The last of the fabrics for the project has arrived - a 2/2 twill woven from the same yarns as the previous plainweave fabric. It's now hanging out to dry after being fulled just like the others... and it's beautiful. Really, really beautiful.

Here's the cloth in its raw state:


And this is what it looked like after washing:


The last picture of the after-fulling state will have to wait for tomorrow when it's dry again - but I can already tell you that the fabric shows no tracking, hasn't shrunk a lot, and is really nice.

Here's a closeup of the threads after washing:


And tomorrow, it will go off to new adventures - cloth metamorphosis part two!

Textiles, Trade and Taste - Portugal and the World is a networking project looking at textiles and their trade from the 16th century onward. The project was launched in 2011 and has since developed into a networking group that looks, among other things, at colours in textiles (that was their focus in 2016).

They have recently launched a project website, and there you can find articles, lists of events and more resources, like Portuguese museums that have early modern textiles. Plus you will see some gorgeous pictures on the site, so go take a look!

If you like to knit and would like to do so in the name of science (yay!), or like to spin in the same name, there's a recent project about Knitting in Early Modern Europe looking for volunteers to do just these things. The main task at the moment is spinning yarn to specifications taken from the original items, then knitting small round swatches and fulling them. This is done to test theories on cap construction without having to knit a full cap (which is rather a lot of work compared to knitting a few smaller swatches).

To join the KEME volunteer team, you will be required to fill out an online form, and you can get instructions for spinning and knitting from team member Rosalind. Read more about the project in their first newsletter, and their second one. (These also contain contact data for Rosalind - I'd rather not get her extra amounts of spam by posting her mail address right here...)

Feel free to tell a friend or three if you think they'd be interested, too!

 

The third batch of cloth for the project is done, and it turned out just beautifully. Here's the cloth in its raw state:


After a little soak and a bit of a wash, it looked like this:


And then I took a little walk on it, and after about one hour, I had this end result:


I find it totally fascinating how the fabric changed - especially its hand, which went from stiff and coarse in the raw fabric to firm, but still somehow soft and fluffy in the fulled version. And I can't imagine a more beautiful tracking effect than the one apparent in the fulled fabric - it looks splendidly like diagonal lines even though it's plain weave throughout.

Ah, the weekend - I'm really looking forward to it... the last of the yarn has been spun and is on its way to be woven, and now I can finish up the cloth that is already here and waiting to be hemmed. And, hopefully, take care of a stack of other things, such as getting tomato seedlings started and tidying up the garden a little.

And Friday is the perfect time to toss some more random links at you...

First of all, The Middle Ages Unlocked was mentioned in an interview with Traci Harding, to my and Gillian's joy.

There's an interesting article about ten female scientists... and an image of a space cake, which is really awesome (scroll way down for instructions on how to make such a cake).

Enjoy your weekend, with cake or without!

Things I learned this week, in no particular order:

I can only listen to so much audio fiction before I want something else, input-wise.
Which means I went out to discover some non-fiction podcasts, and that was quite successful. So here are three podcasts that I thoroughly enjoyed: You are not so smart, which is about the weird things your brain does so you can better delude yourself; Training Beta, which is interviews with climbers about climbing and training (I figured if my ass is stuck on the couch for hours on end, I might as well think about getting it up a wall); and Futility Closet, which is about forgotten stories from history (and has the coolest logo - who could resist a penguin with a monocle and a tophat?).

If I have interesting stuff to listen to, I can spin for a longer time (duh, who'd have thought it, right?) and I can manage up to a kilometer in a day. That, however, will eat up all the workday, and I'll be totally tired in the evening - it's not a really sustainable pace if there is anything else to happen as well, such as keeping on top of emails and other stuff, or running the rest of my business.

Also spinning-related - having an actual piece of goal yarn works better for me than checking against a chart, plus, as an added benefit, these reference snippets on a card can be filed later on for reference in case of similar projects in the future (where I'll be a lot, no make that a huge lot, smarter about calculating).

Third Time's the Charm seems to actually work, and - as I sort of said yesterday - tenacity and stick-to-it-iveness through the suckitude of getting your face kicked by archaeotechnic mishaps is key. At least the current status of the last batch of yarn is "suitable, and work is progressing well". Whew. Might be we'll actually make that deadline.

In all that stress with the spinning and exploding project and so on, I realised that my dieting phase has made me completely quit the habit of stress-induced eating, which is really, really nice. On a half-related note, doing a pullup or chinup is much easier on an actual bar that is easy to grip, not swaying because it is hanging on ropes like a swing, not ice-cold and not rotating than trying it on things that are not really bars, or swinging, or rotating, or ice-cold, or whatever. (Which means I did manage to do my very first pullup - something I've wanted to be able to do for years. Decades, even. Yay!)

I've already hinted at it - while the packing cloth has turned out very nicely, and the sailcloth is about as perfectly as I had imagined it, there's a third type of fabric to be done... and that one is acting up. Considerably.

Doing archaeotechnical work (as in "recreating stuff known from archaeological sources") is interesting, and exciting, and lovely, and usually it is great fun. It is even more so if you are doing it as part of your work, and are actually getting paid for it.

However, archaeotechnical work also includes a guarantee that you will occasionally get kicked into your face by your technique and materials. You've not estimated correctly how long something will take, or how difficult it will be. Something behaves unexpectedly and throws all your plans into the garbage bin, leaving you to draw up new ones and do the work again. Leaving you also to lament your monetary gains that are joining the plans at the happy bin-party as your work hours, now unpaid, rack up and up and up. Germans have the term "Lehrgeld" for things like that - the tuition fee you pay, in this case to life.

And yes, all of the times in the past that something like this has happened, I did get to learn a lot from the experience. However, it is still painful. It's not only the feeling that you have made a mistake, or two; it's the tendency for a bad feeling to creep into your soul, making you think that maybe you are not competent at all. Maybe it will never work. Maybe you should never have agreed to do it.

It's especially painful if it is taking a colleague along for the ride, and the self-doubts are not getting fewer with someone else hanging in the same bad spot with you. There's no way out, though, but to try it again and again, keeping at it until you succeed. Hopefully before the deadline has rushed by... and at the moment, I think I can already hear it. (It does not help that February has fewer days than any other month in the year...)

If you're looking for me? I'll be spinning some more. Again.