Things I did today? Sorting stuff, mostly. There was a new delivery of spindle sticks, which needed to be packed away in suitable boxes; there was some re-stocking of hand spinning kits, and checking the amount of spindle whorls that are left, and some re-organising of different wool kinds, and so on. Most of this is already in preparation of the Nadelkunst, which starts on Friday next week - so I have a few more days to get everything lined up and prepared. There's plenty left to line up and prepare, though, so it's not like I will be running out of work!

Especially not since there are a few other things that need attention, and rather quickly, as they are also on a deadline. That whoosh sound? That's the deadlines approaching... so I'd better get back to writing the email I still need to write, and do all the other things on the list for today. There's a newsletter to get out as well, which is 2/3 finished, thank goodness, but needs a little bit more attention before sending it off.

So if anyone has a few spare hours they don't need - I'd take them!

 It's getting warmer and spring-time-ier outside. The cat is venturing into the garden a bit more now, or snoozing in the sun in the wintergarden, where it's now getting more pleasant again. Well, apart from the not-so-beautiful-looking dead plants in their pots. 

Every year, I try to get some of the tomatoes and some of the chili plants over the winter - with mixed success, sometimes a bit more, sometimes no success at all. Usually some of the chili plants survive, and if I'm lucky, one or two tomatoes make it through. 

This was the case this year (unless it now dies a sudden death because I wrote about it) - one tomato made it. The really nice thing about that?

aThis picture was taken yesterday. There's hope to have early tomatoes! 

I managed to totally forget blogging on Friday - there was just too much stuff going on. 

First, I was being very adult-y and sensible and had a doc's appointment to check for skin issues (cancer screening and mole check); I'd gotten some weird light spots in the upper torso area, and I was actually steeling myself for a kind of skin cancer diagnosis when going there. Fortunately, it's just an overactive dermal yeast and almost purely cosmetic, so now I'm quite relieved (and equipped with a cream and a special shampoo to curb the overenthusiasm of that specific yeast). 

After that, circumstances called for a baking spree - I'd promised a cake as a birthday present. A Snickers cake, to be precise. Which is a concoction consisting of a bit of dough glued together with liberal amounts of buttercream in three different flavours - chocolate, peanut, and caramel. 

Pro tip #1: If you actually buy caramel, and not sweetened condensed milk by accident, you don't need to boil the milk into caramel as an additional step.

Pro tip #2: If you read your notes correctly, you don't leave the cake itself in the oven for double the time necessary. (It was still fine. Phew.) It was a little flatter than I had hoped for, which made cutting it more of a challenge, but I did manage. (It's baked in form of a long rectangle, then cut in half lengthways, then the two halves are halved again with a horizontal cut so you have, in the end, four very thin and long pieces of dough. When fully assembled with the buttercream layers inbetween, you get something more or less with the proportions of a snickers bar. Which, by the way, will not fit on a standard long cake platter as it is, you guessed it, too long.)

Pro tip #3: If you try to mix double the amount of custard into the butter, you will kill the buttercream. (It's a water-in-fat emulsion, and it can only take so much of the water phase before it flips and "curdles".) If you don't realise what you are doing, you will manage to do that twice.

Which leads me to pro tip #4: Don't take skimpy notes, write things down properly. There's no guarantee you will really re-bake the cake after a short time, still remembering the bits you did the previous time in detail.

So... I had a bit of trouble getting the cake all done, but in the end, it wasn't more ugly than my regular not-so-much-trouble cakes, and (most importantly) it tasted really nice. Makes a large, very solid cake that is rather easy to transport, but should be cut in slices not more than a centimetre wide, meaning it makes about, oh, 30 and a bit servings? It will also freeze rather well, which is a good thing, as it's rarely all consumed at once!

That cake is also one of the test opportunities for my (still ongoing) quest to find the perfect chocolate buttercream, by the way...

 With the pandemic lasting for rather long, I started (like some other people) to offer some of my workshops or courses online. So far it's the sewing workshop (about medieval stitches, seams, and hem types) and the spinning workshop.

I've been asked at some points about offering other workshops as well, and I've thought about it, but not every one of my workshops is online-able, at least not in my reckoning and how I teach it.

The most recent in-person techniques that I taught were the tablet-weaving workshop and the loop-braiding one. I can definitely say that I will not offer the tablet weaving one as a digital version. There are several reasons for that.

One of them is that there's often little movements or little habits that influence how smoothly the weaving goes. I need to see these, and in my experience from the spinning workshop, that is just not possible via a small screen and with limited camera positioning possibilities. It's not as crucial in the spinning workshop as it is for tablet weaving, and there it can already cause issues. 

I also need to be able to see the band, in detail and from up close - because occasionally, threading errors happen, or a single tablet flips or goes out of alignment, and, well, see above.

Those are the visual issues. 

Warping is another thing where I have a set-up in the workshop that works well, but it requires using my favourite all-purpose-tool: the clamp. To be more accurate, four clamps per person. These are used for warping, then two serve as anchor points for the warp for the rest of the workshop, and then I pack them up and take them home again. That means that participants in an online version would have to warp with what they have at home, or get clamps on loan and have to send them back, or have to buy clamps, or I'd do the warping and send the finished warp for the workshop. The last would be the easiest version logistically, but it would also mean that warping - which is an important thing to learn - would not be part of the experience.

And then... there's the touching. Warp tension is one thing where it's helpful to touch and see, but that is the least of the points. There's this stage in the workshop when we're going off to weave freestyle patterns based on diagonals - diamonds, X-shapes, diamonds with a swirly centre, diagonals branching off each other. Mistakes happen, confusion might occur, and then I need to orient myself to see what happened, and what needs to be done, and I do that by leafing through the stack of tablets, checking each one.

And this is where, at the very latest, the idea of doing this virtually would die. I'm still hoping to some day, when it gets less busy here, finish filming and making the instruction video for tablet weaving planned and started oh, way too long ago - but transforming the in-person workshop on tablet weaving to an online version is just not possible. 

(In case you're wondering about the difference between a video course and the live online version: The video can be watched again and again if there's something unclear or difficult. Since different people tend to have their problems at different places, watching individually and re-playing the passages in question would not be an issue. Explaining something online live without the possibility of showing it on the band, and having potential visual problems caused by the participant cameras, well... let's say that this is sure not to work out well. It would also mean factoring in a good amount more time for the workshop in advance, making an already rather long one... impossibly long.)

 There was considerable getting sidetracked today - I had planned on getting some different work done, but ah, plans never survive the first contact with the enemy...

The crucial bits got finished, though, and there were (the sidetracking) a few other things that I had planned to do soon, and now have done already. I've even been lucky with the necessary errands, as the weather was rather pleasant while I was running them.

Now it's gone back to grey with a bit of snow... so to counteract that, I give you the rainbow of colours you can see in the Guter Stoff exhibition:

 It's more beautiful in person, of course!

It's Pi Day today!

I like pie. If it has pie in the name, and does not contain cheese, chances are high I'll go for it and enjoy it. Apple pie, shepherd's pie, Coastal Fish Pie, put-some-leftovers-into-a-shell-of-dough-pie... I love them all.

Unfortunately I get to make them way too rarely because, unfortunately, making pie is not a 20-minute-cooking-time lunch. It takes less time (obviously) if you have the filling prepared beforehand (hello, leftovers from another meal), but there's still the dough to be made, and it has to bake. Since my usual cooking plan is "go into kitchen, open fridge, see what needs to be used, put in pot, leave to cook, hope for the best", it also means I have to remember in time that there's something planned that needs prep time and then baking time, and thus I have to start early enough.

That all said... pies have happened here in the past, and will happen again, and there are a number of pie crusts that I've used. One of the versions that are pretty quick to make is the Hot Water Pie Crust:

 Hot Water Pie Crust

150 g fat (suet or butterfat)
150 g broth (or 60 g milk and 80 g water)
480 g flour
1/2 tsp salt

Heat fat and liquid together, then pour into flour mixed with salt, mix with a spoon, then knead until fully blended (should not take long). You can roll it out and use it at once, no rest time needed.

I bake it at 220°C in the no-fan setting for about 30 to 40 minutes. Filled with delicious stuff, of course.

It was, let me tell you, an absolutely and utterly glorious weekend that I had in Lübeck. OUr train there was actually on time, and we had the afternoon to spend in the city, looking at the curious little spaces filled with small houses in the former backyards of larger houses. We also had a look at the ships in the museum harbour, at the beautiful cathedral St. Mary, and at a tea exhibition and medieval artworks in St. Annen. 

Then there was delicious cake and coffee, to get us a little warmed up again after being outside for a while. The weather was half not-so-nice and cold, half sunny-but-windy-and-quite-cold, so both Friday and Saturday morning saw us pretty frozen after a while, and on Saturday noon my fingers felt really frozen, so much that a fresh cup of tea was not enough to fully warm them up again.

And then, on Saturday... festivities! First me and Kathrin Hüing from the Hansemuseum did our workshop/guided tours through the Guter Stoff exhibition, then there was a little "danse macabre" show performed by the Hansevolk zu Lübeck, and the evening was spent with celebration of the 30th birthday of the FGHO. That meant meeting and chatting with lovely people, with delicious finger food and drinks. It was the first party of that kind for me in a long, long while, and it was absolutely wonderful.

I also had time in the museum this visit to play around with some of the interactive bits in the special exhibition. My favourite one? Emboss your own "cloth seal". It's not a real cloth seal, of course - but you can, as a souvenir, emboss a silvery carton roundel with one of three different designs. One of them is the sheep "Locke", who also leads children through the special exhibition. It's probably not hard to guess which one is my favourite of the three...

... and the embossed Locke is the perfect thing to personalise my laptop.

Much, much nicer than the manufacturer's seal on the laptop cover! This delights me no end. 

Also delightful: There is a cloth measuring tape, especially made for "Guter Stoff", with medieval fabric design on one side and the measuring tape on the other side. And yes, I am now the proud owner of one of them. You can get them in the museum shop in the main house of the EHM in Lübeck. And the really good news is that you have until October to do so - the exhibition has been extended!