Usually, for someone working with demonstrations and in connection with living history events, the late autumn and winter months are the slow season - the time to kick back and think about stuff for the next season to come. The time to pack away things, repair stuff, make new stuff (or plan to do it until it's time to frantically do at least a bit of all that work in the week before the new season, in time-honoured tradition and in tune with the old reenactor's joke "Winter is the week before the first event in the new season").

But this year around, I don't feel as if things were slowing down; on the other hand, there's plenty to do and some juicy projects and other things have reared their heads, promising interesting times and a chance of income.

So I am emailing and reading and writing and planning... while drinking coffee (always good) and eating highly motivating sweet substances (aka cookies and chocolate). After all, the brain needs sugars, right?

Link for today: Not a medieval dress, but a spectacular one - and it has been restored recently. It's the Victorian stage costume of actress Ellen Terry, and the article is brought to you by PastHorizons.

I'm still feeling a little swamped by work, though pleasantly so - things are coming up that might mean really interesting projects in the future, there's some progress on the writing front (though there's never, ever as much as I'd like) and I may have figured out a way to find out whether the yarn I have is enough for a knitting project.


A good while ago, a relative gifted me with her old knitting stuff - an assortment of yarns, and among that three packages that were once intended for a sweater, pullover, cardigan or whatever you might name it. Now due to a lot of different reasons (most of them related to shape - my shape), I am not going to knit a given sweater pattern as written. I prefer a zipper to a button band (I'm just not a button person), I am probably going to shorten the whole piece so the hem falls where I want it, I am also probably going to shorten the arms, and I might fiddle with other elements. And the size - I normally fall between sizes.

With all these alterations, though, and yarn that is not available anymore (and not listed in Ravelry), how am I going to figure out whether it is enough yarn for the project? There's lots of guidelines on how much one needs, but somehow I don't trust them.

So here's a different possibility (that I hope will work out well):
Knit a swatch. (You wanted to anyways, right?) This should be at least the typical swatch size, as in at least 12 x 12 cm (or 5 x 5 inch) to let you measure the gauge correctly (since that may be necessary knowledge for altering the pattern). Do whatever you plan to do with the finished piece - wash it, feed it to the dog, ... you know the drill. (At least theoretically, I'm sure you know it.)

Then you calculate the area in cm² that your swatch has. You might want to leave out the very edges to be on the safe side - so 11.5 x 11.5 cm on a swatch that actually measures 12 on each side. Then you put it onto a good kitchen scale - diet scale will be a good idea, probably. You now have two numbers.

Next, you can roughly calculate the area in cm² that your finished piece will have. A sweater will typically consist of one body (roughly a tube) and two sleeves (also roughly a tube). For these calculations, I just took the widest width of the body part and the total length to calculate the body surface area and the upper arm width and desired sleeve length to calculate the sleeve surface area. (Don't forget that you will need two sleeves!)

Now you can divide the complete sweater surface area by the swatch surface area. This tells you how many swatches would be equivalent to your sweater. Now you multiply the swatch weight by this number, and you get an approximate finished weight for the sweater. (Approximate because shaping, armholes and neckline are not considered.) Compare that to the weight of your available yarn... and if your yarn weight is greater or equal, you should be good to go.

I have been asked to consider turning my blog into a book, and I'm now pondering the idea. It's true that I have written a lot of stuff over these past years, but I'm not convinced enough of them would be non-internet-specific enough for a print version.

It is certainly less work than writing a book from scratch - but it's also sort of non-ordered, non-sequitur, and containing a lot of filler posts or link lists.

And I'm just not sure whether anyone would really want to buy a version of this blog in form of a book. So I would be grateful for any feedback - what do you think about blogs turned books? Are there any articles I wrote on that blog that you'd like to have in a print version? Or should everything rather stay as it was?

I slept longer than usual today (it was not my fault at all - I was pinned down into bed by a cat sleeping on my leg, so I could not move, right?). This was followed by a phase of frantic editing and planning work, so today's blog post is much later than planned. I blame the cat. Who is, by the way, sleeping (again).

Via Isis of Medieval Silkwork, a link to a blog post about two extant dresses from the late 16th century in Pisa. It's a very detailed post, and they are beautiful dresses.

And the Bavardess has posted two longish blog posts about interdisciplinary research, well worth a read!
Interdisciplinary research is very fruitful if it functions well, and really necessary for many topics, but it's not all easy to get started with it. In her blog post "Notes for a method of interdisciplinary research" part I and part II, the Bavardess sums up a two-day workshop, with very helpful hints for a framework before getting started. This is especially important for a collaborative effort, but helpful as well if you are doing it on your own.
 

I had a really nice and very intense day of sitting in the library and reading and taking notes yesterday - which felt absolutely fine.

I have started to take notes for each book that I store in my bibliography database so I can have an excerpt and check again if necessary where something came from, and I now somehow sort of regret that I haven't started this years and years ago. I'm still working with EndNote and will continue to do so, I have never gotten onto good terms with Zotero, though it seems to be a good (and free) choice. (In the interest of full disclosure, I have also never really tried hard to get onto good terms with Zotero.)

And let me state again that I am a huge fan of databases, both for bibliography and for pictures - because having a searchable, tagged or keyworded heap of information is much better than having an unorganised, non-searchable heap of information.

So if you have pictures, or collect pictures for research reasons, and read books for research purposes, I thoroughly recommend you to get a database thingie - there are heaps of free ones on the Internet - and at least note down the following: who took the picture (if it wasn't you) or the book it came from (including the page) if it's a scan, and for books you read the author/editor, book title, year, and a short note of how you liked it. You can put in much more - excerpts, keywords (both for book and picture), picture captions, a note of how you liked the book, further citation traces to follow, where the book is located, when you looked at it, or whatever would be good but is not on my radar at the moment. But having at least a note of the minimum things will mean you being able to remember whether you had that book in your hands already... or not.

Having said that, I should probably spend a little time on the care and feeding of my databases today.

It is a very, really, utterly amazing thing how much work can go into a single book. There's this project I'm working on? Together with a friend half-way around the globe? We've spent oodles of hours, both, on the computer and chatting over how to fix this or handle that and on ourselves thinking and writing and editing and checking and noting.

And now we are nearing a stage where we can take a first look at what the thing has become. It has certainly changed a whole, huge lot from what it was (both in writing and conceptually) when we started. There's still a good bit of work to do, but things are getting clearer.

That's amazing. And a tiny bit scary - nearing a new stage.

Oh, on today's agenda, by the way (among a few other things): more work on that project. Which I will now be off to...