One year on

Do you realise it's exactly a year since I started this blog? Quite a lot has happened during that time.

I keep a record of everything I've posted, partly to make it easier to find posts if I want to link them (as I can't always remember what I called them at the time), and partly so that I don't find myself accidentally repeating significant chunks. This means I can now go back and look at exactly what I've posted on over the course of this year. If we don't count the three Gallimaufry posts, which cover a bit of everything, we have, very broadly: 53 posts about sewing; 22 about knitting; 21 about netting; 20 about beading; 12 about creative writing; 9 about baking or cooking; and a whole miscellany of posts about other crafts, including weaving (both loom and tablet), cording (both lucet and kumihimo), zhostovo painting, bobbin lace, needlelace, prop construction, crochet, latch hooking, spinning, basket making, papercraft, various types of knot, dyeing, tatting, and even leather working... not to mention a couple of book reviews, and general articles on subjects such as repairs and historical inspiration. During this process, you have probably correctly concluded that I am a mad improviser with far too many projects on the go at any one time. I do indeed have some that have been sitting around unfinished for too long (or even not yet started; I have too many bags of fabric earmarked for projects). However, I do always eventually come back to them. In particular, now that I have a functional set of garb (which I did need to have ready for the weekend), I plan to revisit the Lahja dressing gown project at the earliest opportunity. I could have done with it over the weekend, and in December I'm going to the Yule Ball, at which point I suspect I shall definitely need it.

There are a few things ahead of it in the queue. I have a pair of socks I need to finish. I also have a hat to knit for the Yule Ball; it's not for me. We have a kind of Secret Santa thing going, and so I'm going to do it for my gift (hand-made items are not compulsory, but they are encouraged). Then there's my favourite toddler's Christmas present, which is always a jumper. He is three now, so I expect he's got a favourite colour by now; I'm trying to get his parents to tell me what it is, but they are not great at answering e-mails. But I think, once all that knitting is done, I'm going to dig out the Lahja and get on with it. Having to take Sibyl to the loo in the middle of the night in a beautiful historic building is a distinctly chilly procedure.

And then there's sprang.

I was really not going to take up any more fibre crafts; but then Crown happened. Crown is by no means just about people bashing seven bells out of one another with big sticks, although that part of it was a good deal more interesting than I expected (there's a lot of skill involved). It also includes a lot of other stuff, including what is referred to in the SCA as "Arts and Sciences", or "A&S" for short; this basically means any and all creative activities, whether that's fibre crafts, dyeing, leather working, pottery, metalsmithing, calligraphy/illumination, brewing, cooking, or the whole bardic side of things (which is quite a list in its own right). So we had a little A&S display involving a number of interesting items that people had made, including an impressive pair of turnshoes; there was also a lady sitting there explaining about hot-stone brewing to anyone who wanted to listen, because it's rather hard to display that, as such. And, of course, it's not just the displays. There's a fair bit of free time during the day, so you can wander around and find people actively doing things. Including, as it turned out, sprang.

I'd heard of sprang before, but previously I'd rather dismissed it. All I really knew about it was that you could use it to make nets, and since I already know how to make knotted nets I wasn't interested in learning an alternative technique to do effectively the same thing. But at Crown I came across this lady who was doing sprang (on a long branch bent round into a U shape, with a stick lashed across the ends to keep it in position), and she was making a solid fabric; so I was instantly interested, and wanted to learn more.

It turns out that sprang is, when you boil it right down, the art of intertwining threads under tension; so it's a little bit like weaving, but more versatile and quite a lot stretchier. In fact, it seems to combine the best bits of both weaving and knitting, because you have available to you both the efficient thread coverage of weaving and the versatility and stretch of knitting; I don't yet know how quick it is to do, because I haven't been able to try it out myself yet. When I got home (and recovered a little from the exhaustion of the weekend), I went looking online, and discovered that there are quite a lot of books on the subject available, but if you're just going to buy the one, the best recommendation is Techniques of Sprang by Peter Collingwood. All the websites I found were mourning the fact that it was out of print and had been for a very long time, and second-hand copies were ridiculously expensive. (They certainly are; the cheapest second-hand copy I found was £150, and they can go up to about three times that.) But, on further digging, I was delighted to discover that it has very recently come back into print, and you can get it from Waterstone's, or at least you can when they have it in stock, which they don't at the moment; and the new edition, which is a paperback, costs £30. I suspect that the price of second-hand copies is about to go into free fall, but in the meantime I've signed up for an e-mail alert from Waterstone's to let me know when they have the book in stock. Amazon do have it too, but I didn't investigate.

Quite how much of that I shall actually be able to do in the next six months or so (assuming they get the book back in within that period) is anyone's guess; but this course module finishes in May and then I have another gap till October. I plan to spend some of that gap learning FreeSewing code so I can help by coding up designs, but I've been told I should be able to do that pretty quickly because I've done coding before. And, of course, there are also the other 1001 projects awaiting my attention, and we must be realistic (not to mention the fact that I'll probably need to start writing another play once we get to about March). But... there is the fact that I can do sprang on my netting frame when not using it for netting.

We'll just have to see how the next year plays out, won't we?