String Notes

The event was fabulous, thanks to many, many helpful volunteers. Nobody went hungry, and I saw some folks even taking seconds. I'll put recipes up soon, but not tonight.

Since I'm too tired to do much other than lay around on the couch with the dog and the cat, instead I'll catch up on some things I've been saving.

• Katrin Kania describes how to untangle skeins. This is a lot like my approach, and saves me from having to write it up. One extra tip: if both ends are fixed (tied to each other, or to fixed points as on a loom), there are limited things that the yarn can do. In particular, you never need to pass the ends through any other loop, since all tangles must have formed in the bight. You can find loops and untangle them, rather than working from the ends. Where it works, that's a faster method.


• More on the golden spider weaving mentioned here earlier, from Bonnie Tarses.


• The book Pattern and Loom: A Practical Study of the Development of Weaving Techniques in China, Western Asia, and Europe by John Becker and Donald Wagner is now freely available online.


• Anne Rock recently contacted me on behalf of the UK-based Braid Society. This group is devoted to research, teaching and construction of braids and narrow bands, but has in practice been only open to UK members. The Society has added a membership class for people outside the UK. According to Anne, "The long haul category is £10 per year (plus £1 if paying by PayPal); is open to residents of Asia, the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa; includes e-mailed quarterly newsletters and a mailed copy of the annual journal Strands; does not include participation in swaps or exhibitions. See attached form for more fine print. The new category is a two-year experiment, so it’s important that we get new members right away. Membership year starts in November; new members will receive the just-published issue of Strands as well as the one published next year." Please check it out.

My own Christmas cactus started flowering while I was off cooking. I was afraid I'd miss it entirely, but it is still going.

All of the paperwork side of the textile symposium is taken care of - class scheduling, program book, the various signs and forms and sheets that need to be prepared.

Now there's just the cooking for 100 for the weekend part... the dishes that have been in storage have been washed, the bread ordered, the meat ordered, menus and shopping lists and portioning and serving plans made, helpers recruited. I bought all the dry goods last weekend (but did I get enough jam?), and more shopping will happen tomorrow and Friday (both days I'm taking off work). A bit of cooking will be done tonight, but the main effort starts tomorrow: baking desserts, and chopping. Twenty pounds of onions, at least, six pounds of mushrooms, eighteen pounds of root vegetables. Friday I'll pick up the meat and bread and other perishables and head out to the site. Clean the kitchen, bake the tarts, make soup, prep for Saturday's breakfast. Saturday I will be in the kitchen from 11am on, so I won't be able to attend any classes.

Except mine. Oh yeah, I'm teaching a class on synthetic dyes, for medievalists who don't have time, patience or otherwise aren't able or interested in using natural dyes. What dyes to use, what other equipment is needed, safety precautions, and what will it look like?



The lighting is unfortunate, but pretty, no? I did up a colorwheel in 20/2 silk as part of my familiarization process with the Lanaset dyes. No streaking, no breaking, no bleeding. I'm really quite happy with these, though they are a lot of work to use.



Wish me luck, and I'll see you next week sometime.

LJ edit: if any of you feel inclined to comment at the original blog post, then my grandfather will see it.

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Today is a day to remember those who fought for their country, and to thank those who can still hear it. It's also a day to celebrate one individual from that group. Today is my grandfather's 91st birthday.



John J. Goslee fought in World War II - stationed in China. Came home, raised three kids, caught an awful lot of fish. Still does, for that matter, but the fishing isn't as good as it used to be.



I think I've learned the secrets to living to 91 from him:

• Oatmeal for breakfast every morning.


• Walk the dog twice a day.


• Always have a project going, something that will keep your mind busy and your butt off the couch.

When I was a kid, my parents owned a marina in northern lower Michigan. Grandpa lived in Ann Arbor, where he was a construction foreman. Among other things, he built the University of Michigan Law Library.

More important, to my young self, every weekend Grandpa would come north to go fishing. And he'd bring me a giant stack of books from the Ann Arbor Public Library. I know he introduced me to Tin-Tin, and I think he probably introduced me to Oz, and many many more. He taught me how to fish, and to clean fish.

After I left for college, for years he would write me a letter each spring, and enclose the first pussywillows he found, pressed. There was often a pansy or violet tucked in as well. By then he was living up north near my parents, and we both appreciated these signs of spring after the long Michigan winter. (Even if Iwasn't living in Michigan.)



Happy birthday Grandpa, and thank you.

Love,
Sarah

Sheep sculptures made from rotary telephones by artist Jean-Luc Cornec. More.

The weather has been just gorgeous here, sunny and close to 70 for the past couple of days. I spent yesterday afternoon outside, and finally got my new tulips planted.

I visited a flower market in Amsterdam, and was astounded by the variety and abundance. Truly, I was astounded by the plants everywhere, from parks to urban windowboxes. But oh, the tulips!



I wandered through, looking at the photos. "I want that one, and that one, and ooooh pretty!" But I was positive that it would be highly embarrassing if not worse for a USDA employee to be caught smuggling tulip bulbs through customs, so I brought back nothing but notes.

Breck's is happy to import Dutch tulip bulbs for me - all I have to do is pay for them, with no complicated paperwork or customs inspections for me to think about. I bought them on the October day that we got 7 inches of snow, so I might have gotten a little carried away: "Think of spring! Think of spring! Don't think about snow in October!"

So, come spring, my front flowerbed will look like this:





And the side bed will feature an assortment of these:







Nick's mother's mailbox will be surrounded with brightly-colored blooms, and my mother's house will have some new spring flowers. My brother Nate and his wife Laura bought a new house this summer with a lot of land, so they certainly needed Dutch tulip bulbs of their own.

I will report back with real photographs in the spring.

November? You don't say? These months, they seem to be sneaking up on me.

Even the vegetation is confused, after that snow. My poor forsythia is changing colors, dropping its leaves, and blooming all at once.



My trees are all winter-bare, but a last few are holding onto their leaves.



Not for long, though.



I'm running a textile symposium in a couple of weeks, and because we are so short-staffed, I'm also doing all the meal planning and cooking. Don't expect to see much blogging out of me until after that's over.

The latest Complex Weavers Journal was in my mail yesterday, complete with the program and registration for the 2010 seminar, with my name in it! This is very exciting - I've been teaching for a long time, but this is my first time as instructor at a national conference. You should all come! The seminar is being held in Albuquerque, NM, July 18-21. It will be fabulous! The complete program and registration information are here. Weaving in infinite permutations, ply-split, tablet weaving,shibori dyeing, design... it's gonna be great!


E-2 Tablet Weaving Tour
Sarah Goslee

Tablet weaving is known from places as far apart as Finland and Sumatra, and from Bronze Age Europe to the present. In each time and place, this versatile technique has been integrated into the local culture. The most common structures - warp-twining, double-face, and 3/1 broken twill --have been used in many times and places, but other types of tablet weaving are known from only one locale. This Seminar will trace tablet-woven structures through time and space, and show examples of the diversity of patterns that have been woven. The primary focus will be on four-holed square tablets, but examples woven with two-hole, triangular, hexagonal, and even octagonal tablets will be presented. There will also be a brief excursion into bands that could have been woven with tablets, but weren't.

Nobody came as a Viking Princess, and I'm very grateful. The cat costumes were the best - don't they look realistic?



The humans had some fun too.



More photos, but I'm afraid the only shot of me is a really awful computer pic from before we left.

The LJ crossposter has un-fixed itself. But you've got to see this...

Apparently I've been doing it wrong. Though of course I'm not a Princess, so maybe it's just a rank thing?



You must go to the original site and look at the closeups. Her headgear is particularly nice.

The LJ crossposter seems to have fixed itself without my intervention.

Weird.

Originally published at String Notes. You can comment here or there.

Real Life Comics today: yarn shops!

The poor tree mostly bounced back once the snow melted, although you can see a bunch of broken branches beneath its base.



I'll prune a bit and clean up, I won't know until next spring just how badly it was injured.

The rest of town doesn't look as bad as I'd expected. Branches down all over, of course, and slowly being cleaned up. The trees that were already prepared for autumn lost their leaves, but many that were still green or just starting to change kept them.



Not bad, but not as spectacular as it had been.



I continue to be very pleased with the new dyes. I did a larger batch of silk this weekend, and it's a good red that is quite washfast and doesn't bleed. Whew. I've had several kinds of problems with the previous trials, resulting in great frustration and time wasted on my part, and even worse, disappointment among my customers.



Isn't it pretty?



That one is big if you click, because it glows so beautifully in the slanty morning sun.

The snow is gone, and we're back to a normal, even warm, Pennsylvania autumn. Yesterday I spent reading novels and watching it snow, but today has been nicely productive. My presentation from Textilforum is now available online as a web-based slide show or a black-and-white PDF. No idea why the latter isn't in color - I will try to get it fixed.

For anyone interested, the handout from the geomancy class I taught at Pennsic this year are finally online. Geomancy is a medieval divination technique that uses random numbers of dots. Unlike astrology, it can be done "on the spot", with no equipment other than pen and paper.

Wednesday morning.



Friday morning (today).



We got far too many inches of slushy wet snow. It started falling late-morning yesterday and continued through the night. Branches are down everywhere, and power was out in much of town. It went off at my house



Even the National Weather Service said, effectively, "We know the snow is beautiful, but don't go outside. It's extremely dangerous." Yikes.

And Nick just called me - I now have no power at home either.

This is the part that's going to hurt, though.



That poor snow-covered and bedraggled lump is my pampered and tended tropical tree, smuggled in from Sri Lanka and carefully tended by the woman who owned my house for the past few decades.

It looks more like this in the summer, and definitely shouldn't be folded over like that.





It still had all its leaves too, and just isn't equipped for this sort of thing. It loses branches every winter, and requires some careful pruning and much love. I hope it comes through this okay.

Yesterday. Yes, yesterday. I posted a picture of our first hard frost. My tomatoes were still bushy and green, and covered in unripe fruit. Now just look at the poor things!



It was raining this morning. Then the rain turned fluffy. And stayed that way. And kept falling. Now just look at this mess. Slush, snow, falling from the sky. All day, and still falling.



The trees are all still in leaf - this morning's photos were taken just yesterday - and what the weather forecasters euphemistically call "wintery mix" is sticking to them. There are branches down all over town, and it's supposed to keep falling for at least another day. It's only mid-October!



Okay, it is kind of pretty. And I got to pull out all my wool accessories. But still...

My LJ-WordPress plugin has gone on strike. I'll post things over here manually until I get a chance to beat it into submission. Prescheduled entries, like this one, may be quite a bit later on LJ, but they'll get here.

The sun's angle changes over the course of the year, as does its time of rising. This time of year, the angle and timing are such that it shines up a hill that I climb on my way to work in the morning.



This hill.



The sun peeks over the horizon, and the first thing it sees are these yellow and red and green treetops. They're illuminated first, before the trunks and street. The treetops glow.

Prettiest spot in town right now. Not that the rest of town is ugly, mind you.




ETA: It's a good thing I took these photos yesterday. The forecast is calling for 2-6 inches of wet sludgy snow, and that could strip the leaves from the trees, ending the fall colors early. It could also bring the trees themselves down, but we'll worry about that later.

Anyone who's been reading here for a while knows that I've gotten fairly confident with my ability to dye wool, but have been struggling with silk, due primarily to my very, very hard water. It comes out uneven, bad enough, but it also bleeds, which is horrid. And completely unacceptable. I tried everything I could think of: additives, more acid, more heat, more time. No joy, and one major disaster.

But look:



Four skeins of silk, fresh out of the rinse water. And look harder:



White towel is white. Even after much squeezing and rolling. Even squeezing this large skein of wool didn't turn it even the faintest bit pink. (That means that I can fix the major disaster learning experience, though by "fix", I mean "start over".)



So what did I do, you might ask? Did I develop a new technique for acid dyes that will solve the world's color problems? Sorry, no. These are my test skeins for Lanaset/Sabraset dyes. They are more work, more expensive, and require more ancillary chemicals, but they don't bleed. For the store, I'll continue doing all of the hand-paints with acid dyes because of the ease of use. For those, some fading is not a problem as long as they won't bleed once I'm done with the rinse step. But for solid-colored silk, I'll be switching. Possibly for solid wool too. I need to do some more sampling, but I'm very happy with these preliminary results. Washfastness has been a horrible timeconsuming issue, and I really hope I've made some progress toward resolving my problems.

In other news, the World's Smallest Pea Patch has experienced its first frost. I did put in a fall crop of peas, but not early enough to do any good. But my CSA is nothing short of miraculous - I came home yesterday with sweet corn. Yum!

[This didn't post correctly from WordPress, so I'm adding it manually.]

Ohhh.... Halloween Poppets! You know, my birthday is nowhere near Halloween, but it could have been...

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Probably everyone's seen this by now. The Skjoldehamn outfit was from a bog body dating to 1050CE or so, found in Norway the 1936. The body was poorly preserved, but the clothes were in fabulous shape. A museum group has been working on a reconstruction (more, more, more). The body was badly decomposed, and it was unsure for a long time whether it was male or female. It was found with a knife, and wearing pants, but is now believed to be female. Rebecca Lucas has an English summary and description of the hood.



Photo credit

This is a very practical outfit, but unlike most of what we think of as Viking women's clothing.

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And one last link, an Anglo-Saxon Dye and Textile History Bibliography. Yay research! (Actually, a whole collection of bibliographies from the Anglo-Saxon Plant-Name Survey.

Originally published at String Notes. You can comment here or there.

Yes, everyone thinks the gizmo looks like a bobbin winder of some sort.

But here’s where we’re most perplexed:

The putative bobbin area is hourglass shaped. There isn’t an obvious way to mount a pirn or quill, and how would you get it off if you wound directly onto the shaft? My friend didn’t get to try to take it apart, but unscrewing the top might be possible. It looks like there might be a seam around the central shaft, but that seems rather inconvenient.

This is also a very large and sturdy-looking contraption. Why so hefty? And is that an adjustment knob on top of the “bobbin”?

I’m hoping that someone recognizes as some piece of antique mill equipment with a particular purpose, something that seems more likely to me than that it’s a handicrafter’s bobbin winder.

With the feed loop and the orbital gearing and the winding, it’s some kind of winder, but what, and where did it come from?

Originally published at String Notes. You can comment here or there.

Long-time followers of Stringpage will remember the occasional puzzles. I get a reasonable amount of email from folks asking what something is, or how to replicate it. These are fun! Sometimes I can answer, but sometimes I have no idea. When I don’t know, I call on the Internet hive-mind, source of all knowledge.

Here’s a new puzzle. I’m stumped.

The querent writes:

I saw it at an antiques fair, labeled as a table top spinning wheel. It clamps to the table and has a hand crank, but the bobbin spins off center. It’s movement reminded me very much of the Lacis Yarn Ball Winder, but the bobbin was hour glass shaped instead of straight. Any ideas? I also don’t know if this was part of the product design, or just because it’s old, but the bobbin’s teeth didn’t always catch on the drive.

Yes, they let me crank it, and the bobbin spun off kilter, and it was the only one they had. The top drum turned, being driven by the rope, but it only had a small slit at one end where the bobbin’s teeth fit. This slit didn’t go all around the drum nor did it gear the bobbin to spin differently. I keep on wanting to say it’s a ball winder, if only there was a way to get the ball off of the bobbin. And then I thought it might be used for plying, but then you would still have to put twist into it :/ I also did a quick internet search and couldn’t find anything that resembles it.

She took several photos of the gizmo in question (click for big):