It's the time of year to work on the wares for next season, and I've been thinking about my linen sewing thread. Currently, I'm offering the thread in 20 metre packages, but seriously sewing with this thread means that 20 metres won't last for long - and that means needing to buy several rolls at once.

So I am wondering: What package units (length in metres) would you prefer when buying linen sewing thread? 20 metres? 50? Maybe even a hundred on one roll? Or should I offer different unit sizes? Please let me know what you would prefer!

From time to time, the rather small amount of surviving medieval garments grows a bit bigger by favourable circumstances and a lucky find. And such a thing has happened fairly recently, at Schloß Lengberg (sorry, links will be all in German!) in Austria. When renovation works started in the building in 2008, archaeologists were making a spectacular find in the fillings of one of the spandrels of the vaulted ceiling: Lots and lots of small finds dating from the 12th to the 18th century - playing cards, coins, shoes, wooden, iron and copper implements, glass, paperwork and - be sure you are seated - garments. And these include underwear!

You can read a bit about the textile part of the find here, and if you do not read German, I still recommend to take a look at this .pdf, an excerpt of the magazine "Harpfe" - there are pics of some of the small finds, including a flute, and there's a picture of one of the underpants found in the spandrel.

It's been a while (I think) since the last links-to-other-pages blog, so it is time for me to do it again, and I hope that you can find something interesting in this list...

Through my blog reading of other blogs, I stumbled across this one: My Textile Notes. It's the blog of an Indian textile engineer, giving a totally fascinating mix of modern industry-related and traditional crafts-oriented information to the reader. I will definitely keep this blog on my list!

Another interesting textile blog is The Textile Blog, a blog with an emphasis on textile design. It's not only medieval (though you can do a tag search for medieval stuff), but I find it nice to have a look at 19th and 20th century design now and then as well.

Just in case you are knitting colourwork and have problems with it and are not yet reading the Yarn Harlot's blog, hop over there for instructions for "Slightly Less Crappy Knitting". I really like this lady's style of putting things, and I especially appreciate her approach to knitting: Do whatever you (feel) like, there is no Knitting Police.

And if you ever wondered about depictions of the Seven Arts in medieval artwork, especially Grammar, you might want to take a look at this article from Marginalia.

Via an link at medievalist.net, I stumbled across this really interesting article in the Scientific American. It's a look at the Icelandic saga of Egil, a man of heroic stature and singular ugliness. There are quite a lot of descriptions of this man, including poems he supposedly wrote himself with complaints about body conditions, that according to this article all hint on him having an illness called Paget's Disease, a disease causing abnormal growth of bone.

I found this article fascinating due to two reasons. Firstly, it (again) shows that it is a good thing to look at a given historical source from all different kinds of angles and perspectives, not only literary or historical. And secondly, it shows in a very impressive way that the oral tradition that served to hand down the saga material from its start to it being written down at least a century later must have been very accurate in passing from one "carrier" to the next one, preserving all the details and hints that led to this diagnosis in 1995. I totally recommend reading this article!

Even if I don't enjoy working up the backlog of mails that accumulated during the holidays and needs to be taken care of, I'm quite happy to be sitting at the computer today or doing other, not-too-exhausting stuff - we spent the weekend helping a friend paint his old apartment, including the ceilings, and that did mean some exertion on our part. Most of the rooms were not white when we started but in some (nice and textured) colour, which meant that we had to give them two coats of paint to make sure nothing shone through, and that gave us plenty to do for the two days.

It was kind of fun as well, though - especially the part when we all three together tackled the living room ceiling to get an even coat of pain on it and got all sprinkled with tiny white dots of paint. After this weekend, I'm also happy that we were able to give back our old apartment unrenovated when we moved out, since that would have also been quite a thing to paint.

So... nice, un-stressful, not-much-movement work for me today!

First of all, a "G'sunds Neus" to you! (Literally, that's "Healthy New", the wish for a good and healthy new year.)

I'm back from our traditional New Year getaway with friends, and it was as gloriously relaxing and immensely fun as I had hoped for and expected - lots of good food, staying up late and having very late breakfasts, and all time was garnished with friendly banter and bad puns. And my current pair of socks is almost finished, despite extensive changing of the pattern.

So now it's back to work in a brand-new year, and I'm looking forward to see what it will bring!

It's time... time to realise that the year 2010 is almost over - there's just a few more days in it for us, and most of these will hopefully be taken up by meeting family, catching up, eating, drinking and making merry. And that makes it time to take a little look back on the year gone by...

2010 has been a busy year for me, with lots of things happening - the book got out, I traveled a bit more than the year before, our Textile Forum went to Italy for a wonderful week at the Archeoparc, and I got married to the most patient of all men (a November wedding with outside photography makes you really grateful for a warm room afterwards), and we had a wonderful wedding, celebrating with friends and family. The TGV, my new little market stall tent, sprung into existence in only eight days of crazed frantic sewing, right before the season started with Freienfels, and has since housed (tented?) me well on the markets and fairs of the season. And this little blog successfully got through its second year (with only a very slight decline in post count compared to last year). Conferences and markets brought me into contact with a lot of new people and brought forth both lots of laughter and fun and good, serious discussions.

Looking back on it, it was a really full year, and a really good year as well. It did bring its bad moments, but we made it safely through, and I had plenty of good and glorious times to counter the bad bits. So now that the year is almost over, I'm looking back happily - and I'm looking forward to find out what 2011 will bring and be.

It's time to settle into the festive mood for the last few days of the year, and that means it's also time for me to wish you all wonderful holidays and a good start into 2011 (the first year in this millenium not to wear at least two zeros in its number!) Have a good time, as little stress as possible, and enjoy the quiet and dark bit of the year!

(I am determined to do so too, and take a nice long relaxing break - proper regular just-the-same-as-2010-blogging will resume on January 7th. See you on the flip side!)