(continued from part 3)

The pieces to practise on? I have a narrow band that I already set up before the Forum; a wider band (or a very narrow strip of cloth, if you'd prefer); and another band (or two, actually) that I call "The Pharaoh".

These are all three quite different from each other, and I'm feeling a bit challenged with each of them, though The Pharaoh really wears the crown. It's a much simplified version of Tutankhamun's collar that Marie Ekstedt Bjersing researched and taught to us, done in a thicker yarn. Thicker, in this case, means a linen yarn in 60/2, which is still freaking thin.

Here's a picture of it:



You might notice that this lacks its heddles - that's because I had a heddling mistake in my setup, and decided that re-heddling would be a very smart thing to do. Then Marie told me that I might as well do a second warp, because it's quick and easy to do, and, well, so I did. That is why I now have two pharaohs.

This is the second one:

 
That does have all the heddles - I had to re-do the small bunch (for the special shed), but now it works quite fine. Apart from the two white warp threads that I still have no clue where they rightfully belong. They got missed, somehow, during heddling, in addition to two red-coloured warps. I figured out  where the latter really belong, though, and got that fixed by now.



The second pharaoh, by the way, even got to accompany me on our holidays as my crafty thing to do. Usually I take some knitting along, but the current project (dubbed the Neverending Ink) is way too heavy and voluminous at its current stage, and the bike will only accommodate something nice and small...

Sorry for the blog silence yesterday - I completely forgot to post! That happens only rarely, but this year, I had the very interesting idea of scheduling workshops fairly soon after the summer break, and together with the catching up on things that is still going on... well, it totally slipped my attention. Even though "blog" is on the list of daily things to do. But just like calendars, lists are of limited use if you don't look at them...

There's quite a bit going on here at the moment, behind the scenes. There's a newsletter to write for September, I'm preparing the items for the next online sewing workshop (on October 10, and there's still spaces free if you'd like to learn about medieval stitches and seams, in German), and both of these meant taking some photos yesterday. There's also a new thing for the shop, hooray! (Which obviously needs to go in as a listing before the newsletter goes out.) Oh, and I figured out how to solve the broken image problem on the blog - they should all be back now. (For some reason, there was a 1 added to a lot of picture file names, and deleting that meant the pics, which were on the server, could be found again.)

I'm also doing some spinning tests for the next reconstruction project - a museum would like to have Bronze Age fabrics for visitors to touch, and try on garments made from them. This is a lovely project, and a wonderful task, and it means a lot of spinning, which also means a bit of test spinning. Once I have the tests finished, they will go to the weaver to see if they are suitable, and give me some feedback, and then spinning for real will start. I'm very, very excited!

Other news? The vote in Germany is over (that was last Sunday), and now we're waiting to see who is going to run (or ruin) the country for the next 4 years. Mathematically, a lot of party constellations are possible - not, unfortunately, those that I personally would have favoured most. We might still end up with the "traffic lights" - that is SPD, FDP and the Green Party, which is the one I'd prefer out of the options left. It's definitely living in interesting times...

(continued from part 2)

I did hop into the car for a long drive to Belgium - because the next thing that happened was the European Textile Forum. To my utter delight!

The Textile Forum is my week of sheer and utter textile madness, and I missed it so much last year when it had to be cancelled due to the pandemic. It was a chance to take and plan for this year, but the stars lined up favourably, with a wonderful venue in Belgium that would have enabled us to cancel everything up to about two weeks before the Forum, if things should explode.

Fortunately, they did not.

First of all, let me introduce you to the house where we had our conference, called "Merveille de Méry". It's utterly beautiful, and spacious, and situated a bit above Tilff-Méry in the woods, so it's quite quiet and with lovely green surroundings.


Unfortunately, I didn't take any decent photos of the house itself - but you can have a look at it on its own website (where you can also book it as a vacation home for up to 18 persons).

There was ample space in the garden for working, there was the multi-purpose room in the basement prepared with looms and tables for more weaving, and of course we spread out over the rest of the venue as well - the main room, where we had the presentations, and the balcony. At one point, there was a little abandoned bow loom sitting on the stairs late at night:



The topic of the week was "Sticks and Stones May Make a Loom", and being a non-weaver, I think this was the Forum where I did learn the most. It was absolutely amazing, and my weaving skills have increased a lot. They are still rather puny, I'm afraid - getting a lot better at something you have no real experience with is easily done while it may still let you end up in the "not very good at it yet" section.

I had a lot of fun, too.

Weaving included several weaver-tensioned trials, and I have finally understood, during that week, why you'd want to tie yourself to your piece of work. That had always been a mystery to me before. I will still use two fixed points for my tablet weaving in the future, but for bands or other types of weaving? Weaver-tensioned is definitely an option.

Basically, what weaver-tension weaving does for you is give you a lot of flexibility in your tension - and if you have mastered it, in a good way. You can reduce tension for some steps of the process, such as when you are changing sheds, and increase it for others, such as pressing in your weft, and this becomes an intricate and subtle dance with your tools and materials. It is absolutely fascinating to watch when someone does this well. It also means you can lessen the abrasion on your threads by only using as much tension as necessary for each step, and since that can differ, weaver-tensioning gives you the ability to use less tension overall.

Me, I'm still struggling with this intricate dance. I know, in theory, when I want to do what, but the movements are too big, too jerky, and my tension is usually either way too low or way too high. It is a question of fine-tuning the whole body fine motor skills, so to say... so maybe it's a good thing I have a full three items to practise on.

(continued from part 1)

A note to the vendor brought me a weird, and not very logical reply: The HDD frame was not missing by accident (as I had assumed), but was not part of the computer - I would have needed to order a second HDD for it to be included. That, people, makes no sense. A part that is a regular part of the regular (new) computer? The frame (actually a sort of sleeve) is available as replacement part only, and not as an add-on when ordering the computer as a new one. It's also sort of not fitting in with the refurbished-instead-of-new philosophy if I have to order a new HDD to put it into the shelf, along with all the others that were unavoidable cast-offs during the years, to replace the new one with my old one. Anyway, I was not happy at all with the reply, but it was quite clear there would be nothing forthcoming from that place. Needless to say, I will not order from there again. (Greenpanda, in case you're wondering.)

A replacement frame/sleeve was available on Ebay, either directly from China and for a very cheap price, but possibly taking a long time to get here, or from the UK. So the latter it was - fortunately Brexit only prevents me from selling to the UK and not from buying there. The sleeve came, I payed the toll/tax (a full Euro and sixtyfour) and the "Auslagepauschale" - the "lending fee" that DHL charges (which is, hooray, 6 €) and got the sleeve out of the packet... to find that it had been damaged during transit, and one of the metal frame parts was bent out of shape, far enough to not fit properly anymore.

Customer service of that vendor was an entirely different experience - I got a part refund even though I managed to bend the frame back into shape and it became useable again. If that would not have been possible, there was the promise of instant re-sending of a caddy as replacement. Needless to say, I will happily recommend that vendor - Rapid Spares Ltd.

Installing the disk drive had to wait until after the Forum, though. No big changes before big events, if it's avoidable! I did take the new machine along, though, just in case - its camera and speakers are much better than those of the old one, and let's not even consider briefly the "microphone" the old computer had. It clearly was built before the advent of video conferencing.

That all happened at the very start of the summer break, as did the wedding of two friends that we went to - and it was wonderful, if a little weird to be around so many other people again. And then, next on the Things Happening: The European Textile Forum.

With the flooding just before the Forum, it was extra-interesting, too. I had a little niggling doubt whether everything would be happening as planned until, basically, the moment I hopped into the car to drive off...

So... the things that happened during the summer break? A lot of them, and, in some cases, not enough. But... let me start from the beginning.

I managed to get a COVID-19 vaccination just in time to have gotten the second shot before the Textile Forum, but not early enough for it to count as fully vaccinated. (It did give me a much better feeling for venturing into Belgium, though.)

There was also major buying of things at that point, to my half-delight and half-dismay. Our old printer, a laser printer that we bought sometime more than a dozen years ago, had refused to calibrate properly for a good while now. So picture quality had been not so great for a time, but now it was getting worse, and printout quality slid just over the edge of being acceptable to me. I use the printer for my business printouts, for instance for the instruction sheets, so having a decent picture quality is indisputable. I would have preferred to keep the machine, but all trials of getting it re-calibrated, including downloading a number of potentially helpful software thingies (all not helping at all), failed. So the search for a new one began - and we now have an ink printer, which can be fully calibrated and will hopefully last for at least as long as the old one did. The new printer is an "eco" model using large ink tanks that can be refilled with bottles, which also means that maintenance will have a smaller impact, materials-wise, than replacing the toner cartridges of the old one, or replacing ink tanks with integrated printer heads (which is what the ink cartridge system does).

The next replacement was my trusty old computer, which still ran on Windows 7. Hey, I'm an archaeologist. I dig ancient things. In this case, however, it became more and more troublesome in different places, and the machine itself became slower and slower. Whenever I was required to use Teams, for instance, Win7 could just not cope with that anymore, and the whole thing became as slow as a frozen slug. I'm pretty sure the old computer was as old as the printer, by the way - but I can actually not remember how old it was.

The old machine had received various upgrades over the years, such as new HDDs (larger, and faster, of course) and more RAM, and a new fan, but, well... it just was not up to the modern and new requirements anymore. Which meant... looking for a replacement. The Most Patient Husband of Them All pointed me towards a type of machine that has a fancy small SSD drive as main hard disk, which means very quick access, and the possibility to mount a second, normal HDD so I could just re-pot my old drive into the new machine. That sounded very good! I found one as a refurbished used machine and ordered it. It arrived, and the usual headache for transferring everything from an old computer to a new one ensued. It was medium-bad, nothing really horrible happened, but it did take some time and there were a few glitches - and once everything was transferred, I opened the thing to put in the old HDD, to find, to my great dismay, that there was no frame to hold the drive...

 
 
 
 

I'm back! And, can you believe it, it feels like I'm almost back on track? I'm sort of half-expecting and half-fearing, though, that I will find out any minute now that I am way more behind than I thought I am...

This year has been sort of crazy in regard to our summer holiday, and the summer break, with a lot of things lining up more or less seamlessly. That meant very little breathing space inbetween... so we ended up going off on holidays directly on our first free day, instead of taking one or two days off at home for preparing the trip and doing all the home things that should be done before.

And just like the holidays began - as in "very suddenly" - I'm back and there's things on the agenda for the next days already, starting with a talk (in German) about two experiments that took place during past European Textile Forums. At 19:00 CET tomorrow, I will be chatting with Franz Pieler, director of the MAMUZ in Austria, about the spinning experiment and the Pompeii dyeing experiment.

Here's the link to the MAMUZ site, where you'll be able to follow the livestream (which will also be available later).

Next thing to come up in line is the next German Online Spinning course, Tuesday next week - so on the 28th of September, starting at 18:00. There's still some spaces left, so if you book your spot now, you can join in with the fun.

For English speakers, the next online spinning course is on November 5, 10:30 CET (it's the Down Under Edition, hence the morning start). Again, there's spaces still free, and you can learn more about it here (and book as well).

And now I'll get back to catching up some more...

The weekend is coming, and with it the summer break. The much-awaited one!

I will be off the shop, and off the blog, until September 21. The Textile Forum will happen within that timespan, as will the NESAT, and there will be time off too, and hopefully enough time in between to catch up on things that need catching up, finalising a few other things, and getting a new website ready to go. As usual for my summer break time, I'll also be taking time off social media, so if you're following me on Instagram or Facebook - expect a lot of silence from me.

After the summer break, there will be workshops again: a Spinning Workshop in German on September 28, the Spinning Workshop "Down Under Edition" in English on November 10, and another German workshop on Medieval Stitches and Seams on October 10.

So. Have a nice next few weeks, I hope you'll have a lovely time, and I will see you after my break.

And to see you off, here's a gratuitous squirrel pic for you - not a cat pic, for a change... because this guy had some nice berry breakfast this morning, right outside our kitchen window.