On my task list for the upcoming weekend is a presentation about medieval fabrics... and on my personal task list for this thing is "explain samite". Because I believe that, if you are interested in the fabrics used in the Middle Ages, you need to have at least a very basic understanding of what complex weaves are, as they were used for high-status garments throughout the High and Late Middle Ages.

There are very few people these days who still make medieval-style complex weaves, and one of them is Sylvia Wiechmann, who runs a weaving workshop in Munich. She made a reconstruction of a type of samite called "Kölner Borten" a while ago, and has a video on Youtube showing how they are made, and explaining the process. In German - but maybe watching it is still interesting for you even if you don't understand the text:


 

While doing my prep for the weekend (so many fascinating things trying to side-track me! So many things I'd like to do more research about! So many questions remaining!), I stumbled across an open access online journal about Archaeology of the Low Countries. Sadly, this lovely little journal only had a few issues before coming to a stall, but the Journal for Archaeology in the Low Countries website might still be worth a visit for you - especially since vol. 2, published in 2010, includes an article by Chrystel Brandenburgh about early medieval textile remains.

 

Tax things and bookkeeping things are some of the details that I had never thought about before I suddenly became my own company, and then, when I had to deal with them, they were quite the scary thing for me. It became much better after a while, and with the discovery of a relatively easy-to-use, but still very professional, bookkeeping programme that does not cost an arm and a leg each year.

Meanwhile it has become more or less routine to do the bureaucracy stuff regularly. And then, every quarter year, I have to take care of tax stuff - one of the inevitable things when you have your own company (even if it's a tiny one). Which means I have to sit down and take care of the bookkeeping that has not yet been taken care of, make sure all the numbers tally up, and then file the report and send the money owed to the state.

Which, you guessed is, was part of the things I did today - and this time around, it included checking a stack of past entries to find the elusive mistake that had snuck in somewhere. I used to think that it's not hard to type off numbers correctly, especially not if you have a habit of double-checking them, but it turns out that at some places, I had clicked a wrong button (and I had actually mis-typed at another point, so the issue had to be fixed in more than one place).

So there you are - the exciting daily (or quarterly) things in my life! Though in this case, I prefer non-excitement quite a bit above this kind of interesting.

I am, now, very happy that I finally managed to find it, and that I have now fixed it, and consequently things feel much, much better. Since I discovered that the numbers must be amiss a few days ago, this has sort of irked me continuously - after all, mistakes in book-keeping are a Bad Thing (TM). Now my tax stuff can be finished and filed and sent off as it needs to, and I'll be a happy woman with nicely corresponding numbers again!

Somehow this week has been really full, and really busy, so I'm really looking forward to the weekend. There was lots of organising and re-stocking and some planning and quite a bit of reading and workshop preparation. Proof of some of the re-stocking: Fibre sample package bags.



So now I'm looking forward to weekendy things, and you're getting a gratuitous cat picture, just because I have it, and Madam looks like she often looks:



The poor, long-suffering cat. She knows from her own hard life that good staff is just so hard to find...

I'll be giving a workshop about brocading in tablet weaving next weekend, so today saw me drawing lots and lots of little dots - thankfully, using the computer and appropriate drawing software made this a lot easier. (The whole thing was also helped by the fact that we'll only be using 15 tablets. There's a lot less dots in 15 rows than in 55 or more!)

So we'll have a selection of nice simple patterns to use in the workshop, all nicked from actual historical bands - though I suspect that we'll not get down to the actual original size of many of these bands, which was in most cases (for around 13-17 tablets) at somewhere between 4 and 10 mm in width... rather tiny.

But then, the tinyness does help with the bands looking quite spectacular. There's a small band with a dragon-like motif in the Irish National Museum Dublin, for instance, that looks just like solid gold. It's tiny and has really thin threads, and I'd love to show you a photo of it, but alas, it's copyrighted... so I'll have to keep the blurry photograph that I have of it to myself. Sorry.

It's finally been cold for a few days - this winter was not very cold overall, there was almost no snow, only a light dusting for a few hours or, at most, two or so days. I'm quite happy that the temperature has finally fallen into the slight negative, even if it's only for a few days, and I hope it's enough for all those critters and plants that need a good stint of frost to do well.

That means I have a few days where I'm not going to prune the willow fence, as it should be above zero for that - it will look like this a while longer:



Every year, I'm floored by the sheer amount of biomass these willows produce over one growing season. It's a lot of wood!

Meanwhile, the snowdrops, unfazed by the cold, are slowly getting ready:



So. A bit more winter, or at least wintery temperatures, and then the new year will truly come in...

I confess I'm rather fond of these silly, slightly arbitrary International Thing Days - and one of the funniest among them is today:

Hug A Medievalist Day! Today's more general, though, it's Hug a Scientist Day.

So in honour of that, here's a medieval hug, brought to you courtesy of the Rijksmuseum:



This, by the way, is the Meeting of Joachim and Anna, dating to about 1470. Go to the Rijksmuseum page to learn more about this statue.