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Katrin Hieroglyphs.
23. Februar 2024
Yes, that would sort of fit that aspect - but you can also go from bits of woods to sticks if you ar...
Bruce Hieroglyphs.
23. Februar 2024
I think the closest English equivalent would be 'Down the rabbit hole'. It has one entrance (No, not...
Harma Spring is Coming.
20. Februar 2024
I'm definitely jealous! Mine disapeared except for one pathetic little flower. But the first daffodi...
Gudrun Rallies All Over Germany.
23. Januar 2024
Vielen Dank für den Beitrag. Ja, wir müssen darüber reden, gegen das Vergessen. Zum Glück haben mein...
Anne Decker Aargh.
17. Januar 2024
This is less likely to have an effect on your personal samples as you likely wrap the same way for a...
FEB.
07
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More Whorls!

The latest delivery of spindle whorls has arrived - just in time, as I was running low on some of the weight ranges. It's always making me happy to sort the new whorls into stock...

...and then send them off to new homes, one by one, as they get ordered. There's quite often some rummaging when I get requests for a specific shape or colour, or for both - so I might dive into the stash and not just the sorting boxes, but the boxes are very handy, and are also what travels with me when I go to a fair or market. Very handy - and it saves searching through a big box of whorls and weighing them several times!

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DEZ.
06
0

Small, Pointy, Shiny.

Today's been mostly spent with odds and ends - packing away stuff, trying to sort out some more of the Textile Forum backlog (as in doing some colour documentation/checking and putting away the dried lake we made from the used-up dyebaths), packing up things to go into the post... and then realising that I'm about to run out of stock with the brass pins.

So I made some more. 

It's fun to make these, and it definitely got easier with practice. Also I find that getting exactly the "right" amount of windings cut off (which is two, not one and not three) is the optimum for going forward.

More windings are harder to get onto the shaft - and less than two increases significantly the probability that the head will not sit firmly enough on the shaft. So that, for me, is definitely a good set of reasons to try and get them headed just like the originals...

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JUNI
27
0

That was... taxing.

Today was set aside to finally deal with the yearly tax paperwork... and hooray, it's almost done. A few last checks to make sure nothing stupid has happened (like last year, when I managed to put a large number in the wrong field, messing up about... everything) and then it can go off, so that part of the yearly Bureaucracy Worship is done and dusted. 

Which also means that I'll be able to go back to all the other (nicer, and more interesting) jobs to do tomorrow. One of the other things I did today was harvesting the last of the woad seeds outside - after snapping a picture first:

I really like how they look, those seeds. They are somewhere between purple, black, and brown in colour, and they can even be slightly iridescent. The flowers are nice, but rather small and yellow, and the leaf rosette is pretty, but to me, the seeds are the most spectacular aspect of the woad plant. 

The only reason I don't leave them on the plant until they fall off is, obviously, the shop - because if you want to sell the seeds, you have to harvest them... and now this year's crop is available.  

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JAN.
30
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New stuff!

There's actually new stuff in the shop - I've finally managed to take pictures and get the new kids in. It's fibres for spinning this time - first of all, two nice, naturally coloured types of wool, from the Bergschaf breed. The lighter variation is a nice, warm brown:

The second colour is a very, very dark brown - so dark that it can quite legitimately called black. I like both variations, but the black is my current favourite. 

And the third new fibre in the shop? It's.... cotton!  While that wasn't the most common fibre in the Middle Ages in Germany and the surrounding area, it was in use - for padding at first, but later also as the weft thread in fustian, for instance.

Because of a series of chance, I learned how to spin on a hand-spindle using cotton... which may have played a role in my persisting penchant for spinning thin yarns with high twist on heavy spindles... because cotton needs quite a bit of twist to make a stable thread, and I had limited amounts of fibre, and if you're a spinner, you can probably guess what happened.

Because after finding out about the pesticide use and water use of conventionally grown cotton, I've switched over to organic cotton or none at all, so this is (of course) also organic cotton. 

You can get all three from my shop, finding them among the spinning fibres, of course. 

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JAN.
26
1

Pin-making.

It's been a good while now since I've run out of the brass pins in the shop, but somehow there was this and that and things didn't line up, and I never got around to sitting down and making new ones. 

Today, though, I really felt like doing something practical again for a bit, after all the website and writing things, and I got out the metal-working supplies and started a bit of pin-making.

It begins with preparing the heads, which are made from wrapped wire, then cut into bits: 

Then shanks are cut and hammered into the little head coils, and then I do some more hammering to make sure the heads are decently stuck on the shanks, and then the annoying bit starts: sharpening the tips.

The photo shows half-finished tips on some pins. I'm still not completely happy with the workflow in that part of the process, but at least I'm getting pins already. Some more grinding, and some more testing of possible methods to come... and soon, pins to come back to the shop. Yay!

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SEP.
29
0

Off To Shenanigans!

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that when things come to happen, they do it in masses.

Ahead of me are three-and-a-half very full weeks, where I'm mostly away from home, doing things - giving workshops, holding presentations, doing museum inventory work, and, to balance out the work, having a few days off with the Most Patient of All Husbands inbetween. (I'm quite sure they will be needed...)

It's wonderful and exhilarating to be off and about and among people once more, though I admit I'm also a little anxious about this. There's still a pandemic happening, even though it is getting easier to ignore it all the time. I have masks, though (really well-fitting for a change, I'm quite amazed) and have just tested negative (something the Spinntreffen organisers were asking for, to self-test before going there), and I hope that I will have a sufficiently effective combination of being sensible and being lucky.

At the moment, I'm in the last bits of prep for the Spinntreffen of the Handspinngilde this weekend, and that means packing the car, printing out lists, and finishing putting together the workshop tools and materials. So once this post is done, I will hop out into the garden and cut some willow and hazel rods to serve as bow looms.

If you're interested in my presentation for the Hansemuseum Lübeck and the FGHO, it will be streamed live on YouTube on October 11, starting at 18:00. There's also still tickets available for those of you who prefer to be right in the room with me in Lübeck.

I will be back on the blog on October 24, when all my away missions are done and I'm back home - and I hope you will have a good time until then!

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FEB.
28
1

Everything Is Better With Chocolate.

We're living in a crazy world right now, and I don't know how it is with you, but I'm double as happy about anything nice and good happening these days as usual. Good news are just so, so welcome.

So it is twice as nice that there is chocolate to brighten up my day - and possibly yours, too. How and why? 

Fairafric is a German-Ghanaan company that produce organic, fair-trade chocolate - directly and from bean to bar in Ghana. Which means that most of the economic value actually stays in Ghana and is not added in some other, much richer country. They are using a lot of solar power and go for sustainable production and sustainable packaging. These are all good things, if you ask me - and the chocolate is, on top, also very tasty.

Since I am a firm believer in the fact that everything is better with chocolate... I'm extremely delighted to be part of a get-to-know-us campaign for them. In the form of having a number of their milk choc with hazelnut bars to pack into the orders from my webshop that I send out.



I hope this will brighten a few more people's days!

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