27 – tablet weaving. It had been an exhausting day and my daughter was out much later than anticipated (a mix-up about the start time of a ball game). It took some effort to force myself to do a little A&S, but a half hour of tablet weaving was incredibly soothing. It was an important reminder of why arts are such a big part of my life.
28 – tablet weaving. I’m getting more efficient at untwisting my warp so I got several inches completed tonight. I also started another batch of hard lemonade. It may not be very historical, but anything brewing counts until I get better at it (my last batch was still fermenting so much that I lose about half the bottle each time I open one – at least they didn’t explode in my basement).
29 – tablet weaving. It feels a little lazy to keep working on the same thing, but my daughter had a ballet performance tonight so I was out to watch her dance. I also read Tomas de Courcy’s latest blog post, where he described his first experiment with making beer from a 16th C recipe. He will be in Ottawa later this week and I’ll get to meet him over dinner – I’m such a geek fangirl!
30 – worked on knitting a pair of split mittens, or three-fingered gloves, in a silk-wool blend for a friend who is going to hike the Appalachian Trail later this summer. There is plenty of evidence for three-fingered gloves, mostly worn by farmers, shepherds or falconers in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. You can find links to many images of them here. It appears that they can be made with pouches for a thumb, forefinger and three fingers, or for a thumb, first two fingers and last two fingers. All of the gloves appear to be made of leather but one picture, of a Landsknechte, offers a tantalizing hint that some were knitted. We know that knitted stockings were being made at this time, as were gloves, mittens and even trunk hose. The image is a wood cut, so those lines could simply be shading rather than knit, however.
Landsknechte, 1525-1530, in the British Museum.
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