The current knitting project, Baton Rouge, is coming near its end - the lace border around the front is almost done, and what remains now is to sew the (already blocked) sleeves together and sew them in - and then I'll have a nice new silk jacket.

There were a few tangles at the end (metaphorical ones) - I picked up more stitches than the pattern called for to have sensible spacing between the stitches in the first knit row, then worked k3tog instead of k2tog in the first lace row, after trying with the original setup for a bit and quickly finding that it made the lace too squished together.

The second, bigger, tangle happened about where the picture was taken - there's supposed to be four rows with yarnover holes as per the picture in the pattern. Which will happen if you make row 11 a p2tog, yo row and not, as the pattern also tells you, a p row (there are two listings for r. 11, and guess which one is first in sequence? Right. The purl one, which is the wrong one). So I purled a bit, then found the mistake, tinkered back and did the correct r 11.

Soon now. Sooooon. And once this is finished, I'll get back to the sleeves on Moyen Age!

Today, I'm off to Bielefeld, to set up the shop there, give a workshop on spinning and have a fair amount of fun.

Today, by the way, is also my one year anniversary of reaching my goal weight, and I'm happy to say that I am still in the goal weight range (with fluctuations, depending on water retention levels, which are closely connected to stress levels), and still very, very happy about it.

While most of the time I manage quite well, there are times when it's not as easy for me to keep the right balance between eating enough and eating not too much. Especially in these times, I can really feel that both the years of being overweight and the wild ride I took as the weightloss phase certainly left their traces, and I get really odd trains of thought. These things usually happen when I have a good bit of water retention that is hard to explain and stays for more than a few days, making me rather... anxious. Yes, even if I can be pretty sure it's water, and will go away, and even though I know that in some cases it will take at least two weeks before it starts flowing out. In these times, I sometimes also have problems estimating how much food I'll need (with not-so-nice side effects if I underestimate too much)

Overall, though? Everything is fine and dandy. And I am happy.

Actually, this title is half a lie, because only one picture is an actual garden pic - this one:


It's a surprise gladiolus that one day just turned up here, and now it's blooming brightly red and standing tall. Well, with a little help - the flower stalk actually had grown so tall that a heavy rain flattened it down to the ground, and it needed a support to keep it upright after that.

The other one is of a plant that resides in our wintergarden - sea kale.


This is a plant grown from seeds that I took from actual wild sea kale on one of our trips to Britain (so it's a pre-Brexit-Britain-exiter!). Sea kale doesn't grow easily from seeds, and it took about 20 of them to get me one single plant, which I then tried to coddle and coax into growing.

It was... rather uncooperative, languishing with only two or three small leaves... not very promising at all. So I kept it in the protective wintergarden environment, and then it got its very own nice large pot with water reservoir, and still... nothing.

I did know that sea kale is a halophyte, but as I also knew that it had been grown inland in former times, I had not added salt to its diet straight away. (The German wikipedia article about halophytes is much more elaborate than the English one, by the way, so if you read German, it's the better choice.) Then, finally, I started watering it with the water we had boiled our pasta in. Salty water. With lovely sea salt. And slowly, this little plant started to grow a few more leaves, and to get a little larger. It's still not very large - especially not compared to the huge, huge sea kale plants growing on the British Coast - but it might just need more salt, and I'm sort of afraid to overdo it, so I'm upping the dosage only slowly and slightly.

Moral of the story: there are plants that can tolerate salt, and plants that actually need salt, and the latter will not do well without it, even though they might survive (if barely) in normal soil. Salting the earth, in that case, is actually helpful!

Oh, and bonus proof it is a cabbage species:


The little yellow dots are cabbage white butterfly eggs.

Talk Like A Pirate Day is drawing nearer again (September 19!), and that is a good reason to pull out the Pirate Robert hats again and take some more photos - especially since the hat pattern is going to be featured in an article soon (and I'm utterly excited about that!).

Some things, though, are notoriously hard to take good photos of. Gold embroidery, or gold brocading, for instance - the glittering gold has a tendency to mess with the exposure time calibration of cameras, and this tends to result in really bad pictures.

While knitted hats are usually not suffering from exposure time problems due to gold thread, small cables also have a tendency to look really obvious in real life, just to suddenly and quietly disappear into invisibility on a photograph. Human eyes and human brains are just really, really good at seeing 3D and making the most even of small differences of light and shade.

So I was very happy about having two nice little photo lights, and a good tripod, and some time for fiddling. And some more time for fiddling. Then some more. There were also some, um, alternative supports for the two photo lights so that I could adjust them juuust so - a few millimetres, or a few degrees of the head angle, already made a huge difference in the outcome.

[caption id="attachment_3367" align="alignnone" width="816"] Lamps, a styrofoam head with the hat, a camera on a tripod. And some motivational coffee (not shown).


In the end, though, I did get a few decent pictures - so I'd say the fiddling was well worth it!

Part of category "fun things I get to do under cover of my day job": filming. In the most current case, filming a short explanatory video about the oil light swimmers that I carry in the shop - to show when I'm at fairs.

I'm still completely delighted with the fact that a company in Nuremburg has been making these oil light swimmers for way more than a hundred years. I absolutely love using them as the eco-friendly (and cheap!) alternative to tea lights. No aluminum waste, no pricey beeswax tealights, and there's vegetable oil in the kitchen anyways, so also no extra space required.

The concept of this kind of lighting, though, has been out of common use and knowledge for so long that the little round and tri-bladed thingies need a lot of explanation when they sit on the table in my market stall - so I've played with the idea of making a bit of an explanatory video for a good while now. Finally, this has happened, and it ate most of yesterday's work time.

Just like taking good photos of things, it's not as easy as it seems to take a good video of things. It can be astonishingly hard to keep everything inside the frame - good thing I've been doing theatre stuff before, so I knew about the magic that can be wrought by a few bits of tape at key places.

[caption id="attachment_3366" align="alignnone" width="451"] Video setup. It's not looking very spectacular, is it?


Also there was a problem with the SD card I used in the first go, so I got to take all the shots again. Sigh. Now the video-ing part is all done, and only (hah!) the cutting and text-setting part remains - which will hopefully not take a lot longer, so I can take the video along to Bielefeld...

I still have a fairly large selection of spindle whorls hanging out here, but some weight classes are running low, and especially the disc-shaped whorls are almost gone again. Which means it's time to go into the basement, fetch the clay and assorted whorl-making tools, and a while later, more spindle whorls have been made, and are now quietly and happily drying out.

[caption id="attachment_3357" align="alignnone" width="507"] Re-stocking in progress, with both biconical/roundish whorls...


[caption id="attachment_3356" align="alignnone" width="514"] ...and the flat ones.


Even though I have a form to make the flat whorls, they never come out exactly alike - there's always small differences in the thickness, even if I try very hard indeed to roll the clay out exactly to the right thickness, and exactly plane. Last batch was a bit too thin altogether, and I hope this won't be too thick because of overcompensation.

The other whorls are different in difficulty, because they don't need to be exactly a weight or thickness; I try to make a range of sizes and shapes every time, but sometimes I tend more towards lighter ones and sometimes more toward heavier ones. Which is sort of an issue when I should be re-stocking a certain weight range as a priority, and I end up making whorls that are, erm, not inside that range.

My theory why the biconical whorls are quite common, by the way, is that it is very easy to form a biconical shape when rolling a ball of clay in your hands - way easier than getting a perfect sphere, for instance. My main problem then is that the tips of the cones are usually a little outside the centre, which makes getting the hole into the whorl in a way that will not cause it to wobble slightly more interesting. Also, whorl-making is actually a pretty boring process (a feeling that is, by the way, shared by the lovely guy who makes the wheel-thrown whorls for me, as he told me when I ordered the most recent batch). I try to overcome the boringness by listening to EscapePod, which usually sort of works, but somehow I still feel it's more mind-numbing than spinning.

Which is actually weird, because it is no real mindless job. Getting the whorls an approximate size and a suitable shape is not really hard, but it does take a bit of concentration; getting the bore hole into the middle so that the whorl does not wobble too much also needs some attention. I give each whorl a whirl on the stick I use to make the hole, and while a bit of imbalance is practically un-avoidable at least for the larger whorls, if it feels too much out of centre, I get to knead it up again and try once more.

The larger and flatter the whorl is, the harder I find it to get it right, as a little off-centeredness in shape and in hole position will have a large impact. There's also some times that I get them all almost perfect just like that, and then, a while later, it feels as if I can't get even the easiest and smallest whorl done in an acceptable way.

So, to sum it up: spindle-whorl making, in my very personal opinion, is harder than it looks, and while I love those nice little tools, making them is a singularly obnoxious task. And even though I have wonderful drawings with cross-sections of actual prehistoric and historic spindle whorls that definitely show they were not perfectly symmetrical, or perfectly centred at all, having mine a bit wobbly always makes me fret, and feel a bit unsure whether the ones I produce are good enough for the spinners that buy and use them (even though I haven't gotten complaints yet). Which also plays a part in making this task feel a bit harder. Weird, huh?

What I totally love about the whorl-making process, though, is picking the still warm, very dirty freshly fired whorls out of the ashes and seeing the many different shapes in  black, light grey and various marbled mixes of them - that is always like unpacking a present!

Some more stuff, while I am prepping for Bielefeld in the background and still trying to get on top of the heap...

Here's a free Dragon Lace pattern - for you knitters among us. The really fun thing about it is that its creator, Naomi Parkhurst, uses a special method to encode a word into a knitting pattern - and in this case, it really looks like dragon heads...

If you prefer to be creative in a totally different way, there's a competition thingie run by the EU parliament. Your goal is to de-bunk one of the EU Myths (such as "cucumbers have to have a certain shape to be able to sell them") in a comic or caricature. The page I found is German only, and it seems it originates from Austria - but if you read German enough to understand what you can do, you should be able to join in, I think. It's the EU, after all.

If you are using Twitter and have received the note about a change in the TOS, and are now wondering about said changes - a kind soul has made a difference check that you can see here.

EscapePod, my favourite science fiction story podcast of all time, has put up a list with a few suggestions for new listeners... so in case you need a story or two, that might be a place to start.