Didn't I just blog about there being winter? It was about 24 hours that the white winter wonderfulness lasted - and then we transitioned right back into rather spring-like weather. It is getting closer to spring for now, really - there's the early flowers getting ready, the rose is showing first leaves, the peach tree as well. The first tomato seedlings have broken soil, too.

[caption id="attachment_5080" align="alignnone" width="640"] The first irises are blooming - I really love these, and they ring in spring for me more than snowdrops and narcissus.


Which means it's high time to finish pruning the willows (which is almost done, there's just a few stragglers left to take care of).

The willows are looking really gnarly in some parts, and some of them have grown to astonishing dimensions width-wise, while their direct neighbours are still rather slender rods, or have actually dried out and died. Some places have four strong, thick ones right beside each other, and some have one thick one and three thinner ones, and I really can't find a rhythm or reason behind this.

[caption id="attachment_5079" align="alignnone" width="640"] The willow fence - you can see that there's different thicknesses. There's no real reason for them to be so different, though...


The low arch that you can see at half height of the photo is the most problematic bit, and we're often having to replace the top of the arch with new shoots bent in, as that part tends to die off during the year - even if it had been growing strong for several years before. That's probably due to growing mechanics, so not much that can be done about it. (Should you be planning to plant a living willow fence, try to go for pointy arches, so the end point of every single element is the highest point of it, and not on a flat slope.)

While this is going on, I'm also trying to get some semblance of order into the garden before, as every year, everything deteriorates with the "I am not finding time to do stuff" syndrome that hits me in summer. For now, I'm really enjoying the early spring garden work. It's a welcome excuse to make the lunch break a little longer, or to have a bit of time in the afternoon to get off the computer and soak up some sunshine outside, and have a breath of fresh air...

There was actually snow yesterday and today. Winter! At last! It did look beautiful outside:



The cat, however, was thoroughly unimpressed:



Or, to be more precise: Not amused. While she did go outside for a stroll, she refused to lower her furry bottom onto the cold snow and instead preferred to come inside and lower it into the litter box.

Oh, cat. You do know that you have fur on your ass for a reason, right?

Things going on here?

Sorting of pictures from Monday. I'm deleting the really blurry one, and sorting through the others. Not everything was caught properly, in spite of my efforts (and very enthusiastic hitting of the camera buttons); I've also discovered that focus stacking software might be my friend, and promptly got sidetracked into downloading and trying a number of programmes. (With limited success as of now... but ah, well, one shall see.)

There has also been some progress during the last days regarding the Sprang Thing - I've found that I am not able to do both layers at once in the end operations, so I've split up the two layers and am working them separately. The first one is actually almost done, though there are some errors (which I am opting to ignore).



The back is still waiting for its turn, and I'll probably use a different method for finishing that, at least for a good bit in. (The bit of wood is clamped there to help keep the two layers separate until I've finished the front.)



And last but not least, I've managed to get some seeds into soil. Most of them are already a little older, so I do hope they will trn out to be still viable, and result in lovely little plants. One of the rows holds the seeds for black cocktail tomatoes - we bought the seeds as a souvenir during our last summer vacation, and I'm very, very curious how they will taste. I'm hoping for somewhere between "nice" and "really, really good"!



And then I will definitely remember to take take more seeds to carry into the future!

As you know from yesterday's post, I spent Monday on a museum visit. Monday.

In case you're not familiar with German museums: They usually are all closed on Mondays, and there are very, very few exceptions to that rule. That means when you're in there on that day, it is either a special occasion (such as a public holiday, or a special event in the museum) or you have an appointment for something that happens best when there is no public around.

In my case, I had the wonderful opportunity to meet with two fellow textile people and see a few early medieval tablet weaves that are in the exhibition of the Diözesanmuseum St. Afra: The Witgarius-Belt and the Albecunde-Belt. The latter also has a piece of the so-called Mary's Belt attached to it. (Unfortunately, there are almost no pictures of these belts on the internet - you can see a tiny one of Witgarius here, and a tiny one of Albecunde's belt (usually called Ailbecunde's belt) here.

All three are tablet-woven, and all of them are done in different variations of the technique: The Albecunde-Belt is woven all in one colour, with letters made by turn direction changes to form a subtle pattern that will be visible in certain angles and almost invisible in others. The threads are very, very fine, and the weave is incredibly dense. The start of the inscription, which also gives the belt its name, is "N NOMINE DOMINI ALBECUND" ... and while the first missing letter clearly has to be an I, I'm not quite sure about how it all goes on - it looks like a letter Q to me after the D, followed by an E, which is sort of weird. Anyways, the sure weirdness is that there is definitely no I in the name Albecund... - but there is a swap of the tablet turn direction between the A and the L, which might have led to the interpretation of a letter I. That was a first very interesting thing; the other, for me, was the density of the weave, which results in very pleasant angles of the letter serifs. You might know the syndrome of stretched-out, elongated patterns in tablet weaving? Well, this has clearly not happened here. It has not happened in a way that has deeply, thoroughly impressed me, and I now am convinced that I have to work on my weft-pressing technique, as there's obviously room for improvement.

The Witgarius-Belt has a similar ground weave - wine-red silk, with edge tablets in yellowish silk and red silk - and a similar density, but is brocaded. The gold thread brocading does, again, form letters; they show up in red on gold background on one side and in gold on red background on the other side.

The third of the pieces is only preserved as two small fragments, and one of them is on the back of the Albecunde-Belt, and thus not really visible. The larger fragment, though, can be seen on the belt front; it shows animals woven in 3/1 broken twill technique, alternatingly white on a background of coloured stripes and coloured on a white background. That was, of course, very interesting for me as well, and I hope to weave one or two of the animals in the near-ish future. My count comes to 41 tablets for the pattern zone, which fits in nicely for my play-band with the 42 tablets... and one of the motifs is a rather nice-looking duck-like animal. I haven't done a duck yet, so...

It was amazing to see these things close up (the case was opened for us, so we could take a closer look). Especially the Albecunde-Belt was a delight to look at. The technique itself, in which this is woven, is really simple - but the fineness of the threads, the evenness of the weave, and especially how densely the wefts are packed in reveals the true mastery of the weaver. It seems like the ultimate impressive understatement status symbol, something simple brought to utter perfection.

As you can see, my brain is still rather full of the impressions. Also, I have a good number of photographs, and quite a few things to try out once I get to string up my tablet weaves again, and altogether I'm very, very happy.

Museum Mondays? They are wonderful. Won.der.ful.

Sorry for the unannounced blog silence yesterday - I was off on a research trip, and I had planned to blog on the train when going back, but then things happened. Good things, mind you, but they were solidly in the way of my plan.

Research trips usually take longer than one expects, and there's lots of photos and thinking, but there's also always something that gets forgotten. (I'm at the count of two things for the trip yesterday, currently. More might pop up.) I also usually get into a sort of "oh that is so cool" rush, and my brain goes on overdrive, and then, at some point, I crash. Completely. As in "brain to mush".

So yesterday's trip did go wonderfully well as these things go - I met with lovely colleagues, got to talk about different textile techniques, and had the wonderful opportunity to see three medieval tablet weaves up close. I then went to see a fourth one - the Ulrichsmanipel - together with my two colleagues, and so it got a bit later than I'd originally estimated. Which meant that the train home was no ICE, and thus had no wifi, and so my plan to blog something while on the train back did not work out.

By the time I was back home, my brain had reached the final state of complete mushiness, and there you go - instant blog silence due to too much textile overload. The best kind of instant blog silence, if you ask me!

Now there's the post-research-trip stuff to do: Sort through the impressions, sort through the pictures, delete all the very blurry ones, and get everything in a semblance of order. Bonus when going through the pictures: repeats of "oh, that is so amazing" might happen...

There's been a UFO sitting in my office for ages now, and it's finally, finally getting closer to completion - it's a sprang piece, and I don't even want to find out how many years it has been on the Un-Finished Object list. Eventually, it is going to become a bag... eventually.

The setup for this was circular, as I wanted to try this version, and wanted the bag bottom to be as stretchy as possible. This means that at the start, you have to carry the sheds around to the back of the work - which was tedious. Then there comes that glorious moment when you can work on the one side only.

My original plan was to make the shoulder strap/handle part of the bag narrower by using two or more threads at a time as one element. However, I tried that, and the way it looked didn't please me at all. So I decided that since this was a learn-and-practice piece, I might as well narrow down the strap by working double-layer sprang.

[caption id="attachment_5060" align="alignnone" width="436"] The double-layer part and its ever diminishing remaining shed...


Double-layer sprang, as the name implies, means you work two separate layers at once, handling one thread crossing from the back layer, then one from the front layer, and so on. So you don't have two sheds but one - and the only thing you have to be careful of is not to cross a back-layer thread into the front layer by accident, or vice versa. It also adds a little twist (hah!) to the crossing of the front layer threads, as you have to go around the back layer thread sitting on your one hand to do that.

Which is a little brain-twisting, but fun. There were a few smaller mistakes and a few ones bad enough that I went back a bit to re-do things. I did learn quite a bit, and working in two layers is much more fluent now than at the beginning, though I am still not out of the mumbling-to-myself stage.

You might be familiar with that stage - when you are learning a new technique, or a new pattern, and there's steps to do (or to repeat), and you sit there and tell yourself the steps. Over and over and over again. That telling can be something as simple (and seemingly daft) as going "one, two, one, two, ..." or "knit, knit, slipslipknit", and after a while it seems stupid to still need to be doing it, because how hard can remembering two or three simple steps be?

Well. I have learned, over the years, that it can be harder than one would think - after all, it's not just remembering two or three simple steps. It is also building up motor skills, and learning to recognise how things look when they are correct, and how they look when they are not, and learning how to correct mistakes. So even if it feels really weird to mumble the same things to me over and over and over again, for every single step, for what feels like ages - I know, these days, that it will just take as long as it does. Eventually, the voice gets more quiet. At one point, it disappears, and that's when you have the new thing down pat.

So there's a bit more to do on my piece (I go "front layer, back layer, front layer, back layer" with each thread manipulation, by the way). It is, however, getting very tight for my left hand... and that is some cause of concern for me. I've figured out how to do the thread manipulation the right hand needs to do with a knitting needle (as you do towards the end of sprang), but trying to replace the left one has, in the last few tries, always resulted in complete and utter failure of the row.

Which means it will stay interesting... or I will have to split up the layers and do them one by one soon.

I shall keep you updated. (Unless, of course, the thing manages to go back into UFO state despite my efforts... then I will keep you updated at a much later point in time.)

NESAT is coming up - well, not utterly urgently and soon yet, but it is looming enough for me to think about it. Especially since I've registered to give an explanatory demo about my method on tablet weaving twill patterns without a pattern draft... and that, in turn, means I will have to aim for an explanation plus demo in about 20-30 minutes. Probably 30 minutes - since my two test runs that I made, quietly mumbling things to myself, took about half an hour.

So here I am, once again with the usual question of "how do I squash as much information as possible into X minutes while still keeping things understandable?" Which is the challenge I'm more or less facing every single time when I give a presentation, or a demo. (Or a workshop. I tend to fill workshops up with lots of info as well.)

For this specific problem, it starts with finding the perfect number of tablets. I have tried things out with a  dozen - which is enough to show the patterns when doing twill background, and how a pattern block moves across the band. For speed purposes, a few less would be even better, so I might cut the number down to ten.

I've also found that the best I can do in the demo is to explain what twill is based on (the diagonals) and show how to do a twill direction reversal. All the rest of how this makes it possible to weave basically anything on the fly will have to be explanatory only - probably with some additional demo bands and printed out pictures. Because this entirely unspectacular looking bit of diagonals and twill weaving, measuring a puny 5 cm, takes me half an hour to weave:

With talking about what I'm doing, and explaining, and showing some things to the empty air. (The cat refused to stand in as audience... she much preferred to nap somewhere else. Ah well.)

So... I'll fine-tune some more, and do it again, and make notes on what to print out in addition, and notes on what I want to say in what sequence. And then, I hope, it will eventually result in a nice little demo that will make my colleagues happy!