Sometimes, the Internet explodes. As in "it goes ka-boom like a clock" - or wait, was that a bomb?

You might know by now what I'm hinting at. If not, let me get you up to speed: a 14-year-old kid was taken in handcuffs from his school in the US because he brought a clock to school and someone thought that was suspicious, and it could be related to a bomb. (Go here for Dallas Morning News about the thing, and the updates.)

Obviously, when you're trying to show one of your teachers what you can do, you don't expect to be taken away from school to be interrogated and then suspended for a few days. I remember bringing things I made to school, showing them to my teachers, and receiving praise and encouragement - just what I had hoped for.

The kid in question, however, is named "Ahmed Mohamed" and has a brown skin, and it's unfortunately statistically evident that there's a strong imbalance in how white and non-white folks are treated.

However, in this case, the Internet took notice. And exploded. Just like a clock would. (Right? Clocks explode all the time, don't they?) There's a trending hashtag on Twitter, #IStandWithAhmed, pics of people bringing clocks to work, and Ahmed has received offers from all kinds of places - scholarships, internships, sponsorings, invitations to visit (including the White House, which is kind of awesome), and lots and lots of other ways of support.

This, folks, is what the Internet is for. For exploding about social injustice, and human stupidity, and giving support where it is needed - in words, in kind, in acts, in money. It won't work all the time - nothing like this happens without there being a pinch of luck to have it mentioned in the right way at the right place and time - but it still gives me hope.

It's just one individual case, sure, and similar things have probably happened lots and lots of time and gone by unnoticed. However, Ahmed's clock kerfuffle has set an example, and it has made obvious that there is an imbalance in how people are treated.

We all have a socio-cultural background, and this always, always, always includes prejudice. We are all humans, and we all have a fear of the "other". That is normal, and natural, and deeply, deeply human. However, we can try to be aware of our prejudices and struggle to give fair chances, making the world a place with less fear and less misunderstandings and less stupidity - in short, a better place for all of us to live in. The only way to battle prejudice is to be aware that oneself will have it, be aware of when it rears its ugly head, stare it in the face and consciously go against it. Go look at things again. Go meet with the people in question. Go and try to be open.

So... I hope that Ahmed's case will help raise awareness in all of us that we might just be prejudiced without having it noticed before, and that we should think twice before suspecting someone of planning evil deeds. I also hope that this thing will calm down in a timely manner to a sane remainder of ongoing support for Ahmed, leaving him and his family to lead normal(-ish) lives again. Which includes having something like a normal-ish childhood for Ahmed, and the slack that is needed to mess up things sometimes and make stupid decisions and, in short, be delightfully teenaged.

The lives of Ahmed and his family will have changed through this, though instead of leaving Ahmed with a stigma as a juvenile offender, he now has fame - a much more positive change in a life, with much more potential.

Ahmed, may you live well and prosper, invent many things and help make the world a better place. You certainly have the opportunity to do great things with your life now - enjoy them, but please don't get stressed out, or feel like you have to be perfect now. You are fourteen. You will mess up things. You will fail in things. Go do it, it's your life, you are entitled to make mistakes. Make them, and make them your own, and grow from them and learn.

Oh, and thanks for blowing up the Internet with your clock.

Here I am, well into the final bits of work on the embroidery book - tweaking, resizing, colour correcting and inserting pictures. Tomorrow will be a library day, where I will read and look up the final few books to give further reading suggestions for all the interesting stuff. (Or at least some of it.)

After that, the only things remaining is taking care of the cover layout (where I'll be getting some input from a friend), doing one printout of the whole shebang to check for any bad things that have crept in, do a final proofread to fix typos, and get a general impression on how nice my layout is. Fortunately there's a lovely book I got one day from a friend:


(That's "Graphic design for non-graphic designers", and it's a really wonderfully helpful book, and it's out of print, but you can get the ebook.)

 There's instructions for lots of stuff in there, including on how to set up the type area for a book. So I looked at that part again, did some thinking, and then did some drawing on a piece of paper. It happens to be a printout of the text (with no layout yet). Fun! And this is how the result of my having fun looked:

As much as I love computers, for some tasks you just can't beat a pencil, a ruler, and a piece of paper.

 Then the only thing left is to finish the front matter (German bookpeople call that the "Titelei" - which sounds very nice in a weird way, I think).

If things all go according to plan, I will send it to the printer on Monday... so only a few more days for me to spend in the thrall of the book. I'll be very happy when I can turn to other things again!

I posted yesterday about a small gold ornament embroidered on fabric, and the post received this comment:

Looking at your ornament, I realized that because I had seen that particular technique only separate from the fabric ground, and because I was thinking about it as structurally similar to macrame and rope knotting techniques, it had never occurred to me that it might have been created using the ground fabric to help create and maintain the shape, rather than being created "in air" and then attached to a ground fabric by sewing. I'd been making them (and teaching people to make them) by using pins on a board with the wire wound in pairs on bobbins, as if I were making a sort of bobbin lace. I'll have to experiment with this approach. I'm curious: given that some of the surviving pieces using this technique are quite long, what would your approach be to dealing with the lengths of wire needed, if they need to be loose in order be able to "sew" them through the fabric as you create the knots?

Well. This does need more than just a few words in reply, so I'm making it a blogpost.

Firstly, and most importantly, this is a special form of gold thread embroidery and not a wire ornament, so if you are thinking "knots in wire", you have the wrong material in mind.

Let me show you - here's the ornament again:


And here's the thing in closeup.

Gold thread is a pain to photograph - but it's so pretty when it works!

You can clearly see that it's not a wire, but a spun gold thread - a thin, narrow strip of gilt silver wound around a silk core. You can also see how the threads go through the fabric at the corners; start and end of the ornament are in the lower right part of the picture.

Hopefully you can also see that it is a real knot, not a braid or bobbin-lace-like crossover between a braid and a weave.

I thus have no clue on how you would be able to do this particular knot in wire, over pins, with the wire wound on bobbins, as there's not only crossovers - it is basically real knotwork that is stitched through the fabric at the corners, and the gold thread goes through loops.

I can tell you how I do it, though: I snip off a piece of gold thread in the length needed (that took about 16-17 cm), fold it in half and tie an overhand knot into the very end. (I feel very badass when I do this. Knots! In gold thread! It's the fastest way to really anchor the gold, though, and it doesn't take up a lot of material, so it's an efficient thing to do, but it still feels like a badass move.)
Then I take a (rather thick) needle and a piece of (thin) linen thread. The linen thread goes through the gold thread loop, then both ends of the linen thread are threaded through the needle's eye.

Now I have the gold thread secured to the needle, with enough slack via the linen helper thread to comfortably do the stitching. Pulling the gold thread through using the linen loop needs some care, but it works really well that way, and it's a rather quick way of making the ornament. After the last knot of the work is done, I just pull the end to the back of the fabric, pull out the linen thread, and that's it.

I don't think this approach would work with wire, though; spun gold thread is a lot more pliable than solid metal, even if it's fine solid metal that has been nicely softened.

I spent a good part of the weekend working on the instructions (they're coming along) and shooting even more photos of even more steps. More and more ideas on what would be nice to add are creeping in, and it's a little sad to smash them down, but the thing has already grown a lot from my first estimate (around 30 pages) to now (probably 44-48 pages, and hopefully not more).

I couldn't resist to put this in, though:





It's a tiny gold thread ornament, modeled after an archaeological find from a bishop's grave dating to the 12th century, in approximate original size. A small enough extra to squeeze in!


In other news regarding the process, cover design is on its way (I'm getting a little help from a dear friend with this), and I have feedback from several lovely proofreaders already, with more to come soon.

Final word on the pictures of original pieces is still out, though, so I'll keep my fingers crossed that I will get permission and won't have to do without the pictures showing close-ups, either because I'm denied permission or because I'd have to pay too high a fee.

And after the weekend work, I'm now a little tired and worn out, so I'm rather happy that there are some errands to run this afternoon, plus a little more embroidery to work in preparation for the last photographs, and that I might just take it a bit easy for the rest of the day.

This was a busy week, and today was sort of weird and hectic* with a health checkup and a friend visiting and mail to get out and oh my goodness am I looking forward to some cake now, and some quiet time, and the start into the weekend. The embroidery instructions are almost done, and now it's time to get some feedback on them (shoot me an email if you'd be interested in proofreading/testreading, though I'd need to get it back soon). A few more pics need to be taken, and then there's the layouting to be done, but I will take care of all that next week.

Friday Flower!

For the rest of today, my plan is to have coffee, and eat cake, and relax and do nothing. Nothing. At all. Now doesn't that sound nice?


*Weird and hectic includes this blog going up way later than planned, due to me not getting around at first and then blogger acting up. I have prevailed, though. Arrrr!

It feels like Friday today, and while I'm happy that it actually isn't tomorrow yet (as that gives me a day more to do stuff), I also think that I'd totally be due a Friday today, and a nice weekend.

I've fallen into the gold embroidery instructions thingie, or to put it differently, it has eaten All. The. Time. Product development is two words that sound rather innocuous, but oh, the things that hide behind them. Things you have planned, or are working on and developing, have a tendency to... well, grow. Or suddenly present you with utterly unexpected problems, costing lots of brain power and occasionally some nights of sleep. I've hinted on it on Monday, but here's the long version:

I want the fleur de lis embroidery kit to be as accessible to beginner (gold) embroiderers as it possibly can be, and that includes good, detailed instructions with lots of photos so you will really know what to do, and how it might look. We do have a decent printer, and that's why I can print the one-page or two-page instructions for the spinning kits and for the distaffs at home, but printing multi-page things such as these instructions is an entirely different beast.

So I was planning on writing the instructions and then having them done up by a printer, in some form of a booklet (which is much nicer than individual sheets with their tendency to separate and land in entirely different parts of the room. Or world, if you're like me). So far, so good - but I don't know if the kit will fly or not, so I'd better not plan for insane numbers of it. Especially as it means investing in things that I do not usually have in stock and that are not easily, if at all, saleable on their own. So I've planned to do a single, smallish batch of kits and see how it goes. If it goes very well, I'll do another batch. If it builds a little nest on my shelves never to leave again because it's so nice and comfy where I store my non-sellable ideas... well, I'll be out some money and a lot of time, but I'll live.

Here's the thing, however. The lower your number of copies to be printed, the higher the cost per item. For the low number of embroidery kits that I will make for this first batch, and with the need to provide instructions in two languages (German and English)... well, let's say printing prices for these would be through the roof, and would definitely leave me with a number of copies in the language less sought after.

The solution? Make a single version of the booklet containing both languages. This does lower the printing costs per copy somewhat, but it's still rather expensive.

So at some point last week, towards the end of it if you want to know it all in detail, it occurred to me that I could do a general instructions booklet, suitable for sale separately from the kit, stick that into the kit and provide an additional single sheet with the kit-relevant additional information.

This, I still think, is a very nice solution to the conundrum of print prices and guessing how many copies in each language will be needed. It has a catch, though: General instructions are much more work and need much more writing than specific ones. They also need more pictures, and different ones, including those that need permission to be published.

Thanks to very nice people all around who answered questions and are looking into pictures, though, it looks like I might be able to pull this off in time. I've taken oodles of photos yesterday, stitched, read, looked up terms (textile terminology is always a pain in the neck), stitched more, translated, and done picture processing. The German text is almost done, the English version is halfway there, and I'm about halfway through the piccie issues as well.

One of the many pictures taken yesterday - supplies for gold embroidery and the embrodery kit prototype.

Now I'm hoping the remaining issues will clear up in time - and then there's only (hah!) layout and pre-print checks to be done. Wish me luck.

Time again to clear out some of those open tabs and pelt you with links!

Here's a comic explaining how the desperate situation in Syria developed.

PhD Scholar blogs about finding answers to questions she didn't have through research - oh, how I know that effect!

Viveka Hansen writes about Nordic Iron Age clothing and dyes on her blog TEXTILIS.

If you are interested in textile conservation, check out the online workbook "Clothes tell Stories", intended to make aware of conservation issues and help with choices in museums and collections where there's no access to a professional conservator to help.

Andrea Phillips has a lovely and thoughtful post about Equal-Opportunity Objectification.

And one last women-/gender-related link: Doug posts about a conference session regarding professional women in archaeology, with links. Highly recommended!