...coffee and cake, and not just in form of a digital image, which I provide to you here from my very large stack of digital images: 

This is exactly what I would like to have now, and what I am looking forward to, as soon as I have sent out the last emails for the session planning for the Forum. Phew.

The cake in the image, by the way, is a Nürnberger Snitte, or at least my version of it. Basically it's the Danish Hindbaersnitte (raspberry thingie) on steroids- it's not just pastry dough, raspberry jam, pastry dough and a layer of sugar-raspberry icing, it replaces the icing with vanilla buttercream and a layer of marzipan.

They are... delicious. Can very much recommend.

Finished the cloak for the Oswald figure, pondered 14th and early 15th century male underwear, cuddled the cat, worked on the Textile Forum website update (test run went well, now the proper one will come as soon as the current newsletter is out completely), had a chat with an old friend (during lunch and while working on the Oswald buttons), and that's about it, I think.

Now there is really not much left before tackling the hose and doublet/tunic for the figurine... 

My colleague and friend Berit died, after a sudden illness, on September 20. She was delightfully enthusiastic, always excited to learn new things, and more than happy to pass that excitement and enthusiasm on to others. I will miss her sorely, as a friend, as a wonderful colleague, as a sister in scheming things textile to do, and as a companion for having that celebratory cake and coffee after a conference we attended together. There's an obituary linked to on this site from her uni.

I still cannot believe it. We had plans to do things together, and I had plans to visit her when I'd be up north next, and now she's just... gone. Go give your loved ones a hug, and your friends a call. Life is fragile, and there is no guarantee you'll have them next year. 

...the website, by the way. As it happens, there's a few bits and bobs still not doing what they are supposed to do, and having taken a rather long break from prodding it inbetween has not exactly helped. Sigh.

But I am working on it and taking notes and it does feel like there's something resembling progress. Or so I hope... I will keep you updated. Or you will notice it, or maybe not notice it because everything looks about the same, when I have finally done the switch...

If you are crafting, you will (usually) have tools. Sometimes these are what you were given by the teacher, or what you bought somewhere, and some will be grand from the start, while others will take some time getting used to. 

For crafts that are well-known and widespread, it's usually possible to get a large range of tools in somewhat different shapes, sizes, and materials, so you can find whatever you prefer for your own preferences (and budget). Normally, there's a range of variation that will work, and all the tools (if they are good ones) will stay within that range. If you know what you prefer, you can keep an eye out for the variants that suit your style.

It gets much more interesting when you are trying to re-make a tool with little or no previous experience on how it should feel. Back in the day when I was first exploring filet netting, I had, of course, the images of archaeological netting needle finds; I also had the instructions on how to work the knot (which, to practise, you can also do with a normal blunt sewing needle).

The first netting needle attempt that I ended up with, thanks to the help of a friend, looked like this:

Well. It did work, but not very well. Why? Because I had seen the general shape of the archaeological find - which was somehow rhomboid ends on a stick - and interpreted it into this version without really seeing the crucial details. The needle was rather short, which reduces the length of thread that can be wound onto it; but more importantly, the pleasingly symmetrical ends turned out to be rather unpleasing in their functionality.

A good part of netting is going into the correct mesh of the previous row with your needle. For this, unless you are working with very well-behaved and rather stiff material in a room without air currents, you will probably need to fish for it. This can be easily and nicely done with the tip of the needle... provided it's the right shape. And, spoiler alert, the pleasingly symmetrical rhomboid is not it! Like in a spindle stick, you want one end to be more bluntly tapered (to provide room for the threads you wind up on your needle), and one end to be nice and long and slender (to help with fiddling your way into the correct mesh).

This is something that became clear to me only after I had worked with this first attempt - and only after that did I realise that the surviving needles were usually not symmetrical in their ends, but had the widest part closer to the shaft. 

Which brings us to the core of why it can be quite hard to reconstruct tools - because sometimes, a tiny detail that seems insignificant or weird is actually important for the function, but to see it and realise its importance, we have to learn how to use the tool. Which, in turn, gets harder if we know less about the process and the exact use of said tool.

Like I said... interesting! (Fortunately, filet netting is known well enough that it's only a question of evaluating the tool attempt and then realising why it failed, with no necessity to reconstruct the process to go with it.)

If you have a textile find, it's sometimes possible to extract the dyestuff used for dyeing it. The instruments and technique have been refined more and more over the last decade or two, but there's still a problem: Knowing which dyestuff combination comes from which plant. 

A lot of things will dye some kind of yellow, so if you have yellow, it doesn't mean you know which plant it was. In analysis reports, this can then turn up as "yellow x". There's a similar issue with red, where it's not always known what was the origin of a red dye that was detected.

The Danish National Museum is now going on a citizen science quest to try and find those elusive colour suppliers, and they are looking for dyers willing to collect, document, and send in their dye sample. The project runs until October 2027, which is when all samples should have arrived in Denmark.

If you are interested and would like to know more, you can find it here on the museum's website. 

Things happening here? 

First important action of the day was going with the little cat for a vet checkup. We'll get the results of the blood check once the vet has them, and hopefully they will be okay. Renal values were a little worse last time than before, and we hope it has stabilised. We're also to give her eye drops now twice daily to prevent more issues with her eye deteriorating. She's blind already, or practically blind (it's hard to tell, we are not getting good answers on the "where does the mouse tail point on this board if you look here" questions) but I have learned today that there can also be troublesome changes inside the eye, and these need to be watched out for. The things you learn.

Also there's work going on for a workshop that I will give in October, apart from the ongoing "make clothes for Oswald". The hood is done, though I want to do a few more try-on tests to see if it fits our interpretation; the cloak is also almost done and needs a few more centimetres of seam and then the button closure. So the parts left are the hose and the tunic/pourpoint, which means I'll soon run out of the easy things and have to tackle the interesting bits. 

The figure itself then has to be dressed at some point, which will be rather interesting, as he is heavy and, of course, not as flexible and especially not as cooperative as a human being.

Most photos from the trip have been sorted by now, and I have also started sorting out a programme for the Textile Forum. There's one more workshop to prepare for right after the Forum, which means everything should be all done, dusted, and packed up when I leave for the Week of Madness.