Historic Double Knitting

I haven't been blogging very much, but I have been knitting.

After the Michigan Fiber Festival, I decided I needed a double-knitted nametag with my given name on one side and my blog name on the other. You can't see the name on the back, but you can see that this is not the back of the "A" in Alwen.

It's finished except for hiding the ends. The blunt needle I like to use for crochet thread is hiding.

The thing dominating the second picture is a double-knitted hotpad using a chart from Johann Siebmacher's Neues Modelbuch, found here, and available from the Digitale Bibliothek as a 20-megabyte .PDF file.

Neues Modelbuch was printed in Nurmberg in 1597. Does the mind boggle?

It boggles.

I re-charted the stag onto knitting graph paper, which bunched his extra-long body up nicely. But I started him on too small a knitting needle, so his hindquarters are a little too squished. I think I'm at about the right needle size now, a US 5 (3.75 mm). I just discovered I have no size 5 circulars, so I'm using bamboo.

In any case, having all these interests in one project tickles me. Old books (really really old books), history, double knitting.

Neues Modelbuch has twenty-something regular charted patterns, including a great dragon-slaying scene, followed by ? needle lace patterns? I don't know exactly what they are for - maybe reticella?

All I know is that I'm knitting from a chart that is over 400 years old. Cooooool.

And speaking of books, the other activity that took up most of yesterday was adding a bookshelf.

I realized that if I moved the wall track I already had down about 11 inches, I could add a 4th bookshelf behind my studio door.

But only if I took all the books off all three shelves first!

That was work. But now most of the books have shelf space again. When I said I needed more shelf space, my husband said, "Or fewer books." What is this "fewer books"? I'm sure he was speaking another language!