knitting bug, I now have more knitting needles thanks to my parents (and splendid ones, too) and I have a new brainfart that is being translated into knitting. With an allover stitch pattern, lots of delicious maths*, beautiful curves and an almost-totally-invisible decrease that mesh together perfectly, I am totally excited about this. The knitting is coming along nicely, the pattern is a tingling mixture of relaxing and interesting, and I hope to have it up for testknitting soon. For those really obsessed with symmetry, there will even be a "perfect symmetry" option. (Which I am not using for the prototype, by the way: For once I actually decided to not do everything at once and in the hardest possible way.)

*Maybe I should mention right here that knitting the finished pattern will not include maths. Just counting. Easy counting.

With the new year now firmly in the saddle, dates for the summer season are slowly lining up on my calendar. And it already becomes clear that 2010 is The Year of Unfortunate Date Collisions, with lots of things falling together - like almost all official holidays with Saturdays or Sundays, and a few of my private fixed date events with work events (and should you wonder: work will win).

There are already a few work dates I am very, very much looking forward to. I am planning to go to Cave Gladium again in 2010 - that will be August 9 to August 14. Since I later heard from some folks that they would have loved to attend a workshop, but didn't hear about it in time, this year I am planning to have the 'shops during the week (to leave the weekend for shopping and all the other weekend stuff) and get it much more public much earlier.
There will be more workshopping and a talk/lecture in Austria, too - I am going to the Spectaculum in Friesach, end of July/start of August. You can read more about the programme here on the official pages. The workshop will teach participants the basics of medieval sewing - differences between fabrics, materials, stitches and seams. Because seam types, stitches and fabric type were purposefully matched for the desired results, this is something like "medieval sewing 101", giving the groundworks for sewing and tailoring medieval style. I love this workshop topic because the lowly hand-seam is underestimated so much today - and lining all the possible stitches, seams and hems up in two sampler cloths - one wool, one linen - shows so much of the possibilities.

And speaking of dates: The book is being layouted at the publishing house, and I am waiting for new work (second proofing) any day. Once the packet is here, I promise I will do my very best to be totally quick in reading, proofing and sending back/responding. Very much fitting the situation and the question that usually pops up at some point - "why does that all take so freakingly long?", INTERN (who does write herself all-caps) has put up a nice blog post summing it up here.

This is where (and what) I'm currently at:

That is the Seriously Slouchy Spirally Hat (or does Slouchy Seriously Spirally Hat sound better? I can't decide...) all knitted, waiting for bind-off. In this picture, you are looking at the inside of the hem. The lower edge is folding up to give a nice, scalloped lower edge to the hem, and then it roughly looks like this before binding off:



It's made with a contrasting band and bind-off at the lower edge. The funny wobbly-crumply shape is the hat in its pre-blocking state - this pattern really needs some blocking after it is finished. It will look a lot better and much more impressive after bind-off and blocking, I promise. (And I also promise you a picture.)

This very hat, though, needs to be bound off first. Which is what I'm going to do now.

And then I only have to wait for the pattern testers to deliver their feedback to get the pattern ready for publishing. Hooray!

After all the paperweight is off my back for a while ( it will be time for taxes soon - more paperwork), here are some things that are not really spectacular, but give me a nice feeling of something actually moving forwards.

First of all, these dropped-off stitch markers

  - and yes, I use bits of knotted silk thread and an old, single earring - these dropped-off markers mean that I have progressed on my second slouchy hat (with better maths for the hem this time),



and am now almost into the first round of ribbing. This means slipping half the stitches to a holder and knitting the other half. Just what happens here:


Then, there's that other idea that I have had. And now I am swatching - not spectacularly either:


But other things have happened, too. Non-knitting things. Like this:


This is where the seam on the tent is today. Which is almost one metre from where it was yesterday in the early evening, and that means actually almost two metres of stitching done, half by me and half by the most patient man that lives on Earth (I'm sure he must be the most patient man on earth, after all, he lives with me). Only a few metres to go on that first bit! And it looks as if there would be sewing time tonight as well. And tomorrow.

And finally... something spectacularly unspectacular.


They have been fired for a while and are now finally in my workspace. "They" are the ceramic disks that are supposed to go on an equally unspectacular stick and there to serve as a spinning whorl.
For those of you who are not recognising these whorls, originally they were made as the reference whorl of the Textilforum Experiment, and they got a lot of praise for running extremely well. However, the experiment whorls were not intended to be sold, and they were purely functional, including all rough edges and unsmoothed surfaces. These are made for actual use - with smooth edges and smooth surfaces. The whorls are made from modern clay, and with a modern technique - I'm using a specially-made little cookie-cutter-like implement. But that modern procedure is what makes them exactly alike and as close as humanly possible to the weight and MI of the original 12th century whorl, which is what we needed for the experiment. I will weigh them today to make sure they are all on a par, and then they are going into the Marketstall tomorrow.

More proofreading today. Why on earth did I write so much? Yesterday didn't go so well in terms of reading progress, so I'm hoping for a much better "pages done" number today.

Inbetween and to keep me motivated, I'm knitting a second version of the slouchy hat to test the new maths for the hem/brim part. My prototype hat does fit, but only after vigorous blocking of the hem, which was not what I had originally intended to need - but I wanted that hat, and I wanted to wear it, and if it could be made to fit... well. I am (obviously) very, very much a product knitter, not a process knitter, though I do enjoy the process.
I'm working the new hat in much bulkier wool than the prototype, plant dyed by Sabine in a beautiful, beautiful orange that makes you wonder every second whether it's a friendly, warm and light earthy hue or a sparkling bright dot of colour... and that makes it very, very pleasant to work with. (In addition to that, I am very happy to find that thicker wool on larger needles really knits up much quicker than fine wool on fine needles - even if I still knit slowly, tightly and on smaller needles than recommended for the wool thickness.)