The weather has been more or less sunny for a few days now, there are crocuses blooming and tulips and hyacinths and daffodil greens breaking the ground and growing vigorously now; most of the flower beds have been freed of the old leaves and debris left from autumn and winter. And tomato seedlings sit in a pot on the windowsill.

But that's not all of the signs it's springtime again: Our tandem is now rolling on the summer tyres again, with the spike tyres back in storage for next winter, it's warm enough sometimes to venture out without a jacket and warm enough not to wear socks in the house.

And more signs: Frantic getting-ready-for-the-season orders. I have just placed one for linen fabric - delightful, high-quality, beautiful, fine-woven linen fabric suitable for fine undergarments - and suitable as embroidery ground fabric. And there are at least two more investments waiting for their turn, all complete with the curious mixture of excitement, joy and tension whether the project will soar or not. Springtime indeed!

This was a nice and busy weekend - I finished my test-stitching, both in regard of the stitches and the ground fabrics that needed to be tried out.

And another thing is also done: 


The ink has arrived, and I already bottled it off into nice little flasks that are quite close to some that can be seen on medieval illustrations of scribes.

And the ink... ah, the ink. It's wonderfully black, just the right viscosity to work really well for nice, thin lines on the linen test cloth, and it does what it's supposed to do: Dry up and then stay where it has been put, no bleeding, no creeping, no nothing. So after being annoyed for a bit more than a year by not having proper authentic medieval ink for proper authentic pattern transfers, I finally have ink to do it the medieval way - and ink to sell for all of you who want some, too. Hooray!

I've finished one pattern bit in the counted work technique now, using the "versetzter gerader Gobelinstich", as they call it in the book. It's really easy - you go over the linen for four threads, then one to the side and two down. And that's it. Repeat ad nauseam or until you can't see anything anymore because your eyes water... because, as I said before (and I'll say it again): medieval embroidery is tiny. T-i-n-y. Minute. Exiguous. Puny little stitches. Exquisitely small. Very diminutive stitch-wise. Tiny. And very, very small on the stitch part - though they did work really large pieces in these techniques. Those Freaks. I'm sure they all did it just to make me sweat over doing it too.
 
So here's what the test scrap now looks like from the front, medieval brick stitch worked to scale, on the appropriate linen fabric, with the appropriate plant-dyed untwisted silk yarn:



Yes. Did I mention it's tiny? I'm seriously short-sighted, and I work it without my glasses on, which does help a lot.
I also made a closer-up of it:






It's not perfect coverage everywhere, but my impression is that the threads will "spread" a bit more after a while in comparison to when they've just been worked, so it might cover completely after a rinse to relax the threads in their new position. However, it does come pretty close to the look of the original already.


And for those of you who are now feeling that itch in your fingers to flip it over, here's the backside (click the pics in this whole post to make them larger):


And that also is pretty close to how the originals look (sans the unclipped threads that still hang from my work of course). So I'm quite content with this little sampler. One more linen now to test for its suitability as ground fabric for counted work, and then that part of work will be done.

I'm totally stumped for something interesting to blog for you today, and even a little tour of my standard check-in-the-morning websites didn't yield anything.

So... I have no blogging topic, the weather is rather grey and dull today after a few days with quite a bit of sun, my current embroidery-testing piece has not come very far (yet, though I'm getting better), and there's a stack of paperwork ...again... to take care of.

On a more positive note, the tulips in the garden are starting to seriously come out, a few of the crocuses are in bloom, and the first batch of tomato seedlings has broken through the earth - plus I'm sniffling. Seems as if spring is really coming here - slowly, but still.

I'm still testing the embroidery stuff on different linen fabrics - I have a few new samples now, and there might be the right one among them.

And I know I've said it before, but boy! is medieval embroidery done-to-scale tiny! It really needs good lighting and good hand-eye-coordination - and probably being short-sighted will help a lot as well...
I hope to be able to show you a photograph of a sample piece one of the next days - at the moment, it's just a very short row of very few stitches in grass-green untwisted silk, and not looking like anything remotely spectacular or embroidery-y yet...

Dr. Richard Nokes from the Unlocked Wordhoard (that has gone much too quiet this last time) has cooked up a new project: An e-publishing house specialising on medieval studies. Publishing will be electronic format only, with files for different readers available.

What is special about Witan is that they are planning to use a peer-review process to select manuscripts that are then published at no cost for the author (as it should be) and sold at very low prices so that scholars on limited budget can also afford them, with the author still getting a share of the sales profits (as it also should be). Plus there is no problem in publishing a text of non-standard length, which means that longer articles could also be a good part of Witan's offers.

If you are interested and want to learn more, there's a bit of info over at his blog and of course on the official website Witan Publishing.

Oh, and by the way - the sewing machine is working again. (Except for the little gadget that is used to refill the bobbins for the bobbin thread - that's still stuck, and thus marinating in a WD-40 equivalent.)

This weekend was nice and rather productive - for one thing, after ages and ages of not spinning on the wheel, I finally emptied the bobbins and started making some yarn again.

I spin relatively thin, on the wheel as well as on the spindle, and most of the time when I used the spinning wheel in the past few years was either to show (or teach) somebody how to use it, or - with a different contraption stuck where flyer and bobbin usually sit - for spooling thread. And now I'm at least planning to spin two bobbins full of single and then ply them together. Who knows, I might even use that yarn for embroidery or maybe even tablet weaving then.

Second productive thing was figuring out a bit more about embroidery and work procedures - now the only thing left to do is to get proper, authentic-thread-count, good-quality linen.

And the third thing was playing around with old sewing machines. A friend had scored an old sewing machine destined for the landfill and came to our place with it so we could all take a good look at it and see if it would still work. Turned out that one bit had been damaged, which led to this bit being removed and then re-made by our friend - and now I've almost finished finetuning the bit so it will fit in and run smoothly. And that meant that a corner of our apartment looked like this during the weekend:


Still does, by the way. But I've almost finished getting the surplus material out of the way - and then we can find out whether that was time well spent or only time in which fun has been had.