I like online resources for research - who doesn't? And occasionally, I stumble across a new one, which is always a nice thing.

My most recent discovery happened because a colleague was searching for a specific article, published as part of a book, that I thought sounded interesting. So I checked my own library database, but of course it was not in there. Then I did a bit of a search on the 'net, and there was a link to the Internet Archive (which you might know through the WayBackMachine, which I can totally recommend if you want to look at websites that once were but are no more today) and, more specifically, to their lending library thing OpenLibrary.org - where you can virtually borrow digital copies of books. Quite a lot of books, actually, including the one in question that my colleague was looking for.

Borrowing works if you have a free log-in for the Internet Archive, and then you can read for one hour in the book in question, with automatic extension as long as nobody else wants to read it. Some things can also be borrowed to your e-reader for a 14-day period.

So in case you're running out of things to read... you might find something there. I hope you have fun!

Sometimes... sometimes it's just so, so nice to buy something pretty. Something that is not strictly necessary... but, well - pretty.

That is exactly what I did yesterday. I bought something for the new website. Something that really was not strictly necessary, not even un-strictly necessary... however, I've long been in love with the idea of it. And what better time to change something design-wise if not a website overhaul?

Otherwise, the changes will not be huge. There will some re-ordering of the main page articles, and some more articles on the main page, mostly information about spinning. The logo stays the same, and I'm also still quite happy with the shade of red I have as accent colour, and the general setup of the shop and shop software. The whole site will stay bilingual, and I'll also keep the three sections main page, blog, and shop.

The blog, however, will migrate to a new blog software, hopefully rendering all the comments more reliably, and allowing me to cross-post to Facebook as well.

But everything will be using a new, shiny, pretty font that I'm utterly and completely in love with. Bye bye, Cabin, you widely available but rather boring thing with your not so pretty @ sign and your not so brilliant kerning in the webfont version, which I had to fix with an extra plugin for the old blog software. Hello, shiny new font that is a semi-serif, because of course I could not decide whether I like a serif or a grotesque better (and they both have their pros and cons), and works well in print and on screen, and is just. so. pretty. At least if you ask me.

Here's a sneak peek of how it will look on the new blog:



Ah. I know it's a little nerdy, but I'm all delighted now.

I have a few more articles to fix up, a list of things to check and test, and then it will soon be time to take a deep breath, take the old site offline, make a gazillion of backups of everything and start the migration. I'm a bit scared, to be honest - it will mean migrating the blog plus pulling things from two different sites into a new one, in a mix of setting options and values directly in the backend, file copying, and SQL editing. The latter is the scariest bit, because a) I don't know much about SQL (read: next to nothing) and b) this is where most things can go horribly wrong and wreck the whole new clean shiny (and hopefully flawless) installation.

About every year around the same time, there's pictures of our willow fence, I think.

I've always liked the idea of a living fence - and even though we have a non-living additional fence around our place, the willow one is the higher one, and the more visible one, and the more exciting one.

It's also planted a little bit too close to the actual border of our garden, which, in retrospective, was not the brightest of all ideas. We had thoroughly underestimated how far the new shoots would branch out over the street, and how many of them there would be. We're handling this now by trying to guide everything as straight up as possible with the help of strings; the trick is to tie those in while the new growth is still green and fresh and very malleable.

We planted the fence back in April 2012, when it looked like this:



It's a kind of willow suitable for making baskets, which was important to us - after all, if you cut back the new rods every year, it would be sad if they weren't useful in some way.

Now it looks like this:



The fence, over the years, has taught me a few things. Among them, first and foremost: Even if willows are bendy, and even if you try to get the shapes all nice and even and just so, they are living things and they will react differently. Some will grow more, some will grow less, some will die off. Nothing will be just as accurate as planned, and planted. And in some places, you'll just have to live with something looking different because of a missing bit.

There's limits to what the trees will accept, and the more horizontal you try to make something grow, the closer you get to this limit. Parts of the tree may go up and die suddenly. The low arches are an issue every year, with plenty of them growing only to about the thirdway point, and then the tree puts everything into the new rods and we end up with a dead part beyond.



Another funny thing is when two trees meld together at their contact point. (That was what I had, in my youthful optimism, planned for all of them to do, by the way.) Sometimes, nothing extraordinary happens. Sometimes, though, the new united tree then decides some part of it is not necessary anymore... and there's another bit of dead wood for us to prune off.

What is really fascinating, though, is the difference between the "before" and the "after" harvesting the rods, and how much biomass this fence puts out every year.

Here's the before look:



And here the after, of approximately the same bit:



Every. Single. Year. Amazing, isn't it?

Here's this year's yield, all bundled up. Want to guess how many kilograms of willow?

From time to time, I get asked if I have a pattern for this or that piece of clothing - to which my usual answer is "No, because there were no patterns in the modern sense used in the Middle Ages". Exceptions may apply for items such as hoods, where it's easy to take the pattern from an archaeological find, and which fits a range of head, neck, and shoulder sizes, and not-really-fitted garments such as high medieval breeches, which are rather huge and don't need a lot of measuring.

For dresses and other fitted items of clothing, though, such as hose? In my opinion, it does not make any sense to offer a pattern in the modern sense for these - because their construction, as it can be reconstructed, did work completely different. To get a result close to what the original garments were, it makes much more sense to follow the procedure that was probably used for the originals than to try and use the industrial, post-19th-century approach to clothes, in graded sizes on paper patterns.

Generally speaking, for the historical construction of garments, you take some key measurements and transfer them to the fabric straight away. It's not even necessary to have a measuring tape for this, you can do it with a piece of string (measuring tapes are a rather late invention as well, at least I was not able to find any evidence for them from earlier than the 17th century). Your building bricks for the garments are geometrical shapes, which means they are easy to cut out of the fabric, and final tweaking takes place straight on the body. In case of the more involved, very tight-fitting garments used in the late Middle Ages, or in case of really expensive fabrics, this cut-then-fit approach can be done first on the lining, and then the lining fabric used as a template for the upper fabric.

The huge advantage of this approach (apart from being much closer to the original method, and thus much better suited to get results that look and fit more like the originals fit their original wearers)? Different body shapes pose a much smaller problem than when you have graded pre-made patterns. Human bodies are quite different from start, and they tend to take on even more different shapes if weight is put on, which is definitely an issue today (it would be interesting how many overweight people there were in the Middle Ages, but that's an entirely different topic and not really relevant for now and here). These very varied ways on where extra fat is stored is one of the reasons why it's much harder to find well-fitting garments for people that are overweight or adipose; some people carry most of the extra weight in the legs, some in the butt, some around the middle, and these differences make for very different shapes, so basic pattern grading will not work properly anymore.

So I'm always a bit to very sceptical when I see "patterns for medieval dresses" somewhere. In my personal experience, a lot of the patterns will not work properly, because - as explained above - the approach is just too different. It's especially, um, "interesting" if the pieces in question have not been published completely yet... as is the case with the Lengberg bra. Apparently this skirted bra has been turned into graded patterns which are now available at a site called Reconstructing History. Apart from the fact that if you use the search engine of your choice to look for reviews of patterns from this place, you'll find a lot of people telling you that they are badly documented, badly graded, and come with not-so-great instructions, I can tell you that the members of the Lengberg research team do not endorse this pattern. It was produced without their co-operation or consent, and they do emphasise that it was made without direct knowledge of the original garments or their patterning.

The Lengberg research team is working on a publication on the garments, and as far as I know, they are also going to make their reconstructions as accessible (and re-tailorable) as possible. I know that patience is hard... but it's probably very well worth it here.

Do you know these days that go "whoooooosh" and they have passed by? Today was one of those. And now it's time to fire off a blog post before I go to the post office, and the little cat has just settled on my arm for some cuddles, so I'm in for a disappointed look in a very short time, when I will get up and leave her all alone on the quiet, empty desk.

She could have come earlier and gotten some more cuddles. While I was taking care of the invoices, or fiddling with the website, or answering emails... but no, then it was much more important to snooze on our bed. (Which had to be made just so before she deigned to lie down on it. Because the duvet has to be placed back onto the bed, not hang on the end of the bed to air out. Because it's just not as nice to lie on the mattress and not the duvet. Except at some times, when the mattress is the only way to sleep on the bed. Because of Cat Logic.)

At least there was a bit of progress on most of the current things to be worked on, including website progress. Including a major design decision that I'm really, really thrilled about. So yay, and we're getting closer! Also, the weekend has seen all our willow fence pruned back, and we now have a stack of willow withies lying in the garden. Some of them will be turned into distaffs, and cutting the appropriate lengths is another thing on my list for the near future. Thankfully that is not a very time-consuming task due to very good, sharp shears.

Now, though, it's time to brave the rain and post the post...

I've not only restocked the pearwood spindle sticks, there's actually a new type in the shop as well: A 20 cm long stick with a thicker belly, modeled after one of the many sticks found in the Mühlberg-Ensemble in Kempten.



They are available in maple and in birch wood. If you've been looking for a stick that is a bit thicker and thus will accommodate whorls with a larger hole, or something shorter than the long sticks but longer than the short ones, this might just be the one for you...

It's still not Friday. Am I relieved, or am I disappointed? A bit of both, I guess - there's a stack of things left to do this week, and I feel like I'm way behind on many of them.

There is progress, though. Actual progress on all fronts - spinning for the Egtved blouse fabric and getting the new website version ready for a relaunch. There's also the February newsletter in the works, due out today or tomorrow. (Probably tomorrow.)

[caption id="attachment_6991" align="alignnone" width="225"] Flowers in the wintergarden! I'm still amazed that this plant can flower. My mum's specimens never did. Maybe it's due to the fertiliser provided at my place? Or more light in the wintergarden? Who knows...


There's also some garden work progress... it's the time of the year when our willow fence needs pruning and some care. We're more than halfway through with it, but the last part still has to be cut - and now, after the stormy winds have calmed down, it is time to work on this some more. With the side benefit of having some fresh air to clear the brain for a bit more work later on.