Do you? No, I don't mean the nasty clump of crud clogging the pipes. I mean Sewer's Block as in Writer's Block - only with sewing work instead of writing.

I think there must be something like it - because yesterday, I finally overcame the hesitation to work on my dress (that has to be finished for Freienfels, because I want to wear it there). Since my upper body has changed a bit during the last two years (damn you, more-or-less-regular gym visits!), combined with shrinkage of cloth in some of the garments, some of my old dresses do not fit so well anymore. That means it's high time for another of St. Elizabeth's dresses to fit me, and I have a gorgeously teal-coloured fabric for that. So I was looking forward to making a teal-coloured dress for a while, until I finally found the time to sit down and start working on it. And then, halfway into cutting... which I have done time and again before, with no problem... I stopped working on it for a while. Procrastination Wave hit me.

Admittedly, it hit me together with a stack of more urgent things (because you know the effect that season start is always soooo far away, right? until it's just, all of a sudden, like, next week?) so it was not a blatant ignoring of the half-cut dress. Not totally, at least; the more urgent things really were more urgent. And since there was no actual pressure, as would be in a time-critical situation (like season starts tomorrow) or similar, I could just put it aside for a while. But after the embroidery workshop in Vienna and finishing the spinning project, I really ran out of reasons not to work on the dress just now.

So I sat down with it yesterday, I cut the second sleeve (that was already marked out) and set it in, I cut the sleeve gores and set those in, I tried it on, and everything is as it should be. And now I'm wondering why I didn't do this oh, weeks ago? More importantly, I'm wondering whether that only happens to me occasionally, or if there are others out there.
Sewer's Block, anyone? And what do you do to get over it?

I think I am now going to invent a new blogging rule. A very easy one. It goes: When in doubt what to blog about, post pictures of yarn.

So I'm doing that. I weighed the skein of yarn yesterday, and it has 65.1 grams on its 595 metres of two-ply.

That's what the skein looks like now:

(Click the pics for the larger versions.)


And then, I just wanted to know. Exactly. So this is what happens if you match a skein of yarn with a visual survey card for threads.


Now these cards are... let's just call them unforgiving. Because you have white threads on black background, and because the threads are absolutely evenly spaced out, you can see every irregularity. You can see them so well that these cards are used for visual survey of machine-spun, industrial yarns - and those have very, very little differences in thickness.

Which means that while the yarn on the card might look quite irregular... I'm actually more or less content with the yarn. There are a few thinner-than-planned-for bits in it, and a few places where the plying could have been more even, but overall, I'd say it is pretty good quality.

And I'll probably hang that skein into my market stall with a note attached to it giving the time that it took to spin it. That should get some reactions - at least from the spinners.

Nicely in tune with my wool spinning blog post yesterday, there's a link to an article on medievalists.net today - about medieval sheep farming.

I've only taken a short look at it yet, but it promises to be a very interesting read - a report based on data from pipe rolls:

The Winchester pipe rolls provide sufficient data to allow an examination of five areas of policy associated with medieval sheep farming. These are the provision of sires; the construction and maintenance of sheepcotes; the supply of feed to the sheep; the supply of medicaments and veterinary expertise; and the supply of labour devoted to the care and well-being of the flock.

(p. 140).

If you're interested, here's the medievalists.net page with the link to the .pdf file. The article is by Mark Page, published in Agricultural History Review 51:2 (2003), and called The Technology of sheep farming: some evidence from Crawley, Hampshire, 1208-1349.

A while ago, I mentioned that I've done a bit of wheel spinning again for a change. After a long while (felt like forever) of spinning to more or less fill two bobbins with single, I'm now in the plying stage.

This

is what it looked like after two hours of plying work. After three and a half hours of plying, the bobbin was more than full - it had a bulge in the middle. (Of course I forgot that I wanted to take a picture. Only natural to grab the swift right away, right?) The result is 595 metres of 2-ply yarn, and it's roughly about 28 wraps per inch. Since I gave it a soak right away to relax the fresh ply, I can't weigh it yet, since it's not completely dry this morning.

However, the plying time has made me think about pricing of handspun yarn again. Six hundred metres of yarn took three and a half hours of plying. If I do a very rough calculation and suppose that spinning took one and a half times the work time of plying (I'll time a bit of spinning next time), then that means roughly fourteen hours of work total. That is one and a half workdays for sixhundred metres two-ply! And that's wheel spun with industrially prepared merino wool, so no additional prep time required plus a relatively fast and efficient spinning tool.

Fourteen hours work - now what would you pay for a skein of handspun wool like that? Probably not my normal hourly rate times fourteen, and my normal hourly rate is not very high at that. And if you look at etsy or dawanda or any other shop, stall or market, you can see handspun yarn roughly half the length offered up for less than 20 Euro. (Oh, it's hand dyed as well.) Spinning rates seem to go up to a stunning 20 cents per metre - but you can have it cheaper, too.

Now, my little wheel is not the fastest one on this earth, and I'm not trying to spin as fast as humanly possible. But let's do some maths. One hour spinning and plying time taken together will let me end up with about 42 metres of two-ply yarn. If I sell that for 20 cents per metre, I will end up with the stunning sum of 8,40 Euros for one hour of my work. Plus the material needed - and I also need the tool to work with, of course. So let's say eight of the Euros remain as "winnings".

And now there's the snag. While 8 Euro per hour might sound not too bad at the first second, what you technically are as a spinner is... a freelancer. And that means you will have to calculate so that you can pay everything yourself - your health insurance (where usually your work/your boss will pay half, if you have a fixed job), your working tools, your stockpile, your vacations; you will need to make enough money so you can cover the times you are ill or some time off that you need to recover and recharge your batteries. Oh, and maybe some day you wish to be old and pensioned? Go pay for your own pension account, then. And if you make enough money for all of that, keep in mind that you will also have to shunt off the VAT from your selling price - and that's between 15 and 21% in Europe. (In Germany, those 8,40 Euros would mean 7,05 Euros for you.)

That is much, much too little money for that work. Ask any freelancer. Go read any freelance advice column, or webpage. And too little money for work - that's not healthy, and it's not good for the economy nor society. Plus too little money for textile work also furthers the underestimation and the undervalueing of this line of work that is so widespread today.

So... provided every spinner around that sells his or her own handspun yarn (and I'd bet it's mostly female spinners here) doesn't work at least three times faster on their spinning wheels than I do... they sell their work under price. Vastly under price.

That always leaves me more than a little sad. Hand spinners, please value your work correctly!

This blog post was the starting point for a series about fair pricing in crafts. Read the start of the series here.

It's been really nice and sunny here for several days now, and everything is exploding in bloom - especially those trees that give me hayfever. So while I'm really enjoying the utterly fine weather, I'm also looking forward to some nice, cleansing rain (that is fortunately forecast for tomorrow). And speaking of spring and spring happiness, here's a very good (and evil!) song that we stumbled across this weekend:

I spent most of the workday yesterday getting back on track with the website relaunch that I had prepared for oh, ages ago - new design, new texts, full German and English version. And then it had taken a backseat (think extralong passenger train backseat here) to all the other things going on.

The good news is: I had some nice progress yesterday. And the bad news... there's still a good heap of work to be done on it.

And now to the randomness part, because if I don't write all those random things here and now, I'll have forgotten about them on Monday.
My IMC Leeds programme arrived - and I was really wondering what I would be getting from the UK in book format. Goodness, it's huge! I already knew the conference was gigantic, but a full book just to list the sessions and papers? That really is a little overwhelming. And since I'm a fan of whelm and sometimes even overwhelm, I'm so looking forward to this thing!

It's really getting summery outside, and there's a few patches in the garden that need some urgent de-weeding. But the rest all does fine - we'll have a lot more of the good mint this year than last year, the first tulips (two real and a lot of small wild ones) are already in bloom, and my little tomato seedlings are also coming along very nicely.

The Spinning Experiment Results article is almost finished and sent off to colleagues to give it a read-through - so I'm happily waiting for their feedback now.

And some of you probably remember my post about the medieval underwear from Lengberg a good while ago - there's now been a little TV snippet about it. It will stay online for a few more days on the ORF page. The snippet you want is titled "Tiroler Tanga". The plugin doesn't work for me, unfortunately, so go enjoy it for me!

Update: There's a little arrow on the top right of the video frame - click on that to view it with an external player (windows media player or the like). That will work even if the plugin doesn't.

While I'm getting back on track of work to do after taking yesterday as a day off - things like putting the workshop teaching stuff from the car back inside and where it belongs, writing emails and working a bit on all those other projects that want attention - here's a nice little video with typography that I, you know, thought you might like?


Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

I hope you enjoy it!

Or, if you prefer to have something with more archeological content, you can watch the videos about the Staffordshire Hoard conservation works, posted by the Birmingham museum. Here's the first one of their five videos (they have their own youtube channel).