If only I had an atelier full of helpers...

What I actually did yesterday:  I said that I was thinking of knitting something furry, but I ran out of time.  I got as far as picking out needles for the next project.

I have a six hour road trip ahead of me today.  I'm going to finish reworking the cap sleeves on the alpaca wool vest.  There should be time to knit some experiments also.

I've got a plan to make crochet hooks work like a set of circular knitting needles.  If it works, it will make it easy to knit that cowl from Vogue - the one with the impossible texture in Condo Knitting.

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Textile daydreams

Some things I'd like to make today:

---an Argyle vest for my guy.  I'd make a really crazy one as a joke ("Teach like your hair is on fire!")
And then I'd give him a seriously good-looking vest for a Christmas present.

--a Not-Sparkly Sweater for the girl who does not wear princess dresses.  It would be a quick knit in bulky yarn the colors of a swimming pool.  I'd add polka dots to the sleeves and wavy stripes to the body.  This sweater would make you want to jump up and dance.

--more embroidered squares for the Swamp Thing Afghan.  I discovered that I can weave in the ends of my knitting in Loud Contrasting Colors.  Really terrible colors can mix together in exciting new ways.  I added some extra ends just so I could sew them in.  It looks full of thunderbolts.

--knitted explorations, gauge squares in condo knitting, in kniting wool alternated with fish line, and in intarsia using variegated yarn

--I feel like making something furry out of yarn.  Maybe I'll go find that bag of fun fur.  I need to find out if it works to use two or three fur strands at once.  Plus I want to make wool fur using hairpin lace.

I ought to be super busy, but I have too many choices.  Can't decide what to do.  I wish I had completed the wolf costume in time for Halloween.  It's not needed now, but it's still on my mind.
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List of textiles I'd like to teach

Free one-on-one lessons:  tatting, nalbinding, finger loop braiding, medieval spinning, Bilum stitch nalbinding, dogbane cordage, twined weaving without a loom


Explore with me (I'm still learning these) textiles:  Omani stitch nalbinding, Russian nalbinding (loops round thumb and first fingers), Turkish wire weaving/ Hasir Belezik, sprang, takadai weaving + Canadian ceinture fleishe, oya lace for scarves, taaniko patterns + Maori twined weaving, Argyle knitting in variegated yarns, Kente weaving: adding foot peddles to a simple loom, adapting New Guinea bilum color patterns to tapestry crochet, China Bolios video, Karakalpak weaving for trimming fabrics, ply splitting, mad weave/tri-axial basket making

If I would only get busy, there's plenty to explore...

Searching for sieidi stones

I think I found another one:  http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aibell
This Wikipedia page describes a place in Ireland that I think was used just as the sieidi stones.

I am hunting for places that would have had magic in ancient times.  It's not really the magic that I'm after-  I just want to find out what life was like in the 200,000 years before written history.

So here's my list of places I've found (and there should be many more.)
--Serre da Estrela, Portugal

--Montserrat, Catalonia, Spain

--Craig Liath, Kilaloe, Munster, Ireland

Here's the link to the acoustic archaeology research about sieidi stones:
http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/EXARC/14-kierikki-iks

Looking for sieidi stone locations

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aibell
Craig Liath, Killaloe, Munster, Ireland
New sieidi stone location?

Seeing things that aren't there

http://mbabramgalleries.com/collections/south-east-other-asia/products/shaman-s-apron-nepal

This is from Nepal?

But it looks like what the Kukeri wear in Sardinia.

Here are a bunch more from all over Europe:

Wilder Mann article

There's a great deal of information about Kukeri/Wild Men in the book, The Dancing Goddesses by Elizabeth Wayland Barber.  I notice that Barber, my new favorite author, is not a lumper.  Ok, that means she does not lump together related ideas, instead she carefully splits all the related information into separate little parcels.  She writes about different countries where they had the tradition of Wild Men, and Carnival, but she does not lump them all together.  She writes about differences in these traditions that might have to do with how far north people lived, or how the traditions interacted with Christianity.

So I am about to lump together things that may not belong together.  It would really be amazing if they do belong together.  The Riverside Project links together ideas from a culture in Madagascar with Stonehenge...  I know, they are not saying that the people of Madagascar walked all the way north to Stonehenge.  Nor that the builders of Stonehenge might have walked all the way south to Madagascar.  But I'm starting to wonder if they did walk all that way...?

Here's what I have to lump together:  the incredibly ancient archaeological site of Gobekli Tepe and the monks in Nepal.  I found a picture of Buddhist monks feeding vultures, possibly to keep the birds around as part of traditional funeral rituals.  I visited Gobekli Tepe as a tourist two years ago, and I kept wondering, 'Why are there vultures carved in the stones?'  Could it be that the Gobekli Tepe people used sky burial for their dead?  I am not very interested in funerals- how awful!  But wouldn't it be amazing to find the same culture spread from Turkey to Nepal, or even further, say Sardinia to Nepal?

We know about a time in the Middle Ages when most people did not ever travel further than the edge of their own village, right?  What if it was something like today: some people stay home and some go explore the ends of the earth.  And what if there might have been a lot more traveling about in the time of Stonehenge or Gobekli Tepe?  What if you could lump together all the traces of the most ancient humans?  Maybe there was a logic that made unrelated groups of people develop similar traditions.  But I think these traditions are linked- European shamen were doing things quite similar to Himalayan shamen.  I think in all the time that modern humans have been on Earth, there has been plenty of time to meet the neighbors even if they lived thousands of miles away, and plenty of time to do an enormous amount of stone carving by hand.  Whatever were they doing for the first 200,000 years?

Magical Portugal?

I think I found something exciting.  But I can't be sure -I don't speak Portuguese.  I found a place in Portugal that appears to be loaded with Neolithic monuments and pre-Christian traditions.  In other words, I think I found a sacred landscape comparable to Stonehenge:  the Serre da Estrela National Park in Portugal.

I am interested in pagans, but I am not actually one of them.  For the moment, I'm an unbeliever.  So don't run off shouting about this --I have no proof yet.  Anyway, it's not a discovery if the Portuguese people have always known about it.

I spotted an odd photo on Pinterest.com, a picture of a large brass band making music among giant boulders at Serre da Estrela.  Why would a group named, Philharmonic Band, hike way up into the mountains carrying their tubas and trombones?  Are they following a tradition from the distant past?

Then there were three photos of stones carved to look like human faces.  These could be fake, or just unrelated, but it made me want to see more of this national park.  I read that there are many megaliths near Serre da Estrela (the name translates to Star Mountain.)

The next photo was exciting: dawn at a mountain top lake labeled, Magic Pitcher, in Portuguese.  Has anyone checked the sound quality there?  It looks like the kind of place that would be perfect for a shaman to create echoing sounds.  It has stone cliff walls that hold the lake in a bowl shape.  I had recently heard about research in Norway- they studied the sounds you could make at ancient shrines belonging to the Sami people.  What if Serre da Estrela was a superb place for a shaman from around the year 5000 BCE?

I found cultural links to Celtic traditions all over northern Portugal.  And I don't know if this supports my idea, but I found lots of traces of pre-Christian culture in Portugal.  For example, Portugal has some very strange carnival traditions.  There are masked mummers, something like the Morris Dancers in England.  I would not have noticed any of this without the book, The Dancing Goddesses, by Elizabeth Wayland Barber (pub. by Norton, NY, 2013.)

Then I found a guy who did a PhD on the subject of the megaliths around Serre da Estrela.  He says that all the Neolithic monuments in that area are lined up so that you can watch a bright star named Aldebaran move in relation to Star Mountain.  Seems to me that the shepards of ancient times would have stayed awake nights to keep their animals safe.  The PhD paper explains how to use the bright star as a calendar, so they could tell when it was time to move their animals to the summer pastures up in the mountains.  Only, I can't understand why you'd need a megalithic monument for that?  Couldn't you just wait until the grass turned green, and then take your hundreds of animals up into the hills?

I figure the people of around 5000 BCE would have been rich.  They would have been plump from having unlimited amounts of food.  Maybe their wealth would have looked a lot like that of the Native Americans of Alaska.  They had plenty of extra time for feasting and creating stone monuments.  Anyway, the Riverside Project (a recent research project at Stonehenge) is on my mind.

According to the Riverside Project, the stone houses are for the dead, for your ancestors.  So, could it be that there were wood houses situated near the megaliths in the valley near Serre da Estrella?  And could archaeologists find them?

That's not all- there is an enormous shrine to the Virgin Mary carved into the side of the mountain.  Pinterest has a picture labeled, Our Lady of the Stars.  If that doesn't have a link to ancient pagan beliefs, then I'll eat my hat.  I think it's really interesting to look at the different ways that Christianity absorbed the pre-existing religions.