It's getting a little bit crazy here, with the Textile Forum coming up plus my gran's birthday right afterwards (which means packing for two things at once). She's turning 101, can you believe it?

There were a few health issues at different So, to prevent things from stressing me out more than they have a right to, I'm going to take a blog break, and leave you with this photo of lavendar flowers with a bee from this summer for a while:

 After all the things that will happen, first the conference and then the family meet-up and celebration of my gran's birthday, I'm going to take a few days off... so I'll be back on the blog on November 28. 

Public holidays tend to slightly throw everything off balance, especially my sense of time - so today somehow feels like Monday, even though it isn't, and I will probably have slight weekday issues for the rest of the week. Good thing that there's calendars and phone alarms to remind me of the really important things that should not be missed, such as a vet appointment coming up, and a doc's appointment for myself for a check-up.

For now, though, as I'm carrying stuff from one part of our living space to other parts to be sorted and organised and stuffed into boxes and crates, have a photo of the Most Patient of All Husbands, dressed in a fluffy cloak:

Good thing that it's so untimely warm for the season, that meant it was no big issue to stand barefoot outside for a bit while taking the photos... 

Well, that week went by quickly. The cat spent a lot of time on my desk, hanging over my arm and purring while I was trying to type. She also has impeccable timing and tends to come for a desk nap and cuddle when I had planned to just finish this two minute task, and then get up and do something else somewhere else. That does lead, in some cases, to a bit of change in schedule and some more computer work first. Because, well. Cuddly warm purring cat on my arm.

There were orders made (for Forum supplies) and orders received (for spinning tools), and there were phone calls in prep of the Textile Forum (and more are still to come, to sort out the catering details). There were appropriate amounts of chocolate consumed. (Though on second thought, they might not have been quite appropriate.)

There's also growing lists and checklists and other lists... and the membrane thread experiment protocol/plan, which still has to get some tender loving care. We have supplies, and a sort-of-plan, but it does need another look at it and some prodding, so we have a workable plan and an idea on what to do in what sequence, and when. 

So... I really, really can't complain about boredom!

Now, though, it's time for the weekend and some relaxing first. Well, and maybe a bit more work on a list or two. Who knows?

Sometimes it really is amazing what you learn as a, well, let's call it "collateral" when looking for something, or researching stuff.

For instance... one thing I learned today is that it's amazingly hard and time-consuming to taper down a 0.5 mm diameter beech rod at both ends. Why would I want to do this, you ask? The answer is, of course, related to the Textile Forum - it's to fake an old Peruanian spindle (which you can find described on this page, scroll down a bit), with the laughable weight of up to 5 grams. I have glass beads to serve as whorls which fit perfectly, but of course the spindle itself needs to be the right shape. 

So I went at it with an electrical drill, sand paper, and various sharp wood-working instruments. Combined with my very mediocre skills at wood-working, it went... tediously. I have to finish tapering down my first try, as one end is still way too thick, and depending on how that goes, I might have another go at it with a different tool, and a different process, but let's say that it is by far not as easy as I had assumed. (Nothing new here, though. My experience, which I am of course not always taking hints from, is that most things that you'd guess to be straight-forward, easy, and quick to do, aren't.)

Another thing I learned yesterday is that goldbeater's skin, which is a bovine membrane, is the outer layer of the bovine appendix. (I knew it came from the appendix, but not that it was the outer layer only. I had wondered, since the bovine appendices you can buy for use in making sausage products make for a very thick casing, but goldbeater's skin is very thin.) The membranes, for gold-beating purposes, are dried and probably treated similarly to parchment (sources vary on that). For use in gold-beating, they are then covered with a special kind of plaster, which is beaten in, and then they are used for about 70 times - afterwards, they are too brittle for gold-beating and get discarded, or re-used for other purposes.

Among those is the use in musical instruments, as in a kind of "bird-flute", I've been told. Might making gold thread also be one of them? That is on the list of things to possibly find out. It would at least be a very fitting second use of the skins, and if you're going to buy your leaf gold or leaf silver or leaf gilt-silver (the most common type, saving some on the pricey gold), you could pick up the membrane at the same time. Provided, of course, that it has not become too brittle, or that the plaster inhibits use for gilding the membrane, or that the pieces are too small for getting gilded and then cut up into strips and then wound around a thread core. Ah. So many things that are lost to the passage of time.

By the way, if you're buying the skin today, it's quite pricey. Which is not new, because back in 1952, when a gold-beater got paid 65 Pfennig for an hour's worth of work, a skin cost 1 Mark (which is 100 Pfennig, for those of you not familiar with the old German currency units). There's fewer sources for the skin these days, though, as the modern variation is a kind of plastic.

Fascinating, all that stuff, right? 

It's time, again, for me to sit down and do the bookkeeping stuff. It's not a thing that I particularly enjoy, but, alas, it has to be done. And that in regular intervals, as I have to hand in the VAT accounting every quarter. (That's actually a good thing, for me, as it means that at least every quarter, I automatically get an overview about how things are going.)

Usually the hacking in of numbers and checking them, and jotting down reference numbers on slips of paper and putting documents into the document folder of the accounting programme goes fairly smoothly, and I'm done relatively quickly. Sometimes though, some little-but-nasty error slips in, and then it's hunting down what happened and where and when and fixing it. I had one this time around, and it took me a while to get where it came from... but now everything lines up again, and looks fairly good, and I've sent off the numbers and paid my dues.

Which means that I can give you a celebratory picture of the little cat with a very silly face:

and then get back to all the rest of work waiting to be done today. 

Thankfully nothing that involves heavy lifting, because I did get the booster shot with the updated vaccine (including the Omicron variants) yesterday, and though I have no other side effects, the area where the jab went does hurt some if I lift the arm overhead, or stretch it out completely.  Side note: The German StiKo, the committee giving the guidelines on who should get vaccinated, still lists only a few groups and people over 60 years of age. Even though there's enough vaccine to get a lot more people immunised. So when I went to get my shot, I had to get an "advisory talk" with a doctor, who had to ask me why I wanted the booster... which you can get even when not on the StiKo list, but only after that advisory talk. Next thing she did was tell me that she personally thought it rather stupid that they'd still not made the list longer, or recommended it to everyone, since the incidence numbers are rising and people still get Long Covid, and there's enough of the vaccine for a lot more people... 

Ah well. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, and nobody understands politics.

With all the many things going on, I never got around to posting a photo of the Trindhoj cloak after sewing on the many, many, MANY loops of thread.

Did I mention there were a lot of them? There were a lot of them. The cloak is rather large, with about 3 m width along the straight edge, and it is all over covered with these loops. Oops. (Sorry. I still get a little silly when I am reminded of all the loopy stitiching.)

The original cloak shows the remainder of stitched- on threads, spaced apart but not very widely spaced. There's not too much left, and it's not described in detail in Hald's publication, so I mostly went by the image available from the Danish National Museum website and some photos I was sent by a colleague. 

Because there's only bits of the threads next to the stitches left, we don't know if they were loops, or individual threads, and we also don't know how long they were. I wound the thread around my hand when stitching to have a similar length for all of them, and to have the loops long enough to overlap the next row below.

A test piece that I made, with loops cut open and loops left closed, looked quite differently after washing in the two parts. The opened loops had acted like you could expect of single yarns and fluffed up considerably, but also lost a good bit of their twist, so they seem quite vulnerable to wear and tear to me. The loops that had remained closed had mostly plied together, keeping the individual loops stable.

The photo above shows the cloak after finishing the sewing work, but before its final bath. It looks a bit like one of those shaggy carpets that were in fashion a few decades ago... 

It's also, not-really-surprisingly-but-still-surprisingly heavy. Unfortunately I completely forgot that it might be interesting to weigh it before and after stitching all those loops, but I used up almost all of the extra yarn that I had spun, which was a generous amount, and it's quite heavy now. It will settle nicely on shoulders, though, and I can absolutely imagine somebody showing off his (or her, maybe, though this item was found in a male grave) riches.

It is a lot of spinning time and a lot of weaving time that went into this piece, and then a lot of stitching time as well. We know from weft crossings in the original that several weavers worked on this together, and I can well imagine that several spinners worked on the yarn for this (or one spinner for quite a good bit of time).

Here I am back again, for a few days, before the Week of Crazy will throw its shadow over my life. The Week of Crazy, also known as the European Textile Forum... 

For now, though, let me tell you that I had a wonderful time in Lübeck. It's really lovely to travel again, and to have actual physical presences when giving a presentation instead of just a camera. Though there was a camera, too, an in case you've missed it but would like to see what I did there, here's the presentation on Youtube:

The sound quality and the video quality are, unfortunately, not the very best - but at least it's there, and available, and I hope you will be able to hear all my (more or less bad) jokes.

I can also fully recommend the exhibition, which has some really spectacular items, among them a belt made from sea silk...