A while ago, I started knitting the Semki socks -  and recently, I gave up on this project, and frogged them.

I had gotten a good bit up the shaft already, and then tried to try them on, just to realise that my heel won't fit through the very narrow leg part, and that my instep is way too high for the sock. So I ripped back to where the decreases start and adjusted, doing some kind of make-it-up-as-you-go-along changes to the pattern.

That was fun, and it sort of worked, and I ended up with a sock that would fit... but unfortunately, the variegated yarn and the pattern didn't go back to playing well together. I did like the wide stripes in the foot part, and had it turned back to this look after a bit of shenanigans for the transition between foot and leg, I'd have been fine. But this? 

Nah. Not really.

So I frogged the sock, and have since started the next try of sock-knitting - this time the "Basketcase Sock".  The last time I've done entrelac knitting was ages ago (and a project that I also frogged), but I really like the idea, and it was time to work on my backwards knitting skills too...

A good part of today has been conference preparation -  both for the Textile Forum (planning things, mostly including madder - red seems to be the dye that stimulates a lot of research) and for the EAA in Belfast.

Conference prep in that regard included going through the session list and trying to figure out what I will be able to attend, and downloading the abstract book. Like in all huge conferences, there's a lot of things on offer. Or maybe I should say A LOT. Or, to be even more precise:

A LOT.

There's three days of conference sessions (August 31 to September 2), and there's so many of these that of course most of them are running in parallel. The abstract book and programme book are online now, and the abstract book has a whooping 1192 pages. I kid you not. Almost two thousand pages!

As you can well imagine, I will not be able to catch half of the things that sound really interesting to me. At least there's one time slot where I don't have any trouble at deciding what session to attend, and that's on September 2, where I'll be giving my own presentation in session 468...

Today is, as I found out this morning, International Cat Day - taking place annually on August 8. And because that is the perfect excuse to not write a long blog post today, and instead delight you (well, hopefully) with a cat picture, here you go: 

Madame is, not surprisingly but still a little sadly, getting old. She's always had some food intolerances, but those got much more severe last year. After several months of searching for a possible cause, we did find out that it's probably the thickening additives in the canned cat food that she reacts to... and that ruled out about all kinds of available canned pet food (in combination with the kinds of meat she cannot have, there's about nothing left that would work for her).

So we switched to mixing her food ourselves, which means buying meat and adding in all the vitamins, minerals, and other things that are necessary to achieve the right amount of everything. Definitely not a low-maintenance cat - but she is much better now, having less issues with scratching herself, and also no more bad gut issues. The past few days, though, she seems to have hip pains :( and we hope that getting her some more aids to get onto her fave spots without jumping, and providing her with some nice warm spots, will help.

Growing old is not for cowards...

Summer break is over - and with the weather in the last few days, it almost seems as if summer itself were over, too. We were lucky to have nice weather for our little holiday trip, though, when we went paddling down the Moselle river, with lots of vinyards to look at.

There were quite a lot of boats and ships on the river - freighters, river cruise ships, small sport motorboats, plus the medium-sized day-trip-cruise ships. Almost no paddlers, though. We had a very nice time and went home right before the weather turned bad (there was the forecast of thunderstorms and strong winds, both not really suited to canoeing). 

Now it's back to work, catching up on the things that have accumulated while I was on the break, and preparing for the upcoming exciting things, such as the EAA conference in Belfast (I have to finalise my presentation for this) and, of course, the European Textile Forum in November. So it's motivational hot drinks today (which, with the hard drop in temperatures, are quite welcome not only due to their motivational properties, but also due to their warmth) and, of course, getting started on sending out the orders that came in during the last weeks...

It's hot outside, it's warm inside, there already was an iced coffee after lunch today, and I will be off on summer break now. 

I'm planning to make the most of the next few weeks to relax and see friends and then sneakily catch up on stuff that has been neglected for too long. The website is freshly updated, all current orders have been sent out, the quarterly tax stuff is taken care of, cat food stock is large enough so Madame will not go hungry - it looks like I'm all set for the break. 

So I will leave you with this image of an ice cream that has stripes like a tunic with clavi... very summer-appropriate, I think.

I'll be back on the blog on August 7. Have a lovely summer! (Or winter, if you're in the other hemisphere...)

Summer break is almost upon me, and for a change, I am not frantically doing a hundred thousand things that have to be finished before the break - there's only one thing with a deadline left to take care of, but it's not a huge task, and two that should be taken care of but where it's not crucial to do it before the break, and otherwise I'm more or less set. Which is a nice change to some other years where I was really getting a bit of extra stress before the break... so it feels a bit like I'm winding down now, and that is very pleasant.

Which, mind you, does not mean there's not a lot that could be done. It's just that nothing will explode if I don't manage to do it before - and a lot of the other things are stuff on the "when I finally get around to it" that have been on said list for way longer than I'd like them to be anyways, so they are well used to waiting, and nothing bad will happen if they don't. But, after enough years of doing this job, I have come to realise that there are always things that would be so nice to do, or to have, or to start, or to make... and then there's something that does not line up, or stuff happens, and it's plainly not possible to do all the things one has ideas or plans for. Which is kind of sad, if you look at it one way, but on the other hand... imagine you only have so few ideas and plans and find so few things exciting or interesting that you get around to doing all of them? That would be a totally different, but at least as sad situation.

And to give you a picture, because they are nice, here's a complete non-sequitur that is not sad at all: 

This  is another case of a project that has eaten more time than initially planned - but oh, it has also delivered. I don't regret a single minute invested in the membrane gold thread project, as it brought me a lot of new knowledge, some new skills, a good amount of new contacts and pleasant time spent working together with wonderful people. 

And the result, as of now, is a method that would be absolutely workable for production. Plus some beautiful thread as the outcome - even though my skills in wrapping the membrane around the core are still not where they could be, it's gotten much better. There will be the EAA conference in Belfast at the end of August, where I'll do a little presentation about the project, and I am planning to do a bit more silver spinning before that. Overall, though - very, very content with the current state of things.

Sorry for the unannounced blog silence yesterday - I was off on a field trip, and I had planned to blog on the journey in the train either going there or coming back, but both trips were spent doing other work-y things instead.  

It was a lovely trip, and it included a brief but intense visit to the BNM - where we had a look at the garments from a noble grave crypt in Lauingen, dating to the 17th century. The textiles are very well preserved, and they are rather spectacular due to a number of reasons - but what fascinated me most was the fabric used for the garments worn by Pfalzgraf Philipp Ludwig.

The fabric looks a little like a herringbone pattern fabric with a lot of bands sewn on - but it's woven in one piece, and the bands are a kind of uncut velvet, construction-wise. Here is a very bad close-up picture:

It is beautiful, and fascinating, and the three of us spent a good while in front of it trying to figure out how it might have been made. I'm again and again intrigued by the creativity used to make so, so many different kinds of fabrics...