The month of May will be full of different appointments for me, including one for a surgical procedure, which also means that I will unfortunately not be able to go to the Nadelwelt in Karlsruhe. Because I'll be off to NESAT following that, I'm putting the shop on hold for a while, and orders coming in will be sent off after May 28, when I will be back.

I'll also be having a blog break during that time, so I can take all the time necessary for recovering and don't need to squeeze in blogging between coming back home and going off to NESAT. 

So I will leave you with this image of my test weave for the fabric reconstruction:

The lower part is the one that's the best fit to what we are going for. The little test piece was done weaver-tensioned, and my selvedges are still, well, let's phrase it kindly and say they are offering a lot of room for improvement. But it's doing okay for what it was intended for, which is answering the questions "how will it look, approximately" and "will we get into the right range of thread density" and "does the amount of twist in the threads look about right". 

And then, just like with knitting swatches... you go for the big thing, and you hope. Which is what will happen while I'm off the grid, or a bit afterwards, depending on how things go, timing-wise. Keep your fingers crossed all goes well!

And now for something completely different... I found this very amusing, and I hope you do, too! 

Somehow this post didn't get sent off properly yesterday - so you're getting the black morel photo today: 

These are, apparently, not very common anymore. They are also edible - though I think I prefer looking at them if they are rare, instead of eating them. (Especially not eating them rare.)

These mushrooms are also the first thing that had the rating "selten" (rare, probably, in the English version) in the ObsIdentify app. That is a recent discovery the Most Patient of All Husbands made - it's an app where you can upload images of (wild) plants and animals, and it will compare them to a database and tell you what it is, and with what probability. Observations that are made with surety can then be uploaded. Your uploads help with monitoring where what species are found, and thus for tracking biodiversity. The app will even recognise caterpillars, so it's a really cool help in finding out what critter you have somewhere.

You can find out more about the app here on their website, or search for Obsidentify in your app store thingie of choice. 

Weekend is coming, and I'm very much looking forward to it - there's good weather predicted for tomorrow, so we might go for a bit of a bike ride to make use of that. There would also be garden stuff to take care of, but, well... we'll see.

Otherwise, spinning is progressing. I'm also trying to get all kinds of things sorted out and all ducks in a row as far as possible before going mostly off-line and on a break for all of May, for a number of appointments and things.

Meanwhile, the Little Cat is already channeling the weekend vibes:

That is relaxation proficiency!  

Just in case you're looking for an excuse to look at a soothing murky green screen... you are helping fish?

There's a boat lock in Utrecht that is closed during spring - but that is the time of year that fish migrate upstream for spawning. The city has found a rather ingenious solution: The Fish Doorbell. You can watch the livestream from a camera in front of the lock, and when you see a fish, you can ring the doorbell for the fish. Once enough fish are waiting, the lock is opened and they can travel on.

You can find the doorbell here (even with an English version for the site). It's just the right thing to watch when you need to look at more or less nothing for a bit. And if you're lucky, you might see a fish!

Maps are nice, and very helpful, and an interesting thing. They are also quite misleading when it comes to the size of countries - because with the "normal" map projection, the one we're all most used to because it's the most common, the sizes change in regard to the distance to the equator.

So in case you've ever wondered how large Greenland or Finland really are compared to Italy... here you can find out: thetruesize.com allows you to drag and drop individual countries on top of other ones. Makes for some really interesting shrinkage if you drag Greenland into Africa!

A while ago, some reels turned up in my Instagram feed, and thus I stumbled over Elle Cordova. She's doing stuff about a variety of things, and one of them is... fonts. I hope you enjoy this one as much as I did: