I've finally finished my little presentation for the Knitting History Forum conference - of course it took longer than anticipated because there were more and more questions. Which, at one point, resulted in a very nice part of an evening spent looking at the twisting actions made by the needles when I am knitting... and figuring out what exactly is happening there. That was fun!

So I'm quite pleased with the outcome. Next challenge will be to explain it all within the time allotment that I have...

In case you're interested in the conference, you can still get tickets for it; it's online only and will take place on February 3.  

While we're at parallels... if you're asking me about my favourite book, I'd be hard pressed to give you an answer, there's quite a lot of them that I enjoy and like to re-read now and then. Even a favourite author would be a hard question to answer - there's a handful of them as well. (Jane Austen is among them, by the way, and C.J. Cherryh.)

But my favourite playwright? Easy question. It's Bertolt Brecht. He wrote quite a lot of plays, most of them looking at the not-so-nice and not-so-intelligent character traits and acts of human beings. He's the inventor, so to say, of the style of the Epic Theatre, intended to get people to think about what they see on stage, instead of just getting drawn in and getting pulled along.

My favourite piece is the Threepenny Opera, which is one (if not the) of his most upbeat pieces. (Also has great music.) But he also wrote something very relevant to today's developments: "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui", which is a parable to the rise of Hitler. In case you're interested, there's the full play online, in a version brought onto stage by the CSU Theatre Production:

I only looked at a few of the scenes, but it looks good to me. Brecht-good, which means scary, in this case... There's also music, and dancing, and good costumes, and a lot of very obvious parallels to what we'd prefer to never have again.

If you watch it, I hope you enjoy it - do let me know in the comments what you think about it!  

A lot of people took to the streets the past weekend, protesting against the AfD and their plans to transport us back in time to the Nazi era. Which is a very good thing! You can read a little overview about the rallies here. At least that did go quite well, with lots and lots of citizens standing up and making it clear that we do not want right-wing fascist idiots and arseholes in our government.

It is really, really uncanny to see the parallels between the rise of the AfD now and the rise of the NSDAP back not even a hundred years ago. But apparently, humans are very, very good at forgetting things, especially shitty things. We had a really interesting discussion with some of our friends on the weekend about this. Approximately two generations, one of our friends said, would be the timespan that big impact events would be remembered. Such as, say, World War II.

I was the youngest in the group, and because my gran lived a very long time, I did get to hear some of her stories from wartime, and from after the war. My granddad died when I was five, and I don't remember him talking about the war (he was a soldier, and only did not end up in Stalingrad due to some crazy good luck - he brought his new wife home to his parents, as her family had been bombed out, and when he was supposed to meet up with his company afterwards, he was unable to find them. They went to Stalingrad.) My grand-uncle talked a tiny little bit about his time on a submarine during the war when they visited us, but his wife didn't like that and tried to put a stop to it as soon as she heard it - so there were not a lot of stories from him that I heard.

Even with my own close or close-ish relatives talking about their own experiences, they are very, very far removed from what I can imagine. Some things you just can't conceive of unless you've had a similar experience - and luckily, I've grown up in times of blissful peace and abundance.

And as we chatted about this, the Most Patient Husband of Them All realised that most of the wartime and post-wartime stories that he had heard were from my gran as well, as his grandparents either did not talk about the time, or died too early for him to actually get the first-hand accounts. 

So to me, it's very understandable now that events get forgotten in the third generation, and even the second generation after the first-hand witnesses may have gaps in their knowledge. Because, let's face it, you also need to have an interest in the (hi)stories, and sometimes they are so far removed from what seems important, or worthy of attention, to a child or teenager or young adult with their own problems and troubles and social obligations that they might just not be remembered.

I'm just hoping now that enough of a memory remains here in Germany to stop a repetition of the Third Reich... at least the rallies are a good start, and a good sign. Hopefully the politicians who got the utterly stupid idea that they'd get more voters if they also copy the fascist talk and right-wing strategies are now realising that this is not the case, and they'd better take a clear stance against this inhumane bullshit. 

The next elections, coming up soon, will show us more. We're certainly living in interesting times.

If you listen to what certain extreme right-wing parties have on their agenda, you could feel like we've all been transported back in time. To about, hm, a hundred years ago? Approximately?

Mind you, I'm an archaeologist and as such I do datings just roughly. I won't attempt to pick an exact year to set into a parallel with today, but it definitely feels like the NSDAP has been re-born, and there's unfortunately plenty of people who are on board, and think that going back a century would be the solution to all our modern problems.

I really can't understand how this is happening, and part of me just wants to "disbelieve this illusion". But unfortunately it is no illusion, there's actually politicians saying things about deportation and firing squads out loud, and they are still on their posts and still active. I freaking cannot believe that this is happening here IN GERMANY! Of all places in the world. Goodness, the last survivors of the Holocaust aren't even all dead yet. We still have contemporary witnesses alive. (Oh, by the way, what they are saying is "yes, that's how it started back then".)

So today's work day will be cut short because I'll spend some of it going demonstrating against this fascist right-wing shit. Thank you very much.

Oh, by the way, you can sign about a gazillion of petitions to stop the AfD, and of course if you're in Germany, you can add your warm body to the group on a demonstration near you. There will be quite a lot of them this weekend (Erlangen is a little early, but who cares), and you can find them on this handy map from zusammen-gegen-rechts.org

Please stand up and protest. Write to your Abgeordnete. Say something. Protect our democracy. Because if we're time travelling back to the Nazi Era... we'll all be fucked.

It's really interesting, and a little funny, how sometimes things come back into play that were done for quite different reasons, and a good while ago. Just like today, when I had a phone chat with a colleague and it turned to the topic of looms, and building looms.

That is a topic that I would like to get into a bit more, especially the early medieval horizontal looms. I've had chats with a number of weavers over time, and apparently there's a lot of different loom types, and they will behave quite differently and stress the yarns in different ways, so it would be extremely interesting to try and find out what would be best suited for medieval fabrics.

And now I am pondering how much one needs to know about looms and weaving to be able to build a loom. Is it sufficient to have good, exact plans for a functioning loom? Are there good, exact plans for a functioning loom? Or is it more a project where you'd need to adjust things no matter how elaborate your plans are, and have to know exactly what you are doing, and why, for it to work?

I've had issues with getting tools made before, when the tool-maker was good at their job, but did not know enough about the function of the tool. In my experience, it's unfortunately rather common for craftspeople to make adjustments to the instructions or measurements that you have given them, and that is rarely to the benefit of the tools' functionality afterwards. 

For a warp-weighted loom, there's not too many things that are crucial for the function, and I think I could list all of them without too much trouble. It's a relatively simple tool, after all. But I would not be as positive about knowing what to look out for when building a horizontal loom. And now there's that itch in the back of my brain saying... What would it be? How difficult would it be? How many tries would be necessary to make a good one?

Probably a good thing I don't have the space for a loom here, or the ambition to have one. Otherwise, that woodworking workshop in the basement might be very tempting!

You know that effect when you do something textile-y, and you totally expect a certain outcome, or behaviour of the stuff, and then it just - thwarts you by doing something entirely different? 

Aargh. Yes. And yes, that happened... the knitted test pieces that I made did not exactly what they were supposed to do. So at least it proves the old adage that whatever number of questions you go into an experiment with, you will go out with even more! 

These are two close-ups of knitting, done with plied threads and done with threads held together. Can you tell which is which? And why? 

After washing, they were supposed to look a bit more different... but if there are differences to be seen, well, they are more subtle than what I'd have wished for. So I feel a bit thwarted by my own work, and I'm also wondering why. Was there not enough twist? (There was plenty, I'd have said.) Does it depend on yarn thickness? The last test I did was with thinner yarns, and I had more of an effect there. Or maybe I was knitting too tighly?

Questions, questions, more questions. Well, at least life never gets boring that way!

It's gotten a good bit colder here, and there's also been - snow! Finally!  

And with the nice white background I suddenly noticed... we've forgotten to harvest one of the apples on our tiny apple tree.

It's not a huge loss, though, the apple is about as large as a marble, so we are not short an apple cake due to it! (The tree itself is really tiny, as it was intended as a potted tree for a balcony. The apples it makes are, accordingly, also quite small, but most are larger than marbles. And they are quite tasty too!)