A snowplow cleared snow — tried to — from the driveway of the Eden Prairie, MN, Community Center. Jon and I and the kids went there every day during our visit to Minnesota so we could work off the meals we sampled during auditions for our May rehearsal dinner. Photo by BF Newhall

My vintage, preindustrial Austrian Walkjanker finally got to strut its thermal stuff. Photo by Jon Newhall.

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

My genuine Austrian Walkjanker had hung forlornly at the far end of a plastic garment bag for decades. It had no place to go.

Till my son got engaged to a Minnesota girl.

A classic Walkjanker, just so you know, is a traditional, no-nonsense Austrian winter jacket of real wool. It’s densely knit and, using an ancient, pre-industrial technology known as Walke in German and fulling in English, it is aggressively soaked, heated, beaten and shrunk until it’s two-thirds its original size and the scales on the wool fibers have loosened and hooked on to each other. The finished fabric is as thick and stiff and impenetrable as a slab of berber carpeting.

It’s a garment so old-timey and so Old World that even Google [Read more...]