Top-ology

Right now I'm in the middle of making my first Verdun woven T-shirt. There will be more to come; it's actually a nice pattern now I've tweaked it to suit. As I mentioned previously, it is American, and it is all in inches, which

Knowing your limitations

I'll start by saying I'm not an all-out AI enthusiast. I have programmed it on a limited scale, and I do find it fascinating; nonetheless I also have some serious concerns about it, and anywhere AI is being used I need to know that those concerns

Summer break

I'm not one for going on holiday anywhere, but I'm giving myself the rest of this week off (and possibly also the following Monday). I hadn't been planning to do so, but there are two main reasons. One is that I had a stoma

Tools of the trade

You've seen my regular netting needles, and these are not they. My regular netting needles are made of steel, they're very narrow, and they carry a lot of string (or thread, depending on the size). These? They're bamboo, they came from eBay, and their

Middle-Aged spreads

Ah, mediaeval recipes. They're eternally fascinating (I saw one recently which began "Take a sausage and kerf hym in gobettes" - what's not to like there?), but I can't help feeling that they were more mnemonics than actual recipes. The actual recipes,

Freestyle swimming

I love sewing. And I love open-source. So when I found out that someone had actually put the two together, I just had to go and investigate; and what I found was quite out of this world. Freesewing.eu is not like any other pattern site you've ever

Discord and harmony

Just over eighteen months ago, a young woman died in hospital in Katowice in Poland. She was no stranger to that hospital, having been admitted many times during her short life. I don't know her exact age, but she was certainly only in her early twenties. Her death,

Beyond the pale

I'm not an albino. I'm just extremely melanin-deficient, to the point where every time I go to hospital someone, at some point, asks me in concerned tones if I'm always that pale. And the answer is: yes. Yes, I am. I know what I&

Making (your own) history

I have the first skirt which is suitable for mediaeval garb; at that point - in fact, for the entire Middle Ages and earlier periods of European history - you had a choice of linen or wool, and if you were feeling really fancy you could mix them, and so

Potted pirates

We all make mistakes, and drama groups are no exception to that rule, especially not very new and highly enthusiastic ones. So I'm not blaming any of them for what I'm about to relate, but... it was still kind of frustrating. The first thing I asked

Infinite variety

So, as I think I mentioned the other day, I am now the proud owner of a galvanised bucket; and once you have one of those, the world of dyes is your oyster. And, while dyeing fabric is always a fun thing to do, I realised that I now also

For peat's sake

Given the time and place in which I had chosen to set my persona, I rapidly came to realise something very important; and that was that she was Definitely Not A Saxon. She probably doesn't have anything against individual Saxons, as long as they're civilised and

An offer to dye for

Viscose/linen blends, as it turns out, are usually quite expensive. Unless you want white. Minerva has some white deadstock viscose/linen going at about half the price of the colours, and over the weekend they had a sale on white fabric, so it was still further reduced; and this

The making of Síona

It was this picture that did it. I decided I was going for Ancient British. See those two young women in the top half of the picture, just right of the centre? They're both wearing long dresses with a short(ish) tunic over the top. And I thought.

Creative anachronism

Quite a long time ago now, I was in the SCA, which stands for the Society for Creative Anachronism. The tagline on the website of the local chapter is "Learn history by living it!", and that is pretty much what it's all about; the Society isn&

The play's the thing

I have a first draft. It's not complete - I still need to write most of the song lyrics - but I have all the dialogue, barring the odd tweaks. The organiser e-mailed me on Tuesday, I think it was, and asked if I'd like a

Net deficit

It turns out there's more than one reason I need to make some nets in an unexpected hurry. There is the fact that we need them for props, obviously; if you're going to set a play at sea, you do need nets to give the general

Setting the scene

We had a meeting about the script on Thursday night, and it was... quite a long way off the wall. Which is what you want when you're going for comedy. There were only five of us there, and only four at any given time, because one person had

Chromatic fantasy and fugue

This applies to a lot of other creative crafts as well as beading; so if beading isn't quite your thing, you may still find something here that resonates. I'm going to talk about colours. Sometimes, colours are really easy, and there is a superb example in

Sew simple

Recently I was asked to fill in a brief survey about what my sewing level was; and I was actually stymied. I had no idea what to put. So I didn't fill it in at all; but, having been musing on this a while, I realise the correct

Oh, no, it isn't!

I'm not writing a pantomime. Let's just make that 100% clear. Thing is, we had a little misunderstanding in the drama group. I'm delighted to say there wasn't so much as a hint of unpleasantness about it; it was just one of

The heat is on

I was rather hoping to get a photo from the play itself, and I know there were plenty taken; but none of them has circulated back to me yet. I live in hope. So here's a rehearsal photo, so that you can see what I mean about some

Geometric progression

So I made that accidental olive green skirt, and, given that the hot weather looks like persisting for a while, a few more summer skirts seemed like a good idea. I bought some more fabric (reduced, naturally), and I'm now having at it in odd moments. Deciding that,

Midsummer madness

Noel Coward was a wonderful lyricist, but he hadn't quite caught on to inclusive language. So when he wrote that "mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun", he probably didn't intend to exclude Englishwomen or, for that matter, English children... and