There hasn't been that much knitting in the past days and weeks as I'd have liked, but somehow other things happened or were done or taken care of. (Including some mending of socks and t-shirts...)

There is, however, some progress now. I'm getting closer and closer to the point where the sleeves will be finished, and I'm very much looking forward to that - and the fact that I will then be able to continue with the body of the cardigan. Hooray!



(Yes, that is Madam the Cat's tail in the picture.)

Working both sleeves at the same time using magic loop does work nicely in reducing my personal "Aaargh!" factor. It's a little awkward at times, as the two strands of yarn tend to do things they should not be able to do (as in they wrap around one of the sleeves, or suddenly are not both on the same side of the cardi anymore), but that is a relatively minor nuisance.

And soon, it will be over, and I'll go back to nice and brainless back-and-forth for a little bit, until the increases and the pattern shifts start. Already looking forward to that!

You remember the UFO sprang thing that I blogged about a while ago? Well, believe it or not (I certainly have a hard time believing it) - it is finished!

I started making this because I wanted to practise basic sprang, and wanted to try the "endless" circular setup, where you basically work one closed loop. As you can see on the photo, I totally botched the start, where the structure is much more loose than it should have been. The start is not right at the bottom of the thing because I also managed not to push both sides in completely evenly; it thus slipped to one side of the thing.



The project was successful insofar as I really got in a lot of practise with the basic move... and successful again as at the end, I got to learn how to do double-layered sprang (yay!) and try out methods for doing the last few rows.

And now it's finished. It is quite stretchy, so it will eat up a lot of things - though they can be awkward to get out of it, because it's so long. It has been used successfully already to carry glass to the glass container:



Quite a few more would have fitted, but that was all we had to carry to recycling.

This is how it looks stuffed full of cushions:



So... learning-wise, it was a good thing. Bag-usability-wise, jury's still out; because the relaxed state is such a narrow tube, large things won't fit through the opening easily. It still does seem useful, however, and on the plus side, when you're done carrying things, or when you want to bring it along clandestinely, it can be worn as a summer scarf:



...and that makes it definitely the weirdest bag I have!

It feels surreal to be in the middle of a slow-motion catastrophe. Sometimes, life feels just entirely normal - there are orders to be packed (thank you for keeping my business running!), there are blog posts to be written, the cat wants to be let out. It's getting warm again outside, the sun is shining, the trees are starting to show first leaf buds.

And then, suddenly, it hits home again. The unusual, eerie quiet from the kindergarden and school right around the corner. The fact that all our events and planned meetings with family and friends (yes, down to meeting just two other people for a game night) are called off. The fact that I'm not sitting here alone, typing along, but on a desk in the same room, there's the Most Patient Husband of Them All, typing along as well in his quest to conquer the Home Office.

It is weird, and it's hard to process. Our world is definitely changing, and all this will leave a lot of traces. There's hope, though. We can flatten the curve if we all cut down on our social contacts for a bit, even, yes, even if it seems weird and excessive. The thing is - what seems excessive now might save our ass tomorrow (or, importantly, our grannies' asses). If you're in a country that isn't hit as hard yet, please don't make the easy mistake that almst everyone does and underestimate this danger. Stay home. Call off meetings. Ask for home office possibilities. Call off your social engagements, even the small ones. Phone your loved ones, and make sure they know about how serious the situation is. Every little bit of distance counts.

Even if taking your distance now should prove to have been a little excessive in a few months... I'd rather do that, and be considered a bit weird, than spread the virus. We don't get a second chance in this.

 

We're certainly, certainly living in interesting times right now. What I'm currently taking home from all this is a) how lucky I am, and b) how fragile our world and society can be.

I remember border controls from my childhood and youth. They were an added bit of excitement when travelling to another country, but they also always had a tiny drop of scariness. What if they would not let us pass?

After Schengen, after Europe grew together so much that border controls were abolished, every time I passed a border I was filled with wonder that this was possible, that I could just cross over, no questions asked, no passports checked. Even the money stayed the same! That sense of wonder held on, even though simultaneously I started to be annoyed by the passport controls when travelling into Britain. (They were Europe too, after all! Ah well, that is another topic for another day...)

Now the borders are closed again, all over Europe. All countries are trying to slow down the spread of COVID-19, and one of the steps is reducing travel - which has suddenly turned into something potentially dangerous instead of something totally normal, safe, and potentially delightful.

Yesterday morning, Bavaria has declared state of emergency; shops will close, as will gyms and other social spaces. It's a weird kind of danger, invisible and creeping and transmitted by fellow humans; way less obvious a danger than a physical attack or other war-like actions. Nonetheless, it is a danger, one to us all, and one that everyone should take seriously. Even if it feels weird.

This pandemic is changing our world, and it will surely change what happens in future. It has already cut an impressive trench through my calendar... there will be no NESAT this year, no wool fairs in spring, I won't be visiting my family for my mum's birthday this weekend, and I suspect there will be much more gardening time this year than ever before.

Free travel will come back - of that, I am sure. A small, optimistic part of me even thinks that maybe we'll manage to think things over while we are cutting down on our voyaging and manage to turn things into a bit more sustainable tracks when we're re-establishing our routes, at some point in the future... which, I suspect, won't be before summer.

Be safe, everyone. Take care of your loved ones - which might mean calling them and encouraging them to stay home, if they are part of the risk group. If you're still healthy, consider going to donate blood; this is going to be increasingly scarce in the next days and weeks. We're going to get through this, and the more each of us keeps their distance in the next two weeks, the better.

Yes, you've guessed it from the title - I'm writing about the virus again. When this all started, I was not aware of the possible consequences, as so many of us - but it has dawned on me, in the meantime.

It's spreading like wildfire, and we probably are mostly underestimating how far it has spread already. Here's an article with really, really scary numbers regarding this.

The gist of it: There's a point at which you cannot stop the spread of the disease, you can only slow it down in hopes of keeping the healthcare system from teetering over the edge of the abyss - because if that happens, mortality rate will shoot up, due to lack of medical staff, machines (such as respiratory machines), and medicines.

The measures necessary to slow down the epidemic have to be more drastic the later they are applied, and the earlier everyone acts, the faster the danger will be lessened. It's the "flattening of the curve" that gets mentioned again and again.

We are in all of Europe most probably already well past the point where the epidemic is stoppable, so our best chance collectively is to slow it down as much and as fast as we can. Which means cutting down on social stuff - which means no large gatherings, obviously; as little travel as possible, and staying at home if you can. Home office gets an option discussed more widely, and more often.

Humans are social animals, and we all need human-to-human interaction for our sanity. It's weird, in some way, to be aware of how important contact to other people is, and usually getting told that it is healthy to have a good number of friends and acquaintances to meet with - and now, basically, what we need to stay healthy, and to lessen the danger to the more vulnerable among us, is to keep away from other people. Social distancing, if you want to use a fancier term.

In the federal state of Bavaria, all schools and kindergardens and similar childcare institutions will stay closed from today on. Universities have been closed for a few days already, the start of the semester has been postponed, and all public gatherings are off until at least mid-April, but it looks like that might be extended. Non-essential shops are probably going to be closed from Tuesday on, as well as restaurants, clubs, and swimming pools (and, I suppose, gyms etcetera).

There's no complete lockdown on everything yet here, but it will certainly become worse than now before it becomes better.

If you're in a country that is not as badly affected yet - don't make our mistake and wait until things start to get out of hand. Take precautions (which does not mean hoarding stuff!), wash your hands, look into the possibility to work from home, and do your thing to help slow the spread. This mostly means: social distancing. Whether or not you have pre-existing health conditions, it certainly will be a smart thing to stay at home if you can, and away from other people if you have to go out. It's not just your own health - it's also the necessity to slow down the spread. Also make sure to tell your loved ones, especially if they are among the higher-risk group.

If you do go out, or meet friends and family members, take care and be safe. Wash your hands, don't touch your face, don't hug random strangers, and, again, don't panic-buy and hog hand sanitizers or face masks, they are needed elsewhere - like in hospitals and doctor's offices. (Or toilet paper. Or... dry yeast? Apparently, once a supply seems to run low, people panic and start to buy more of it, until it's all gone.)

By the way, people here are joking that when in quarantine, Germans will eat only pasta, shit an enormous lot and occasionally roll themselves in flour - because the most common suspects for "Hamsterkäufe", the German term for panic buying, are loo rolls, pasta, and flour. And on Friday, my aunt told me that the patron saint of protection against epidemics is called... St Corona. I'm still not over the funniness of this. (Wikipedia only tells about this in German, not in the English version.)

So. Stay safe, stay healthy, and make sure your loved ones do, too. Don't panic - but don't ignore the danger either. We'll all know in a few weeks whether what we did was enough or wasn't - and I do hope that it will be the former. After all, Pandemic is only a good thing if it's the board game, and even that is no fun if the cards are against you, and you lose... which can happen, if you are just a little bit unlucky.

Oh, and should you need something more medieval to time washing your hands than the old "sing Happy Birthday twice" - a single stanza of the Nibelungenlied should take you safely across the 20 seconds:

Well, there I was, doing things and getting stuff ready well in time for the conference - and now I will have another year to prepare: NESAT has been postponed.

I'm obviously not very happy about this - I was so looking forward to travelling there together with friends, to meet friends and colleagues up in the north of Finland, to hear about their new research and results, to chat with them and hang out and try new exciting foods and all the rest of wonderful things you do at a conference.

It's a decision I can understand, though. It's not a very large conference, but it is very international... and nobody knows how things will develop during the next two months. We've already botched doing enough things early enough with our climate, maybe it is time to err on the side of caution for a change.

And maybe, once the epidemic is over, we might actually do some similarly drastic things to keep our planet habitable? Just saying. Because obviously, it is possible to do stuff to counter dire things happening...

After being happy about figuring out the setup and sequence for my twill tablet weaving demo for NESAT, using up the last of my playband, I set out to warp a new band. Logically, that band also needs two colours, ones that play well together as in "give good contrast".

Well. Let's say my brain was probably not fully online when I was making the new warp... I looked at the colours, thought "they look nice together", found that the two colours were rather different from each other, then thought for a split second "but they are both rather light..." and then proceeded to warp anyways.

Which was, in retrospective, not a good choice. That quickly became clear when weaving the first few picks.



Yes, the two colours do look nice together. Yes, you can see the lines. However, contrast is not very high after all, and high contrast in every imaginable lighting (including not-so-good lighting) would be a very smart thing to have for a demo band.

The reason for the not-so-good contrast is the difference, or better the lack of difference, in the grey value of the colours... which becomes very obvious if you use one of the convenient quick filters that will turn your image into grey-scale or, in this case, because I like it, sepia:



Nice, isn't it? You can see the structure of the band, and you might be able to guess where one or the other colours are, because of teeny tiny differences in darkness - but then that might just be an effect of the slight irregularity of the colours.

So this warp is not what I need for my demo. But. The effect of "everything the same colour" is just what you get in so, so many cases of archaeological textile finds - which, of course, includes tablet weaves. In these bands, there's sometimes a hint of pattern weaving because of changes in twist direction in the band.

I've had this idea of trying out how a band with a few different pattern types would look if everything turned the same colour for a while now, and this oopsie warp now means I have something to do exactly that. It's just 10 tablets, and not very long, so it will not result in spectacular stuff, but I'm planning to do some "threaded-in patterns" using tablet threading direction and alignment, a bit of "4 forward, 4 back" patterning, and then some Egyptian Diagonals and twilly stuff to round things off. Make photos of the band in colour, turn them into sepia, and see.

I think this sounds like fun - it just remains to see when I'll find the time for said fun, as there is still the "real" NESAT demo prep work to do. (Also there's a queue of fun stuff waiting for their turn... which, yes, is a luxury problem.)