Packing for 4 Months in Berlin: 12 Pairs of Socks, 23 Crochet Hooks

Hey, I refuse to apologize for having my priorities straight.  Plus, realistically speaking a crochet hook is much smaller, lighter and sometimes more expensive than a pair of socks, as well as being harder to find in the correct size.  Obviously you should pack the hook and buy the socks overseas.  (Or bring along yarn and make some socks.)

Also, a crochet hook can be much more versatile in solving problems with a temporary residence.  Got no place to hang up your keys in your dorm room?

Schlüsselkäfer the Lucky Chafer Beetle says "Well, why do you think they call it a hook?"

It's a nice dorm room, though, with a pretty view of a quiet street in the Berlin neighborhood of Dahlem, and good for photographing FOs.

Speaking of FOs, of course, I can't resume my blog posting without providing the obligatory photos of a new T-shirt baby quilt, completed shortly before my departure:

It came out pretty well, though the patterned backgrounds are doing it no favors!  I took some other pictures of the construction process, thinking that at some point I'd put together a complete T-shirt baby quilt tutorial, but this isn't that point yet: you really need to document every step.

Another Fine Furry Product

... from the Atelier Perigordien de la Couture Préhistorique.  (This is probably the highest level of activity in the manufacture of customized undressed-hide products that our village "Noyerac" has seen at any time in the last several thousand years.)

Y plays the bansuri or Indian bamboo flute, and he wanted a travel case for it so he could take it on fieldwork trips and play it in the caves.   (Since archaeological cave sites are generally not furnished with TV and internet, the fieldworkers have to amuse themselves somehow, right?)  Here's how it was made (photos courtesy of C).

1) We're not entirely sure whose skin this is: Y thinks it might be a goat or possibly a deer.  In any case, he thought the tail would serve well as a flap for the case, so that's how we laid it out and cut it.

2) The next step was closing the side and end seams, flesh side in, with blanket stitch.  (All the dental floss in the house has been commandeered by the Neanderthal Craft Club; I finally went to the supermarket and got some French dental floss so I could have some to use for its intended purpose on my teeth, instead of having to root around in my sewing bag for it. No, it's not a good idea to re-use a leftover piece from sewing for dental purposes or vice versa, although I won't say that the idea never occurs to me when I consider how much of the stuff we go through.)

3) The last part of my contribution was adding a snugging seam on the folded side to give the case a more symmetrical look as well as a closer fit for the flute.  Y finished it off with a thong and button for the flap.

And finally, continuing my previous practice of posting on the combined topics of skin sewing and baby quilts, here are a couple of photos of a project from last year that C took while we were visiting Frankfurt.

Generally, I like to use a somewhat more subtle form of documentation rather than making a separate solid-color label, but the backing and binding fabrics here are busy enough that you wouldn't really be able to read anything embroidered on them directly.

Tools and Projects

In the intervals of exploring caves and walking in the woods and shopping at the market and practicing  my cuisine du Perigord and even doing some work, I've got a few needlework projects finished (including ones on my Ravelry page and not posted here).

To start with, here are a couple of objects that were made (strictly according to authentic stone-tool techniques) for me, not by me, for use with future projects and just general coolness factor.  One bone needle (which I think will become a yarn needle for joining crocheted project pieces) with deer sinew thread, and one flint point.

And here are some things I sewed out of deerskin for Y, who added the bone buttons and deerskin thongs that make them look really nifty.  My contribution was a lot less historically informed, relying not only on steel needles and dental floss but also on "ficelle alimentaire" or nylon kitchen string (for things like trussing poultry or tying bouquet garni: food safe and resistant to heat and moisture, which makes it a good sewing fiber for skins). 

(1) Ruler case and (2) tool bag, before and after having red ochre applied to the seams:

And in keeping with the same early-human ethos of using scraps of things you've already got to construct useful other things, here's one of my patchwork baby quilts made from T-shirts of more sentimental than sartorial value.  The backing fabric is quite an eye-popper, huh?  The recipient is a tropical-climate chick, but nonetheless her parents may have to keep this thing locked in the car trunk as a sunny-day beach blanket, because it could scream the house down if allowed indoors.  But I still like the flamingos.

Paleolithic Implements

Spending a few months living and working with a colleague (C) and her family in a small-town vacation home in the south of France has basically no downside.  Well, okay, we are a bit isolated from the center of things, and it takes a few hours by train to get to anything resembling a big city.  But we have quite a good supermarket and a semiweekly farmers' market with lots of local specialties, so we get by just fine.  Especially considering that local specialties here in the Perigord-Noir region include pate de foie gras and truffles and cheeses and mushrooms and chestnuts and walnuts and grapes and figs and apples and tomatoes and pretty much any other kind of temperate-zone fruit or vegetable you can think of, many of which we can just pick up off the roadside trees and bushes when we go out for a hike.  With picturesque medieval buildings and breathtaking views over the valley of the Dordogne and fresh French bakery breads and our own little fruit orchard, what's not to love?

Of course, some people might object to the bones, pelts and flints all over the house, but that's not a bug, it's a feature.  The reason we're here in this gorgeous back-of-beyond village in the first place is that it's smack in the center of an unusual region characterized by karst topography resulting from the dissolution of layers of carbonate rock, which is geologist-speak for the fact that the whole area is as riddled with holes as a Swiss cheese.  The immense number of caves made the region a very desirable residence for various populations of early humans (in fact, looking at some of the natural caves and so-called "troglodytes" or caves enhanced with walls and stonework by human inhabitants in historical times, I wonder whether this area might have had a higher population density in the days of some of the cave-dwellers than it does now!). 

Consequently, the place is a magnet for paleoanthropologists who study early humans and their activities, including my colleague's husband Y.  Studying the activities of early humans naturally involves reconstructing the activities of early humans, which can be a bit far removed from the activities of contemporary humans, but often turns out to be surprisingly handy or just plain cool.  There may not be much of a career future for professional flint knappers nowadays, but when you're out for a hike and happen to need a cutting edge for some purpose, it's remarkable how convenient it can be to have someone in the group who's able to spot a good piece of flint by the side of the trail and shear off a flake of it with a hammerstone (and those flint flakes are pretty darn sharp even before they're professionally knapped).

But today's culture of technical specialization means that even many skilled modern flint knappers don't know much about sewing, which is how I got recruited into the Neanderthal Craft Club.   It turns out that raw deerskin is comparatively easy to sew (although it was a bit painful while I was doing my first project, a deerskin thimble, but now that I've got the thimble it's much better).  For lack of the proper tools I've been sewing the skins with a steel crewel needle and waxed dental floss, but I've been promised my own stash of sinew and a bone needle with sharpening flint as soon as Y finds a good piece of sandstone to grind it.  I've also been promised an authentically prehistorically-crafted fossilized mammoth bone crochet hook (size G), which I feel confident will automatically make me the coolest person at the January Meetings Knitting Circle even if somebody is successfully proving the Riemann hypothesis in the same room at the same time.

And in fact, I'm finding out that there are things modern needleworkers can learn from the Neanderthal Craft Club, besides how to make things out of untanned deerskin.  For example, I was losing my temper yesterday evening over the absence of a fabric marking pen or tailor's chalk or any other substance  that would let me make visible but removable and non-damaging marks on knit fabric to trace with chain stitch embroidery (T-shirt baby quilt project, pix may follow).  Even if I knew where to get a  marking pen or tailor's chalk in a French village, I wouldn't know the French word to ask for it.  Tonight,  though, it occurred to me that the red ochre (hydrated iron oxide pigment, found all over the place in the form of dirt) that the early humans used in lots of their paintings seems to show up pretty well on a lot of surfaces.  And although Y tends to leave a trail of the stuff wherever he goes, it generally seems to wash off with little trouble.  So I borrowed a chunk of ochre from Y's toolbox, mixed it with water to form a sludgy liquid the way I've seen Y do it, and applied it to the fabric with a pointed stick to trace my embroidery lines.  What do you know: it works great.

(10 November: Corrected post title.)