Hello and welcome, 2018!

May you bring us all good times and joy, pleasant work and helpful contacts, exciting new projects and successful endings of current ones!

All the cookies are baked, all the urgent things are taken care of, and the end of the year with all its festivities is coming closer and closer... which means it's time for a nice and proper winter break.

We'll be seeing family and friends, there will be food and drink and warmth inside and walks in the cold outside. There will be mousse au chocolat to welcome in the new year, too - and I'm looking forward to all of that, and to all the other things coming up in the next days.

So I'll wish you a good festive season with one of my favourite seasonal songs:


Have a lovely time with loved ones, and a good, safe start into 2018 - I will be back on the blog on January 8!

Time for  a link drop again!

The Time Magazine has chosen "the Silence Breakers" as their Person of the Year. Which I find really, really cool.

Gillian has posted a blog article about her teaching box (which I've heard quite a lot about already, it seems to be a veritable box of wonders!).

Also via Gillian: The Converso Cookbook, a 15th century Jewish cookbook, with a few recipes already transcribed on the website.

If you like reading stories out loud, Escape Artists are always looking for narrators to fit their stories.

There's a computer games company boss in the UK who likes jousting.

And that's it for today!

The region I live in is the Promised Land if you like bread, pork-based meat dishes, sausages, beer, and baked goods in general. Germany is famous for its wonderful bread varieties, and Franconia has the best breads in Germany. But I'm actually not concerned with bread at all at the moment - my mind is much more seasonally and regionally occupied: with Lebkuchen.

Lebkuchen (which may or may not contain ginger in the spice mix, and thus may or may not be translatable as gingerbread) is especially famous if coming from Nuremberg (or the area), and the best kind are Elisen-Lebkuchen, which contain little or no flour. I have my own recipe for them, and I like the result a lot, but this year, we'll get our supply again from our favourite Lebküchnerei (which is a bakery, but making only - or almost only - Lebkuchen. Welcome to Nuremberg.)

We (and quite a few of our friends) are quite sure that those are the world's best ones. But of course, tastes differ, and there's always the (albeit small) chance that there might be something even better around. So what do you do, obviously?

You team up with like-minded Lebkuchen-loving curious people and get a variety of individual ones from individual small bakeries. All hand-made. All of the "Elisen" variety. All covered with dark chocolate (because, really, there IS only that kind, if you ask me). Several of them claiming of being the best ones in town.



And then you get together and cut them all into parts and taste them all to see which ones are best. Like a wine-tasting, only with tea instead of water to accompany the wine, and Lebkuchen instead of wine. (Friends of ours, by the way, did something similar with Bratwurst - there are so many good ones that it's really hard to find out which ones are best. They had a barbecue event and tried sausages from about a dozen different places. That's dedication!)

I'm really, really looking forward to finding out which one will be the best of the lot - and how they compare to our benchmark Lebkuchen.

At least re-use - that is, after all, what was done with the Bernuthsfeld tunic. Case in point?



Patches 35-38, our numbering. (Did I mention we gave out new numbers for the patches, as not all of them are covered in the drawing that Hahne did?)

You can hopefully see that there is a light diamond twill fabric and a darker diamond twill fabric, and the lighter one has its own seams, done in a different hand than the main tunic makers' one (which is the rather clumsy overcast stitch around the patches). There is also a proper hem at the bottom of the light fabric, which in turn is stitched to the darker fabric, which has its own proper hem at its own bottom.



So my interpretation is this one: The light diamond twill fabric was once a kind of garment, sporting said seams and hem. At some point, it was worn down so much or had gotten out of fashion so completely that it was taken apart, and the still-okay bits were used again, to make a new garment (maybe a child's tunic) out of the light fabric together with the darker fabric. The two are not the same, but rather similar, so they'd work nicely together.

The colour difference in the original today is not quite as pronounced as it is in our reconstruction, which is partly due to the difference in the base colour of the fibres in our fabrics being larger than in the original and partly due to our decision to make the fabrics a bit more different in order to clearly show that they are two different pieces with different history.

In any case, here we have a beautiful example of re-using fabric not once, not twice, but three times as part of a garment - first, the lighter fabric on its own, then together with the darker one in a garment, then as a big patch in the Bernuthsfeld tunic.

(Also it was really, really nice to sew the proper seams and hem in the light fabric, and an amazing contrast to do this sandwiched right inbetween doing some Bernuthsfeld overcast seams!)

Me and the Most Patient Husband of Them All like our bicycles. A lot. They are our main method of transportation, and we're riding them year round. Well, I ride my bike with a good dollop of less enthusiasm when there is a significant amount of snow, as it's a 20"-wheeled front-drive recumbent, and that means I pedal more than I actually get forward. Especially when it's up an incline there can be a lot of slip. Still, having a bicycle that it is possible to ride in winter? Totally cool.

To be able to ride said front-wheel-drive 'bent in winter, though, I do have to mount winter tyres. Yes, there are things like that for bicycles - and in contrast to those for cars, bike winter tyres have spikes. (At least most of them do.)

We're also mounting spike tyres onto the tandem, and the bike my husband uses for commuting to work. It's the same brand on all of the bicycles - Schwalbe Marathon Winter - only, obviously, in different sizes.

They do make a hell of a difference on slippery ground. Deep snow will still be awkward to navigate, especially when it has been ground up by cars and there are frozen furrows underneath, but black ice and otherwise icy streets lose most of their scariness. It's a very big boost to security to have spike tyres, and I'm always a bit surprised that so few people know about them.

So if you are in an area where there's snow and ice in winter, and you still want to ride your bike, consider investing into a pair of spike tyres. They are not cheap, but they will last you for years, and the difference between having them to navigate ice and snow and normal tyres is enormous!

Well, we're more or less in the festive season, and isn't that time of year the time for miracles? At least small ones?

A while ago, I posted a picture of an amaryllis plant in almost full bloom:



and you will notice it's almost full bloom because there is a third bud, still growing, on that plant.

You will also notice that the plant is very tall, and the pot is not so very large. Which, early one morning, led to the plant doing a proper suicide attempt in falling off the windowsill, where we had placed it the evening before.

Bang.

The two flowering stems had almost finished being pretty by that day, but the bud was still in the bud, and growing enthusiastically. And now, after that fall off the sill, it had broken off and was only hanging on by a little bit of plant skin. Which made me quite sad.

So what do you do in a case like this? Place the pot into a large, massive second pot, so it can't topple over again. Whip out the masking tape. Gently pull the bud up so it can sit again on its stem... and wrap, generously, with masking tape. Then be rather sure that that was a pathetic attempt in saving the bud and go on with your life.

A few days later: realise that the bud is still green and hasn't browned and shrunk yet.

A few more days later: be very happy and very impressed, as the bud is opening up, getting ready to bloom.

Here you go. Our personal little Christmas Miracle:



Now if that isn't a nice thing!