The sun has come out, which means the winter garden will very, very soon be warm enough to sit and sew. Diverse things and happenings have conspired this week to throw me back from the point I wanted to be at today, sewing-wise, so I am equipped with a thermos full of tea and one of my favourite mugs (I accumulate those, it seems) and I still have a few last gruesome chapters of the Nibelungenlied left.

So... I shall take my cup and leave the cat sleeping here, keeping my desk company. While I shall sit in the sun and listen to how Ruedeger, the most tragic figure in the whole of the Nibelungen song, finds his bloody end.

How fitting that the lady's dress is a deep, deep red.

I owe you a chili recipe, and there's actually a sizeable stack of other stuff that I could blog about, but I have the strong urge to blog other stuff today. You will know why in a moment:

Maybe you've heard of Juan de Alcega's "Tailor's Pattern Book" - it's basically a book with instructions how to place your patterns on fabric so that there's as little waste as possible. There seem to be three similar books, also from the 16th century, from Austria - and they are being published as a Kickstarter campaign. (Kickstarter is a really cool thing.)

Also, the Blogging Archaeology Carnival roundup for February is over at Doug's place. It's not that big, this time; a lot of participants seem to have had the same problem with the open question as I had. There's also the last question for the carnival - I'm a bit sad it's already over, I was enjoying this!

Also: Meet a finished sleeve with cloth buttons.






The only thing left to do on this sleeve is pull out the marker basting thread (on the back, for marking where the edge should fall) and the basting thread for making the hem. And I will pull these once the second sleeve is hemmed, too.

Cloth buttons are a lot of work - each time I make these, I think to myself "I so know why buttons were considered a chic thing". But they are also so beautiful... and having a finished piece with buttons, such as that sleeve, that is something really, really nice.

(Just in case you wonder: the white sewing thread used to attach the buttons is invisible when they are closed. They sit smack on the fabric with their little bottoms.)

I will now leave you with a riot of colours. Colours, I might mention, that all live on wool. Except one, who lives on silk. And I am allowed to cut into each of them. Muahahaha.





The picture does not do them justice - they are lovely, and brilliant, and totally awesomely beautiful. At the moment, they make a fluffy stack of joy in our living-room and draw my eye every time I go past them. There's one almost-black and one black to the right, on different cloths; these will become legwear. And the darker orange shade you see to the left? That's a piece of cloth 1.5 m wide and 5 m long. Dyed in one piece. Spotless. No better dyer than Sabine, I tell you.

I didn't get around to working on the exact stuff I was planning on yesterday (there's a last fitting control needed, and that did not happen), but I did get a good bit of stuff done. This included some refresher research about the development of trousers from hose, and puzzling over how that happened, and when.

And what the guys in the Manesse Codex probably wore underneath. You see, normally you don't see that. And the codex is dated to the early 14th century, but it depicts clothes that are seemingly more in the traditional style, with long tunics for the men.
So the big question for me is... would they wear something more like the traditional wide underpants, and hose that go only to the middle of the thigh in the back? Or already the shorter, tighter underpants and hose that go up higher? Both would be possible for the early 14th century.

I'm still not decided on this. I have made, however, both an old-style wide "bruoch" and a younger-style shorter one, roughly resembling the underwear shown in the Tacuinum Sanitatis:

Threshing scene from the Tacuinum Sanitatis, c 1365. Picture source: BRUNNER, K. & DAIM, F. (2002) Ritter Knappen Edelfrauen. Das Rittertum im Mittelalter, Frechen, Komet.

As you can see, the underwear is short - both the shirt and the pants, and he's not wearing anything else since he's threshing (thank goodness that was such an itchy and sweaty job, it makes for a good number of pics of guys in deshabillé).

I've based the shirt I made for the Manesse garments roughly on this - the sleeves on my version are a bit longer, and it's cut with a little more ease, and it has no shoulder seams, but the type is the same. So at the moment I'm leaning towards the short version for the pants... but I'm not completely decided yet. I am planning to cut the man's hose tonight, and until then, I have time to think. (Ideas from you, dear readers, or other input are, as always, very welcome.)

Oh, and on a completely different note? There's the smell of damp wool in our bathroom - I finished my socks yesterday, and now am waiting until they are done drying after their inaugural soak. (There was no proper blocking after the soak. There is no proper blocking necessary - the fabric is so firm that nothing happens when they are soaked, except they feel even firmer.)

First of all, thanks to a hint from Gillian, here's a link to Palgrave McMillan, who are making their journals - all of their journals - free access during the whole of March.

Also online, with free access, is the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation, 1977-2005. (That site might yield other interesting stuff too - I haven't dug around yet.)

Also online: Codex Falkensteiniensis, dated to 1166-1196 (with a few later arms depictions strewn in). It includes a pic of someone fishing out of the window.

For those of you who are still here after that, said Gillian is doing a series of guest blog posts for Women's History Month. I did enjoy today's post - very interesting woman.

And Amalie has tried to trace warp transition in tablet weaving - unsuccessfully (yet).

That's it. If you are still here... I have nothing more for you. Come back tomorrow ; )

The many hours of sewing, it seems, make me want to increase my knitting time as well... and there's two just-for-fun projects on needles, currently: The socks that I sort of blogged about a while ago are almost finished (just a few more rounds before bind-off):




Also, I have started knitting my very first lace scarf... because of the yarn I spun, oh, back in 2011. It had a run-in with an indigo dye vat last Textile Forum, resulting in blue yarn. 595 m (or 571 m, the second time I measured) and weighing 64.9 grams. What do you do with that? I can tell you what I did: I scoured Ravelry's pattern database until I found a shawl pattern that I liked and that uses about this amount of yarn.

I got that pattern as a present for my birthday, and yesterday I couldn't resist any longer (I had planned to wait until the socks were finished) and cast on.






It's the Renaissance Shawl (here's its ravelry page). The designer, smart woman, is giving percentages of yarn left throughout the pattern, so you can see whether your gauge is fine for the amount of yarn you have.

Speaking of Ravelry and patterns and socks, by the way, there are a bunch of really cool socks designed by General Hogbuffer. If you like socks that are not just plain vanilla, check out his design page!

Finally... since the sock yarn I spun gave me so much pleasure, I have this:





which, one day in the medium-far off future, will spend some quality time with my spinning wheel.

So as you can see, there's a lot lined up as fun knitting for the evenings and my breaks!

Sewing project update: The first buttons are attached to the sleeve of the red dress. I tried to snap a photo this morning, but found that I need either much more light or a tripod and was too lazy to get the latter. It's beautiful, though - the red is an incredibly lovely colour.

There's also a next project lining up for when the current one is finished - including an altar linen, something that is weirdly exciting to do. It's no spectacular work, just a very simple cloth, hemmed and pieced together in the middle, with no embroidery or other special effects, but the altar vestments are such an important part of religious life and thus of medieval culture that it is super-exciting for me to do.

We're also working on finishing up the paper about our dyeing experiments of the last two Textile Forums - one of them is a little late, but I'm (or we) are trying to make up for that with the second one.

For those of you who read German, there's a very interesting article on Archaeologik about how the public (especially that part going on treasure hunts with metal detectors) sees archaeologists. Not nice to read - but important to keep in mind: Sensational stories about treasures shift the impression of the public towards the find, not towards research.

Also in German: the guy behind Tribur is working on reconstructing the carolingian sword-belt-thingie.

Not in German, not medieval, but really cool: Geek Knitting Links and more of the same.

February is always a short month, feeling even shorter due to all kinds of parties going on at our acquaintances - it's a popular birthday month. This year's February, though, feels like the shortest one ever to me, and I can't believe it is almost over already.

Before that is finally the case, I want to at least mention the Blogging Carnival with its February topic: Blogging archaeology. That's it - no proper question this month, which makes it somehow harder for me to tackle. The open February topic is intended to let everyone who would like to write a piece about blogging do so, with the option of getting it published. (With deadlines for those who wanted to submit. Needless to say, they are all past already.)

Writing about blogging archaeology without a proper question is hard for me, as I feel I don't have so much to say on the topic... so I more or less decided after the topic came out that I won't participate properly this month. I don't use the blog to write articles, due to time restrictions and lots of other, non-public-process writing going on (at the moment, three papers and a book are in the pipeline). It might be interesting, though, to write an article in the blog one day - if I can figure out a process to do that. (I should probably check out the reader numbers before and after, though, so I can see how many I scared off!)

For this month, however, I'll more or less pass - it would be nice to have a long piece about how important archaeology is for me, how I enjoy talking archaeological textiles, how I would like to spend much more time researching them... but this month? I don't have the time or energy left for it. There's work to be done. Work that is for a large part a reconstruction attempt, based on archaeological sources, of medieval garments. (I shall finally finish my button-making today - not yet finished because other things snuck in beforehand and I did them first.)