There's a second "Mittelaltermarkt Online" tomorrow, starting at 11 am German time - and I'll be there!

This is a funny little thing: You register (free), then you can click yourself along the market paths (which reminds me of a simple game dungeon), look at the stalls left and right, and chat with the stall owners, look at their goods, and maybe buy something.

I was there last month for the first one, and it was curious, but also fun, so of course I decided to go there again. Stop by if you wish, and have a chat with me, either typed at the stall or via Jitsi Meet as a video meeting!

There's new shiny things here! Well, actually they are not shiny at all...

Almost exactly four weeks ago, I ate a passionfruit and then placed the seeds into a little dish with soil. I did manage to keep it moist for the four weeks, and guess what has now started to germinate?



Right! Now I'm very curious to see if they will grow, and survive, and maybe even flower at some point.

Another thing that is now finally sprouting, after weeks of hanging out in the soil, is this avocado seed:



And finally, also new, also not shiny, but still delighting me a lot - new spindle whorls have arrived, and I've taken some photos already, to update those in the online shop.



There's now a wider range of weights available, from around 9 g (and very few even lighter ones) to up to 50 g. New stone whorls are also here, and taking pictures of them is on my list for tomorrow...

 

The eye, the nose, the neck. Ah well.



First, let me tell you about the main difference, for me, in weaving ass-first versus nose-first: When starting with the nose, I will very easily end up with a baboon ass on the dog because of getting the timing of leg slope start and back slope start not quite right. When starting with the tail, I have a high probability of ending up with a too-thick neck because of somehow fuddling things up in the middle, and then getting the timing for the neck not quite right. I suspect that if woven cleanly, the thick-neck-problem might evaporate. (It's on my list to manage that the next time.)

The nose area, however, is a different beast.

[caption id="attachment_5364" align="alignnone" width="328"] Photo from UNIMUS.no


[caption id="attachment_5365" align="alignnone" width="441"] Photo from UNIMUS.no




If you compare the look of the back of the band in the tail and leg region, you can see that there is a characteristic look of broken narrow lines - that's the back of the regular diagonals structure, which is exactly what we have on the front for a while: white, purple, white, purple.



The noses on my dogs are all one of these regular stripes as well - white, purple, white; a single (two-thread) line on top of the band, and the regular broken line on the back. Except in the very first dog, where I did a wide nose.



Now, the rules of normal twill dictate that a line you "draw" on the background is either one line (two thread's worth) wide, or three lines (in order to go out with a nice clean line again). Three lines because you have, in the diagonal base setup, a white line coming out of the twill, then your pattern dark line, a light line, a dark line, and then a white line going back into twill again. For a wider line, you cover up the light between the two dark lines by change of tablet turn direction, but you still have to weave into the regular dark line to get a clean shape. So. Two or six is the choice you have.

The original animal's nose is wider than a single line (of two threads) and much more narrow than a regular wide line, though, and that is technically not possible without doing Strange Things (TM).

I suspect the sneaky and ingenious use of some double-turns here, to get the effect. I'm not sure yet how and where they need to get started, though. This is one of the cases where I'll actually sit down with pen and paper and start drafting this to see where lines meet normally, and where lines have to start, or change, to get the desired effect.

And then I can see another dog-weaving stint in my future...

(By the way, in case it interests you: If I don't make silly mistakes and have to weave back, weaving a doggie takes me about one and a half hours. Do try this at home, but not late in the evening when tired, especially not late in the evening when tired plus distracted by other stuff going on in the room that you feel the need to participate in while making silly mistakes in your weaving.)

The Evebø band... oh, source of joy and questions. For me, at least.

The Evebø band is a find from Norway and dated to the 6th century; it's a tablet-woven band with twill technique patterning, and very good, very detailed pictures of the band can be found at the Fotoportalen Unimus. Including, to my great joy and delight, photos of the back of the band... because, as simple as the band might look at first glance, there are some strange things happening with the animal that might be a dog (though the Most Patient Husband of Them All says it looks more like an ant-eater to him, and I sort of agree).

[caption id="attachment_5364" align="alignnone" width="368"] Photo from UNIMUS.no


The original band happens to have a 20 tablet pattern zone, which coincidentally is the width of one of my playbands... so of course, at some point, I had to weave the Evebø ant-eater doggie. And as we all know, dogs are pack animals.

So. Let me introduce you to my Evebø dog collection:



The first one, in the upper band part on the image, was woven starting from the nose, after just a sketch of the original animal. Though I was sort of aiming to reproduce it, I wasn't going for the "have to match it exactly" approach, but more for the general direction. As you can see, it has a wider nose than the original, a much thicker neck, and a baboon butt.

The rest followed a considerable amount of time later - they grow younger from right to left. First (rightmost) was woven from the tail onwards; then, because the first one had been so long ago and that made it hard to compare what the differences were, I did another one starting from the nose (you can easily tell that by the baboon butt). Finally, I did a third one, trying to a) weave less mistakes than in the first ass-starter, and b) matching it as closely as possible to the original. Which was... well... not completely successful in both cases. As you can see mostly in the chin and nose area. Sigh.

If you compare my versions with the original, you can find quite a few differences (even disregarding the baboon butt versions, and just looking at the ass-first doggies). A small thing is the forelegs not having the split further down than the hind legs in one case - though that is just a question of me not paying enough attention to where the split was supposed to come, and not a technical issue.

The really interesting differences, though, are in the neck, eye, and nose area... can you spot them?

I had a very interesting, and very pleasant, late afternoon yesterday with the video presentation and discussion in "Digital Lauresham". The event was hosted by EXARC on their discord server, and the discussion session has been recorded, with plans of making it available for everyone once the necessary bit of editing has been done.

Over the past years, I've done so many presentations in all kinds of different venues and for all kinds of different events, but the virtual version is quite new for me, and I was extra-nervous (Will all the tech work as intended? Will my internet connection hold up for the discussion part?). Having everything pre-recorded also means that there is no way to adapt things on the fly, in case the audience seems extra-interested in a certain topic, or in case everyone's eyes glaze over. You also can't tell from the room if people like the thing already during the presentation, you need to wait until it's all over and there is feedback, which makes it very different too, and it does take some getting used to. Another thing I missed is the immediate feedback for the questions, or the possibility to quickly ask something back to clarify. The questions were typed out on the text channel in discord, then read out by one of the EXARC volunteers for everyone to hear, then I got to answer them. This format does work well in general, and it does reduce the problem of multi-person audio on conference calls, where only one can speak at any one time, and background noises from somewhere else might kill the intended sound for everyone - but it lacks the easy interactivity of real-life Q&A sessions.

It did all work well, though, and there were a lot of interesting questions, some of which were totally unexpected for me (like the one whether I have worked with material that I'd prefer never to touch again). Though I did miss the immediate audience feedback, it was also really nice to just sit at home in a comfy chair, with the cat in the comfy chair next to me (I'm afraid she didn't really count as moral support, she was sleeping), and interact with people interested in tablet-weaving from all over the world, and see a lot of familiar names on the channel. With the easy access for a lot of people to digital presentations such as that, I can very easily live with the downsides of the format!

The videos are available on the Lauresham YouTube channel, both in English (title text is German too, but there will be English spoken text) and in German - so you can still watch them, in case you missed the event yesterday.

Let me know if you have any questions!

It's a public holiday in Germany today, and I'll use that as an excuse for a long weekend. I will leave you with these two versions of the Evebø dog:



See you on Monday! (Or on Sunday, if you're joining for the Lauresham tablet-weaving presentation...)

If you looked in vain for a blogpost yesterday, you've probably guessed that it got gobbled up by the current project - which, as other publications tend to do, has eaten up all available time and then some. However, it's about done now (I'm keeping my fingers crossed that there will be no hiccup during the final file export), and hopefully everyone watching it will enjoy the thing on Sunday late afternoon.
If you're interested, you can find more info here on the page. Info text is in German, but there will be an English version of the presentation (where you will see that I didn't even try at all to match the voice-over to my German speaking face action...). I'm assuming there will be a link to the presentation posted on the site on Sunday at around 17:00 German time, but you might want to register for the Discord thing as well and hang around there in the EXARC channel - and join the discussion afterwards!