Have I blogged about this before? If so, please forgive me. If not, enjoy the fun that Chronotrains brings you -  a website where you can state a place of start and a time and then see how far you can get by train, in that time. 

I can get, for instance, to the very south of Denmark in just under 8 hours. Or to Den Haag. It's quite fun to play around with, and sometimes very sobering how much possible distances depend on the network you have access to. (And for really long trips, I usually prefer a night train, even if that takes longer - because I never count the time that I'm sleeping as full travel time...

...in our compost bin.

It was covered by a little bit of dried grasses and such, but now we know why there's so much soil and compost heaped on the side of the compost bin!

As it's about one metre above ground, we suspect it's not a hedgehog (unless we have a climbing hedgehog in our garden). 

Any guesses on who might have gone on a digging spree here? 

I'm looking forward to going into the weekend now - maybe there will even be a little snow, as it's gotten quite a lot colder here the last few days.  I'll send you (and me) off into the weekend with this photo of my "Mayan Weaving":

The extra sticks you can see were our try of understanding how to make the pattern sheds for the additional wefts - and we did figure out how to do it after a bit of messing around. 

Now I only need to get a little better at the general weaver-tensioned weaving, and more even selvedges... 

I've recently stumbled across an app called "Be My Eyes"  (thank you, slightly weird Instagram feed) - which is an app to connect blind or visually impaired people with those with seeing eyes per video call, to help them with the little bits that are just extra hard to do when you can't see. Like reading the labels on a new machine. Or deciphering an address on a letter. Or... well. You can probably imagine lots of stuff like that.

The idea is to have a network of seeing volunteers, and when someone needs an eye, they can call. First volunteer who takes the call gets to see the problem (pun intended), and help solve it. A really neat idea!

If you're interested, you can learn more about the app here: https://www.bemyeyes.com/about

While we're at the "very old stuff" thing - there was the discovery of c 12,000 year old stones with holes in them that are suspected to be spindle whorls. 

The authors and their associates did some tests with replicas of the bored stones, and it was indeed deemed possible to use them for spinning, though the spinner working with them had issues spinning wool and only was content with the results spinning flax. That was, as far as I could tell from the paper, processed the modern way with retting - and whether that technique would already have been used 12,000 years ago is another question. Most of the stones weigh between 2 and 15 g, which is also quite lightweight - though that would be depending on the technique used and the spinner's preference as well as just plain physics.

In my opinion, there is no good evidence for spinning this early; the very early threads we have were spliced, not spun. I could well imagine the bored stones to be used in some context with textile production (such as twisting two spliced lenghts of fibre together, for instance), but not really for spinning.

The article itself, if you would like to read it, can be found here. And I'd be happy to hear what you think about the stones! 

...as in a cat that was about three weeks old before it got frozen for, let's say, 36,000 years (give or take a few thousand) - if that sounds interesting to you, you might want to check out the nature.com article about the find of a sabre-tooth cub here. It was found as a frozen mummy, with the head and front paws very well preserved - and it does look quite different from a modern lion cub!

I'm back from an amazing week at the Textile Forum  - it was a lot of fun, a lot of learning, and a lot of laughing! We made pearls, wove Egyptian warp fringes, a warp-weighted loom got heddled for diamond twill, there was some tablet weaving and some Egtved Skirt trials.

Someone snapped this picture of me while I was trying to get my heddles for the warp fringes made:

I'm still not in the zone where I heddle once and then I'm done. Something is always an issue... sometimes an outright mistake, sometimes a forgotten thread, sometimes the heddles are just so uneven it doesn't work well. Sometimes I drop the stick (always secure your heddle rod! Don't be like me and forget to do it!) and sometimes it's not a real bad mistake, but the heddle wraps around one of the other threads where it should not, and if they are too short, it keeps the shed from opening.

Anyways... I did some heddling, and some more heddling, just like other people. And some weaving. 

Then, at the end of the week, came the sad time to say good-bye to everyone leaving, re-packing the car (which ended up very, very full after all) and going home for a few days of rest.

Now I'm easing back in, catching up on emails, getting everything sorted, and sending out all the orders that came in during my time off. And, well, of course planning for the next European Textile Forum next year... which will have tablet weaving as the focus topic. Already looking forward to that!