Thank goodness it's Friday - somehow, this week seemed both too long and too short at the same time. So here's links to celebrate that it is Friday, and the weekend is coming!

A self-filling water bottle for cyclists - it catches humidity from the air and collects it in a bottle. I'm not so sure I would really want to drink that water, or how well it would work (especially in dry weather, when you'd need the water the most), but the idea is just cool.

Copenhagen Uni is offering a POD book called "Refashioning Viking Garments"; their sales page also has a pdf with the table of contents to download.

If you're looking for some nice stories to enjoy this weekend, here's a bunch of Escape Artist ones (they are podcasts, so you can even do stuff while enjoying the stories). They're all eligible for the Hugo Awards 2016, in case you have voting rights.

Or you could check out the Recording Archaeology Youtube Channel, where you can find videos from archaeological conferences.

Enjoy!

One of the things that come up frequently when I do presentations or demonstrations of textile techniques is the value of textiles. We're so used today to going into a clothes shop that sells things for ridiculously low prices that our estimation of textiles and their worth tends to be very low.

The ridiculously low prices are not without their own price, though - only it's usually not us here who are paying it, but cotton farmers, clothing factory workers in Bangladesh, or everyone in the area where cotton is grown when water supplies are used up and the groundwater level plummets (no wonder if up to 20 000 litres of water are used to produce one kilo of cotton), or is poisoned by herbicides and pesticides.

It's not fair, it's not sustainable, and a lot of people have been talking about this "fast fashion" and its problems in the last years. (Just plug "fast fashion problems" into your favourite search engine. You'll be surprised.) There's things we all can do, though - one of them is becoming more aware of what we buy, and how often. Another thing is to try and avoid conventionally grown cotton (organic is much kinder to both producers and the environment) and look for clothes that were not produced in Bangladesh, but more locally. Buy used clothing, mend things that can be mended, and give things you do not wear anymore away instead of tossing them into the bin.

The fact that textiles are such a cheap commodity today has coloured our perception of textile crafts, and our internal valuing of fabrics. This makes it hard for many people to understand why fabrics were so precious in the Middle Ages (and also way past that time, until rather recently). Clothes used to be a very valuable thing, in our past, and I do wonder if they will, one day, be again.

Back at the Textile Forum, one of our participants, Micky, brought some of her wool along to sell - and of course, there was the siren song of indigo-dyed wool luring me in. Being utterly fond of anything blue, one skein went home with me... and then it sat there while I was trying hard to decide what to do with it.

[caption id="attachment_2199" align="alignnone" width="592"] One 266 m skein of gorgeous blue wool with a little variegation... hand-dyed.


Now I've figured it out. There will be another Spirally Hat in my future - and I'm already almost past the first stage, thanks to a bit of knitting while watching TV in the evenings:

[caption id="attachment_2198" align="alignnone" width="600"] The upper part is almost done - it still has its little starting belly button, though.


 
Now the big remaining question is: Will I finish the hat before it is too warm outside to wear it?

Most of the recipes that I've posted during the last years were for baked goods (because I just love to bake), but today I've got something non-baked for you: Pickled Herring, as it's traditionally eaten in many parts of Germany. (Well, mostly - I made a few tweaks.)

Pickled herring (or green herring) is young (not yet fertile) herring that is put into brine and left there to ripen for a bit. These are often prepared "nach Hausfrauenart" (housewife's style), which is in a thick creamy sauce together with apples, onions and pickled cucumbers and usually eaten together with potatoes. I really love this dish, and since the fishmonger at the market in our town sells brined trout (which, taste-wise, is very close to pickled herring), I get to enjoy this more often these days.

It does not look spectacular...



...but oh, the tastes and textures!

To serve one to two persons, depending on how hungry you are (and if you serve it with potatoes or not):

~150 g brined herring (or other brined fish), filleted
about the same amounts apple, pickled cucumber, and onion

Cut the onion into rings (traditional) or dice it finely (I prefer that). I like to marinate the cut onion for a bit in a splash of the pickling liquid from the cucumbers, but that's optional. Cut the cucumbers into pieces (I dice everything!), peel the apples and also cut them up.

Traditionally, you now add a mixture of sour cream, cream and maybe even mayonnaise (you want a thick creamy consistency in the sauce), mix that with the apples, cucumber and onion, insert your brined fish and let it stand at least for a few hours, overnight is even better, for the flavours to mix and develop. It's usually quite a lot of sauce, much more than I used for the version in the photo. You won't be needing salt for this, as the brined fish is salty itself (in some cases, it's even recommended to soak it in water first to remove some of the salt), but an absolutely necessary herb for this is dill - so do add some, at least, up to a generous amount, or it won't be what it is supposed to be.

I prefer preparing this dish as a kind of salad, so I dice the fish up as well and go easier on the sauce amount. I've also recently discovered skyr, which is a traditional Icelandic dairy thing somewhere between curd cheese and yoghurt. It is fairly thick in consistency, has a lot of protein and little fat, and also works wonderfully as a sauce for this. For the salad in the picture, I added about 150 g of skyr - so it's basically about equal amounts of each ingredient (except the dill, that would be overdoing it). With the splash of pickling liquid that I marinated the onions in, the skyr ended up the perfect sauce consistency.

The result? The apple, cucumber and fish pieces are all sour, but each in its own way, and they have distinctly different textures. The onion adds some zing to the dish, and a fourth texture, while the dairy envelops all of these and lends a rich creamy mouthfeel to the whole thing. I will eat this straight, with a spoon, no need for potatoes, and be utterly ridiculously happy.

Obviously, you can adapt the amounts of the individual ingredients if you prefer more apples, or no onions, or whatever. (There's even a version where the apple is replaced by pineapple, though I'm not really fond of that.) If you're serving it with potatoes, it's advisable to make some more cream sauce, as that goes really well with the 'taters and it will be a little dry otherwise.

If you can get brined herring, feel adventurous, and do try this dish - let me know if you liked it. I hope you will!

There's a Day for everything these days, it seems - on Friday, it was World Nutella Day (at least according to the twitter hashtags popping up in my feed), and today is Computer Cleaning Day (or so a more or less spammy newsletter from gmx is telling me).

Well, cleaning the computer is never a bad idea, especially if (like me) you are inclined to keep an extra copy of something just in case... or copy a file temporarily and then forget to delete the copy. Also Windows sometimes goes off to place a huge file or three on its disk space, just because it can.

So, just in case you find yourself in need of computer cleaning, here's some of the tools I use. They are all free as well (yay!) so there's nothing to lose:

For general cleaning up and removing of temporary files - CCleaner (the same company also offers a defragmenting tool that I also use). This can also clean up the registry (always do a backup first, just in case) and de-install programmes you don't want anymore, plus clean your autostart folder (helping make the computer start faster).

For finding and removing duplicate files - AntiTwin. This one also lets you filter for size or compare files only from two different directories, which can come in pretty handy.

For checking if there are any abnormally huge files hanging out on my computer (recently, it was a 1.4 GB text file, courtesy of Windows, called CBS.log), I'm using SequoiaView. This used to be downloadable from the TU Eindhoven, but it seems it's no longer available. My search engine tells me that TreePie would be an alternative, though. This programme shows you the size of the individual directories and files on your drive, so you can quickly see what is taking up a lot of space and what isn't.

A few days ago I already did a post on how to clean out old updates from Win7 and Win8, so if you find that your system has been grabbing a lot of space for itself, you might want to give that a try as well.

And, of course, cleaning the computer might also mean cleaning the fan - if your machine is rather hot or you can hear the fan labour as it's working hard, opening it up and getting rid of all that chaff and dust might be a good idea. There's usually instructions available somewhere on the net on how to clean the fan - and most machines aren't as hard to do as the one in this video:

Assorted links for you on this Friday - and hooray, weekend is almost upon us!

First of all, a post about how little changes can have rather large effects overall, sometimes without us noticing it at first: How a lamp took away my reading, and a box brought it back.

For those of you who dcrochet and like peacocks, here's a pattern to crochet a peacock feather appliqué.

Discarding Images has a picture of a very fluffy cat.

And finally, I found an online bookstore that might be an alternative to the Big River (and, as they bought them, bookdepository): wordery.com. They are located in the UK, ship world-wide with free delivery, and I can feel the urge to buy a book or two coming up, just so I can check them out.

The Internet is full of helpful things, and I have a few more resources for you today. Hooray free helpful things!

First of all, the Book of Kells is online, in all its digitised splendour and glory, free for you to look at! Here's the official announcement from the Trinity College Dublin, and here's the direct link to the digital book.

Aarhus Uni Press' free e-book of the month is Re-Mapping Exile (edited by Michael Böss, Irene Gilsenan Nordin and Britta Olinder); it's a collection of essays about aspects of exile in Irish writing.

And finally my discovery of yesterday: The Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte is available online, for free, under the title of RDK Labor. It works like a wiki in that you can also submit articles, and it's a huge resource of information on German art history.

On a completely different note, it's snowing outside, and - very fittingly - the snowdrops are blooming: