One of the topics during the weekend that I had chats about was about wool. And spinning.

I had the wonderful opportunity to try out quite a few different spinning wheels, both in a shop and at the conference, and one of the things that sort of caught me was the expression of "twists to an inch".

Really, folks? Twists per inch? Who wants to count that high? Plus archaeological threads never give the twists per inch - they give a spinning angle. For obvious reasons, because you do not untwist an old yarn.

A basic fact is that the historical yarns are much harder spun than what modern spinners usually do. A spinning angle of 30 to 45 degrees is quite common, and that is a lot of twist in a bit of yarn. The first time I was doing replicas of fine, historical threads, I was amazed at the high twist they had - and now I'm totally addicted to them. The soft-spun yarns that are so often to be found today are nice to wear, but they will not last for as long as a good worsted high-twist yarn. So if you are trying to spin historically and have a modern spinner's background... your wool is probably underspun.

You can measure the spinning angle by drawing a straight line on a piece of paper, then draw lines at some different angles (10, 20, 30, 45, 60 degrees) towards that line. Now you can align your thread with the first, straight line and see which of the slanted lines drawn on the paper will best match the slant of the fibres in your yarn. And if you are doing this, I'd be curious to hear what your spinning angle is in your "typical" yarn!

I had the most fantabulous time in London, meeting old friends again - two of them even took me on a wonderful tour to Butser Ancient farm and Whitchurch silk mill and Oxford), making new ones, enjoying delicious food and lots of lovely tea (and one very bad espresso and one very good latte too).

The MeDaTS conference was quite small, at a beautiful venue and mostly populated by audience members from a living history and reenactment background. And that, frankly, is the only thing of that whole weekend where I think it might have run a tiny bit better - I had sort of counted on more persons in the audience without that background, and thus my presentation was tailored to give that group an overview of who and what can be found in the field of living history. Nevertheless, people seemed to like it (and I enjoyed talking to an audience who laughed at all the funny bits), so I am well content with how it turned out. Plus I got to try out a really beautiful spinning wheel at the conference, and now know what I might need for spinning high-twist, fine yarns on a wheel.

The rest of my time in London was spent sightseeing and doing a little bit of shopping - hanging out in bookshops, going to the Handweaver's Studio (to try out more spinning wheels), visiting the new Medieval & Renaissance galleries in the V&A, eating Nepalese food and British lamb roast and chocolates from Harrod's and sitting in the sun and laughing. I also rode the tube and several buses and walked so much that I feel I must have walked 20 cm off my legs. At least now my rather new shoes are properly broken in!

When you are reading this, I am already in London - and there I will be until Monday evening. Next regular blogging, therefor, on Tuesday (or Wednesday, if I'm really worn out from the trip). But if you are in London or in the area, you can catch me at the MeDaTS autumn meeting on Saturday!

Recently, Gina of Gina-B Silkworks posted this really helpful instruction on how to unwind a (small) skein of yarn with no reel and no helper - and no tangles.

And today, while preparing for my London visit, I stumbled across the UK Textile Society. There's an event page as well as a museum list on their site, and they have a journal that does look interesting as well.

And finally, the posters from last NESAT have been put online, so you can download them and have a look. It is really worth it!

If you have been writing stuff, chances are high that you have had your experience of writer's block. It's unfortunately a quite common thing, and that is on the other hand quite nice - because everyone suffering from it can do so in the firm knowledge that he or she is not alone.

Now there's gazillions of websites and many books telling you what you can do when you have it, how to get rid of it, how to find new ways to cope with it, and so on. But I just found out that there is also... an event about it.

Louisville, Kentucky, has actually held a Writer's Block Festival. That's... unexpected. Really.

I am one of those persons who uses tabs in the browser window. A lot. I keep tabs open to remind me of things, to check things out later, to blog about them one of the next days, to have something handy to look up that I suspect I will need later that day or tomorrow, and so on.

I try to keep the tab flood down and under control, and mostly I don't need more tabs than fit in one row once across the screen on my computer. (Though occasionally, there will be much more of them. For a while.) I have tried other methods of working with fewer tabs, or getting organised in a different way, but this one just suits me best. I have that nasty habit of forgetting about bookmarks, for example. Or forgetting to actually get back to those "to read" lists that some add-ons offer, and they just grow and grow and grow.

So generally, this system of tabs to check and close down when finished works very well for me. But sometimes, Firefox crashes. Or there's a system update. Or I have a second browser window open by accident and close the wrong one first... and gone are all my tabs. I hate when that happens. And guess what happened today? Yes, right. All my tabs were gone (and miraculously, so has the browsing history of the last few days). Fortunately there was nothing utterly important open as a reminder - at least not that I'd remember - so it's not too bad. Still, I hate when that happens...

It's getting really autumn-like here now, with snny weather and bouts of rain inbetween. Leaves are turning to yellow and red, the air has that smell of autumn, our car has its winter tires on... and I am really tired.

Some people get tired in spring. I seem to manage getting tired in both spring and autumn. Which explains why this blog post is rather late (I slept much longer than usual), and why it's not very substantial.

So instead of me writing proper and interesting stuff, here's a video where you can see the craziest harp player I know doing things that should be technically not possible to do on his harp...




Hint: watch his left hand...