Tomorrow is a bank holiday here - the first of the Easter holidays. We're looking forward to a few nice days off, seeing family, relaxing, and having a generally good time. Hopefully also with decent weather. The forecast did look rather bad until today, but has improved now, so there might be some delicious spring sunshine.

So with this image of a wild bee on our very recently flowering cherry tree, I'm off into the long weekend...

I'll be back on the blog on Tuesday - for a day or two before I'm off again to a fair, followed by a textile workshop in Vienna.

(Even though the pandemic still isn't over, general happenings here in Germany, like in most other countries, happen just as if it were. And, well, I'm still wary of some things, but like so many others, I'm really craving personal meetings and input, and proper human-beings-in-a-group interactions. So... it's the fair, and then the workshop, and there's some more events coming up and I am looking forward to them all.)

Sometimes you just need to have something... fun. So.

Not so very far from where I live, there's a company named BIG, and they make stuff. Among that stuff are small toy vehicles called Bobby Cars. Now, if you're in Germany and a child, you will know these things - they are small, sturdy plastic cars, classically in red, that you sit on and you push with your feet to get them moving.

Some people half-joke, half-conspiracytheorise that the cars are sponsored by manufacturers of children's shoes, because when you give the car a good push and it rolls forward, chances are high that the toebox of the shoe will drag across the ground... and if you do that on asphalt, you have a good chance of ruining your shoes very, very quickly.

I did mention that these little cars are quite sturdy, right? They will easily carry an adult as well, though adult-length legs (even if they are rather short) are hard to use for pushing when you are sitting so low. Which means that usually, you put one knee on the seat and then you can sort of get along. (Why would you do that, you ask? Well. Because it's fun, and it might bring back childhood memories, and why should only toddlers enjoy the Bobby Cars, anyway?)

Speeding along with the too-long legs we grownups have remains a bit uncomfortable. Unless, of course, it's going downhill. Then you can just sit on the thing... and go. 

Apparently there's enough people who find that appealing that there is a number of events for Bobby Car Racing. 

Some of the cars have brakes, but a lot of people just brake with their feet. Like you do on a Bobby Car, usually. (Did I mention this shoe industry thing?)

There's also this guy who got himself a scaled-up version of a Bobby Car: 

Lauresham is always good for some interesting and exciting projects - and their most recent one is "A Year on the Field". This is about crops raised in historical times, and this year's crop is flax (linum usitatissimum). 

For their project, Lauresham is looking for participants who have raised flax in the past years, or are joining in to grow it this year. Especially welcome are farmers, open-air museums, museums, or living history places - but they also look for scientists and crafters who work with linen and are willing to share their knowledge and insights.

You can learn more about the project (and get into contact) here. 

Just in case you are wondering, I won't be joining in. My preferred gardening technique is "demented squirrel", as in "I put things in the ground and then forget about them". Flax is a crop that needs a minimum of care, or so I'm told, and, well... the tomatoes and woad and, this year, fuller's thistles that I am growing are more than enough for me to handle. I will be keeping an eye on the project, though, I find it is a wonderful idea!

I'm nearing the end of the ring-making for the Egtved skirt, and like things often seem to take longer towards the end, this does too. At times it feels like a stunningly boring job. The actual making of the rings is not so bad, but the prepping of the fibre rolls, while not taking a lot of time, somehow feels like it has supernatural mind-numbing powers. Still. There is an end in sight, and I'm already very much looking forward to stringing them all up!

There's also definitely more rings in my skirt than I found in one of the estimates of the number of rings in the original. Now I'm wondering if they were counted? Or if it really was just an estimate? There would be an easy way to find out, as the full skirt image is available, and it's large enough to download and scroll across and count the little buggers.

But somehow, I feel like I'll currently rather spend my time on finishing the rings that I have on my piece...

The sky here today looks weird, all yellow-ish - due to dust from the Sahara in the air. It's also raining, which is a very good thing, as it is already quite dry again, and the soil can use some moisture. (I hope there will be a break later, when we're going to the blood donation place, though - or we'll get wet...) 

I wanted to take a picture of the weird light outside, but it's hard to do so. It looks really dull and yellow from here at the desk, but my tries at capturing the light and mood were in vain. So instead, you're getting a cat pic with an exceptionally interesting facial expression.

(She's just about to yawn... because being a cat is really, really exhausting and tiring. Especially if you spend most of the day napping supervising your humans from different vantage points, such as boxes with packing materials in them, the human's desk itself, and the cat bed next to the desk.)

It's Friday, the week has flown by, and, well, I'm very much looking forward to the weekend - with hopefully some nice weather. So... here's a few random-ish things for you: 

• The Deutsche Umwelthilfe is running a campaign to introduce a general speed limit on German streets. This would have a lot of advantages - more safety for pedestrians and cyclists in cities, less traffic jams, less CO2, less fuel used, less stress when driving because nobody is going to shoot at you with a BMW. You can sign the campaign here.
• It's Women's History Month, and maybe this podcast (with transcript, so you can read if you prefer) about a lesbian woman who owned silk dildos might amuse you. (h/t to wh1350.at, who pointed me to this.)
• If you're looking for something more futuristic, I recommend Escape Pod's "Tony Roomba's Last Day on Earth". 

Otherwise, things are staying busy here - I still have a good amount of Bronze Age Project to finish, namely the cutting and sewing of the garments and the finishing and stringing up of the Egtved skirt rings. (They've been delayed while the website things exploded and while the spinning for the Egtved fabric went on, so the skirt is not completely finished yet. It's getting there, though, and I'm quite pleased with how it is going.)

It's done - the website relaunch has happened, as you're able to tell from how this looks here. A lot of the weekend actually went into tweaking things here and there, and of course there are a few remaining issues, as there always are, but I hope the main things are all working for you. 

One of the issues is videos and images that are there, but are not shown in some views (like on the blog frontpage), and another one is the comment linking from recent comments. I'm working on this, but it might take a bit to actually get it solved, since it has to go via the support for the corresponding part of the site.  

There's also been some re-vamping of the main site content. I'm not all finished there yet with my plans, but the rest of the list will have to wait for a bit, until other work things have been finished. 

I hope you like the new site - do let me know what you think in the comments!