There's not only new spindle whorls in the shop, there's also new wool - from a rare sheep breed.

The Manx Loaghan sheep is a small, hardy breed that can be found on the Isle of Man. The sheep are a four-horned breed; some of them even have six horns. You can read a bit more about it on the Wikipedia page, with links there for more.

It's mostly kept for its meat, but the wool is also really beautiful: a warm, brown colour that reminds me of honeydew or chestnut honey.



The wool arrived just in time to make it into the shop in time for the March newsletter... which will go out tomorrow in the English version, and has been sent already in the German version. Hooray!

 

One of the things I've learned running my own business: Nobody Tells You Things.

I always thought that information about things changing that would affect a shop or business would be coming to said shops and businesses. Say, for instance, that there's a change in VAT rate - the tax you have to charge for every sale.

If you have a business in Germany, you're listed and registered. At the very least, your home town has your registration as a business. You might also be registered in some other institutions or thingummies, but let's leave that aside - one registration, which is in your town and thus an official state registration, that's enough.

So in theory, since you are registered and the state should sort of have an interest in having you comply with rules and regulations... I'd have expected some letter or email or notice about that change in VAT rules to come to each business. Not necessarily a long explanation or precise instructions, mind. Just something like a heads-up, as in "there'll be a change, please check if that applies to your business and inform yourself".

Just in case you're also in the Fluffy Bunny Wonderland of Imagination and Incredible Optimism, like I was about this once upon a time, let me burst your bubble: This is not so. Nobody official from the town, or from the state, or from the EU, or from any other stately place, ever tells you anything about upcoming rules or changes. Ever. EVER. You have to miraculously find out about things yourself... or fail to do so, and then maybe eventually fail to comply with rules. The most you can hope for then is an admonishment if your failure to comply comes out somehow, and maybe you'll have to pay a fine then, too.

The long-time readers of you will remember the issue with VAT-MOSS (or VAT-MESS) some 5 years back, when VAT rules for digital goods sales across borders were changed, and caught a lot of vendors unaware. Back then, already, it was hinted that similar rules should be introduced for physical goods as well. This is now going to happen; it was planned to start in January 2021, but has been postponed to July because of the pandemic. I accidentally learned about that this morning... which meant I spent half the morning reading up on stuff to find out what I'll have to do come July.

The good news is: looks like I'll have to do exactly... nothing. My business, and thus my export volume, is small enough to fall under the annual export threshold, which, thank goodness, has been set into place right from the start (as opposed to when the digital sales VAT changed). As a side effect, I've also found out that a similar threshold has been put into place for sales of digital goods, which is fantastic as I'll be able to sell digital instructions and knitting patterns from my shop again. (That threshold introduction happened at sometime back between 2015 and now, and I totally missed it.)

So. Phew. A burst of adrenaline, and then good news - that's an okay outcome of this. And I confess, should you now all conspire to order so many things outside of Germany but within the EU to lift me over the threshold, I'd be totally cool to register for the One-Stop-Shop for my taxes and do the fancy changes to the shop system that would be necessary. (If you want to know, it would mean to look up the tax rates for each of the 27 member states and what they apply to, as books and other printed goods are sometimes taxed with a reduced rate and sometimes not at all, then enter those taxes in the shop system accordingly for each country. Then test all that to make sure it functions properly. That is probably a workday, if it's going badly, more.)

After this little intermezzo... I can now tackle my overly long list of things again. Hooray!

I've been doing a bit of evening playing around research stuff recently - a colleague has sent me some images from braided bands attached to relic purses, and we're trying to figure out how these were done.

Loop-braiding remains absolutely and utterly fascinating for me. The ease with which it is possible to do complex braids, with different patterns; the mindboggling efficiency of this technique, compared to braiding with single ends; the possibility to have several braiders work together on one piece, making it wider and more complex - it's just wonderful.

I have also, in the tests and trials for these technique reconstructions, found out again that sometimes the simple approach is the one most likely to be the right one. There was a good amount of pottering around with just five loops for the first puzzle, moving them from one finger to another, until I finally realised that it was just a very simple braid which I have done gazillions of times before... that was a nice d'oh moment. I was smarter for the next one, though!

So here's two pictures of the current puzzle in progress, braided with seven loops:

They show front and back of the band; one of the loops is a bicolour one (grey and dark blue) to make things more clear for me when testing the effect of twisting the loop vs. taking it straight. It also shows how one single loop/element travels through the whole braid.

Can you tell I'm having fun with this?

You probably know that - you're looking at some newsfeed or something on the internet, and suddenly something really cool and exciting pops up. That is just what happened to me, leading to my finding out about the Bayeux Tapestry online.

In a project to make the embroidery more accessible and digitally available, the whole 70 metres have been photographed and then pieced together into a large panorama - which is now freely accessible online. So you can have a look at whatever piece you want to, and even zoom in quite a bit. Here's the museum's info and intro page to the Online Tapestry.

I've spent some time already squinting at the stitches in different parts. Of course, I immediately had an Oliver Twist moment when clicking on the zoom-in button, when I would really have liked to have just one more... but didn't get it. Still, it's wonderful, and probably allows a closer look than going to visit the original piece!

After feeling like it was Friday all day yesterday, I'm certainly happy that it's the end of the week for real today. I'm also quite happy that there has been some taking stock, scheming, and planning for restocking my embroidery silk collection, and adding a few new colours.

The red and yellow are almost gone, the purple has been sold out for a while, and I'm planning to add a proper black as well as another shade of green to complement the blueish green and the apple green already in the range. The light blue is also running low... and now I'm wondering if I have missed something?

And while I'm getting things dyed, maybe also some lace braids? And a bit of the silk ribbon? Hmmm...

(Suggestions and thoughts - as always - are very welcome!)

Here's another picture of embroidery featuring gold - this is the sample (unfinished, of course) where I did the counting of how many threads were lying side to side:



The silk parts are worked in split stitch, the gold is couched down with a red silk thread in the same thickness. As you can see, I was not very good at this kind of stitching when I made the sample - which was quite a few years ago! I did this bit mostly to show how the silk and gold would look together, and how split stitch can be used to cover an area. So it was stitched on a rough charcoal drawing as a template, and the gold patch also only outlined with coal, still faintly visible and not very rounded or symmetrical.

Like most of my sample bits, this has been dragged around and stuffed into baskets and boxes and taken out and fingered and then stuffed back in wherever it came from. I've also cleaned (gently washed) all my samples at least once by now. The gold has developed a little bit of a patina due to all this, but it's still pretty and shiny when light falls on it. So - it does hold up quite well!

I've been asked recently about how much gold thread to calculate for covering a given area - so I've taken out my samples and took a look, and did some maths, and maybe that's interesting for you, too.

The gold thread that I have in the shop is about 0,2 mm in diameter - so if we assume that it will be couched down perfectly, one thread right beside the next, and there's no significant gap between threads, 50 threads next to each other are needed to cover a width of one centimeter. For a stripe one centimeter wide and ten centimeters long, accordingly 5 metres of thread are needed - plus a little more, since it's necessary to have a little bit of thread to pull to the back of the fabric.

When I had my gold embroidery starter kit fairly new, I found a volunteer to test it for me, and these are the results of stitching with 5 m of gold thread:

[caption id="attachment_5805" align="alignnone" width="640"] This is how much ground you can cover with 5 m of gold thread.


That's roughly in the area of the 10 x 1 cm stripe. As you can see in the picture (hopefully - it's really hard to take a good photo of gold embroideries!) there are areas where the threads overlap a little, and areas where there are narrow gaps, and that can even itself out or, if you tend more towards one or the other, it will reduce or extend your covered area slightly.

As to the number of threads lying beside each other, I did some counting on a piece where I had threads couched all in parallel, and I got about 21 to 23 threads on 5 mm - so about 42 to 46 per centimeter. Which is close to the theoretical 50, but not quite there, just like I would have expected.

For calculating thread needs, thus, 50 cm of thread per square centimeter seems to be a good ballpark number - it should give you enough wiggle room to anchor your thread ends and safely cover that area, even if you have a little bit of overlap here or there.