Weekend is coming, and I'm very much looking forward to it - there's good weather predicted for tomorrow, so we might go for a bit of a bike ride to make use of that. There would also be garden stuff to take care of, but, well... we'll see.

Otherwise, spinning is progressing. I'm also trying to get all kinds of things sorted out and all ducks in a row as far as possible before going mostly off-line and on a break for all of May, for a number of appointments and things.

Meanwhile, the Little Cat is already channeling the weekend vibes:

That is relaxation proficiency!  

If you're interested in historical weaving, this video by Marta Hoffmann might make you happy. It shows traditional weaving in Norway, recorded back in 1955; the tradition of using these warp-weighted looms there for this kind of fabric goes back into the 1500s at least.

If you're an archaeologist and you are digging somewhere else, or reading about a dig somewhere else, you might also find yourself digging for words in your brain. After all, you might know what a "Brandhorizont" is, but how do you say that in English?

In case you need some help with archaeological terms, you might find it here at the Grabungswörterbuch. There's translations between German and a number of different other languages (of course including English). If you're looking for a slightly larger one for English and German only, available as .pdf, you can find it here.

Just in case you're looking for an excuse to look at a soothing murky green screen... you are helping fish?

There's a boat lock in Utrecht that is closed during spring - but that is the time of year that fish migrate upstream for spawning. The city has found a rather ingenious solution: The Fish Doorbell. You can watch the livestream from a camera in front of the lock, and when you see a fish, you can ring the doorbell for the fish. Once enough fish are waiting, the lock is opened and they can travel on.

You can find the doorbell here (even with an English version for the site). It's just the right thing to watch when you need to look at more or less nothing for a bit. And if you're lucky, you might see a fish!

It's not just textile work in the sense of handling fibres here - there's also tool preparation. Such as prepping distaffs for people who order my historical spinning kit with dressed distaff, or cutting notches into spindles.

The latter requires some nice, sharp tools, some courage, and a bit of patience. And, of course, spindle sticks to cut the notches into. 

There's not too many finds of complete spindle sticks from the Middle Ages, and those are usually without notches. However... we do have some finds with notches, and we have plenty of sticks with broken-off ends, which of course happens more easily if there's a weak point in the wood. As in... a notch.

So like in many, many other cases, we have a hard time finding things out for sure.

Personally, I am ambiguous about notches. Having them can be nice, and spinning with them is fun if you just sort of slot your yarn in without the need of doing a half-hitch. They are also very good to have if, for whatever reason, your yarn keeps slipping off otherwise. (When I did the membrane thread spinning, I found that no notch was a no-go for me; this is the one technique where I absolutely want a nice, deep horizontal notch to put my half-hitch in.) But they will limit you in other ways  - a horizontal notch means you can spin s or z, but you still need a half-hitch, and it will hold that securely even when you want to take it off for winding. A spiral or diagonal notch means you can spin without a half-hitch... usually. Unless your yarn is too thick, or you fumble, then your spindle will fall; plus this kind of notch limits you to one spin direction.

But there's plenty of people who will appreciate a notch of this or that kind, and I am thoroughly fine with that. So fine that I will happily provide the notches: 

 In this case, the long spiral ones, worked in the different kinds of wood. They look pretty, don't they?

I'm fitting a bit of spinning in every day now - and there's noticeable progress. Or, more precisely: The first three bobbins have been filled, and been reeled off, and now I have the first three skeins of yarn, destined to be the weft yarn for our fabric reconstruction. 

They might not look like much, but it's almost 1.5 km of yarn, with a rather high twist (as you can see from the skeins crunching up). A bit more to go for the weft, and then I will go on to spin the warp yarn, from a different kind of wool and with even higher twist. The warp in the original is actually really, really hard-spun, and it will be interesting to reproduce this. I just hope it will behave on the loom and not be too hard and awkward to weave with!

Maps are nice, and very helpful, and an interesting thing. They are also quite misleading when it comes to the size of countries - because with the "normal" map projection, the one we're all most used to because it's the most common, the sizes change in regard to the distance to the equator.

So in case you've ever wondered how large Greenland or Finland really are compared to Italy... here you can find out: thetruesize.com allows you to drag and drop individual countries on top of other ones. Makes for some really interesting shrinkage if you drag Greenland into Africa!