There's an online conference tomorrow about warrior elites in the late 6th and early 7th century in Europe - most of the programme listing German titles, but with a few English items inbetween.

The conference is online and held by the LVR Landesmuseum Bonn, who are doing it in preparation of an exhibition. There's a paper by Dr. Petra Linscheid on tomorrow morning at 9:45 Berlin time about leather and textile fragments found in a grave in Wesel-Bislich, and there's quite a few well-known places that will get re-visited in the rest of the conference.

If you're interested, you can download the full programme here, and you can watch and participate in the conference via this Youtube link. 

There's a lot of things going on here in the background, but none of them are spectacular. There's book-keeping to be taken care of (because of, well, tax paperwork being due and such stuff).

In addition, I'm working on the relaunch of the website. It's, well, not coming along too quickly, as these things tend to. At the moment, I am having severe struggles with CSS stuff regarding how the shop page looks... because even though I found what commands should technically fix the problem, I have not found the sweet spot yet where I can actually insert said commands.

Even though I started my internet career back in the days when it was cool to have your own website (I was Team Geocities), and you were coolest if you hand-coded your html for that in a text editor, I've not kept up. Which means that now, with the modern developments of website stuff, I'm sort of only half-literate. I can dabble around in some of the code, I can understand bits and pieces of what CSS and javascript and php codes do, but I cannot write them from zero, and if it gets more complicated, I'm lost. All this means that I can fix smaller issues and tweak things, but it's a bit hit-and-miss. Mind you, what I do know is still immensely helpful in 80% of all my use-cases, but when it comes to setting up or adjusting basic layouts like now... I'm sort of at my limits. (Any CSS wizards willing to have a look?)

In other news, as soon as my current book-keeping and other urgent stuff are off my desk, it will be the Return To The Spinning Machine - the last batch of yarn for the last piece to be woven for the Egtved project is due to be spun. And then, finally, there's also the rings on the skirt to be done... where I think I have a good method now (which may or may not be a possible method for how it was originally made), but it needs a little bit of fine-tuning and practising before it can start in earnest.

So. Lots of things, and none of them spectacular... but more than enough to keep me more than busy.

What you see here...



is the rest of the weft yarns spun for the Trindhøj man's garments. They've taken their bath and they have dried and they are en route to being woven... and I am very, very curious on how the finished fabric will turn out!

Each time I spin for a weaving project, I'm amazed at how much yarn is eaten up by a puny bit of fabric. Well, in this case, it's not so puny, with about 170 cm on 275 cm. That makes it a fairly good thing that the thread count per cm is not as high as in a medieval medium-fine fabric, but at only about 3-4 threads per centimetre.

Altogether, I've spun about 6400 m of yarn for this piece of fabric. The loom eats a generous portion as loom waste, which accounts for some of the extra yarn needed; then there's of course a bit of shrinkage after weaving, when the raw weave is wet finished. Finally, there's always need for some leeway just in case, it's not nice to run out of yarn right before the end. I've also added on a bit more of the weft yarn as one of the batches turned out to be rather thinner than intended.

Spinning consistently to the same thickness and the same amount of twist over a longer time - I still find that challenging. Though admittedly my comfort zone regarding yarn thicknesses has grown quite a bit in the past years compared to when I started spinning, and my tendency to gravitate towards a certain thickness of yarn has diminished with all the practice that I've been getting spinning yarns to specification for weaving projects. I think in that regard it did help a lot that some of these projects - like this one - required yarns that were a lot thicker than my default thin yarns.

Have you done spinning outside your comfort zone thickness? And/or spinning in bulk for a larger project?

My eternal ink is finished, finally! I blame a number of things for it taking so long - among them, yes, the pandemic, as that seriously cut down on our opportunities to sit in a café and knit while enjoying some coffee. Travel times also were reduced greatly, though that was not as much of an influence, since the cardi is knit in one piece, and I have this rule about not taking along any projects that will not fit into my project bag. Which is rather small, because, you know, travel.

(I tend to lug along a plethora of things anyways, and usually way more than I will use or need, so it does make a lot of sense for me to limit myself.)

So here is some picture proof of the finished thing:



I'm very happy with it - the only thing left to do now is to sew in the zip so I can close it. The original pattern intends for it to stay open, and I've worn it a few times already now without a closure... but I like to have the option of wearing it closed, too. In case I end up not liking it with the zip, well, I can always take it out again.

The wool is very, very soft and nice to wear, and I also really like the colours. The stripes are not too blatant, but I think they add some interest, and the cables are also rather subtle but nice.



Also - I managed to tweak the pattern a bit while I was knitting so it fits me really, really well. Which is also a nice thing!

There was more packing of parcels today, and more prep work for the courses - both the spinning one, and the sewing one. My dressing of the distaffs was supervised by an expert for fluffyness and hair:



I've also been dabbling a bit on the shop relaunch. It's coming along, albeit more slowly than I'd like it to, but hey, what can you expect regarding anything that involves computers, right?

Basically, the shop and site relaunch means a clean, new installation with a template that is compatible to Joomla 4, and I'm trying to find the right balance between "keep everything as it is and get it done as quickly as possible" and "this is the perfect time to make some changes and make everything better and add a gazillion new texts and images to the page which means I will never ever be finished".

The main points are a new shop installation (in hopes that the glitches that happened in the past will then be history), a blog migration to a different system in Joomla (because I'm not sure if my current wordpress-in-joomla thing will continue to get support) and, yes, a little bit of restructuring of the main page. According to my tests, the new template will also mean the site is visible, and mostly useable, without javascript turned on. (The shop, of course, needs JS to function.)

So - if you have any suggestions for the site, or site structure, or comments on what you like on the current one, or dislike - please let me know in the comments. I'm grateful for any input, whether it's regarding the blog, the shop, or the main page, the content or the layout.

Today was gobbled up by all kinds of preparation tasks for the two upcoming online workshops - especially making a few more distaffs, and some more pins for said distaffs.

 


It's been a while since my last pin-making session, so I was really looking forward to this. It's a fun task, if a little fiddly at times, and winding the coil for the pinheads takes a bit of a toll on the fingers... but I still like it a lot. (And I only lost one pinhead somewhere on the floor...)

I really like the simple look of these. Mind you, I also enjoy pins with fancy heads, and pins with pressed heads, but these are charming in their own way somehow.

So - pin-making, distaff-making, distaff-dressing, cutting the fabric for the sewing workshop, and packing things in boxes to be sent off. More boxes tomorrow - plus hopefully some time for the overdue book-keeping, and a few other desk and writing tasks.

French shepherds in a particular region used to walk on stilts - and apparently, if you learn how to do it at an early age, you can be really good with stilt-walking.

Alex Makin has made a video about the stitches in the Bayeux tapestry:


And finally, in case you've missed it (I think I posted that before somewhere) - you can download Karina Grömer's book about prehistoric textiles "Prähistorische Textilkunst in Mitteleuropa" for free from this e-library. The English version is also available behind the link. Enjoy!