Dirt

Anyone who claims (an they are many) that women have some kind of natural disposition for cleaning and keeping tidy have never had teenage daughters.
No, we don't have a natural disposition for it, we have just been told for centuries that it's our job and that we are valued after how clean our homes are.

I have just vacuumed the whole flat and while that may not seem like a lot of work it is if you have arthritis. But the friend who's coming over has a little boy who is allergic, so there wasn't much else to do.

I finished my new smock

My new smock, made after one of the Sture shirts, is finally finished. The actual smock has been finished since the beginning of January but I needed to make ties with fingerloop-braiding from thin linen thread too. But now all that remains is to starch and form the ruffles around neck and wrists, and for that I need to buy myself a curling iron. You see, instead of the box-pleat method found on for example the Elizabethan Costuming Page I just gathered them, just like on the shirts and on the preserved ruffs Janet Arnold examined and wrote about in Waffen und Kostümkunde and then they need some help to be formed into neat figure-eights.

The ruffles are decorated with simple drawn thread work. Modern linens seldom has neat enough selvedges to be used as they are - it's because they don't use a continuous thread but cut the thread at every edge. Since I had mainly worked with hand woven linen the last years I had forgotten about that. Well, since I was going to have to hem the edges anyway I decided to add a little decoration at the same time.

( photo, quite large )