I'm totally stumped for something interesting to blog for you today, and even a little tour of my standard check-in-the-morning websites didn't yield anything.

So... I have no blogging topic, the weather is rather grey and dull today after a few days with quite a bit of sun, my current embroidery-testing piece has not come very far (yet, though I'm getting better), and there's a stack of paperwork ...again... to take care of.

On a more positive note, the tulips in the garden are starting to seriously come out, a few of the crocuses are in bloom, and the first batch of tomato seedlings has broken through the earth - plus I'm sniffling. Seems as if spring is really coming here - slowly, but still.

This weekend was nice and rather productive - for one thing, after ages and ages of not spinning on the wheel, I finally emptied the bobbins and started making some yarn again.

I spin relatively thin, on the wheel as well as on the spindle, and most of the time when I used the spinning wheel in the past few years was either to show (or teach) somebody how to use it, or - with a different contraption stuck where flyer and bobbin usually sit - for spooling thread. And now I'm at least planning to spin two bobbins full of single and then ply them together. Who knows, I might even use that yarn for embroidery or maybe even tablet weaving then.

Second productive thing was figuring out a bit more about embroidery and work procedures - now the only thing left to do is to get proper, authentic-thread-count, good-quality linen.

And the third thing was playing around with old sewing machines. A friend had scored an old sewing machine destined for the landfill and came to our place with it so we could all take a good look at it and see if it would still work. Turned out that one bit had been damaged, which led to this bit being removed and then re-made by our friend - and now I've almost finished finetuning the bit so it will fit in and run smoothly. And that meant that a corner of our apartment looked like this during the weekend:


Still does, by the way. But I've almost finished getting the surplus material out of the way - and then we can find out whether that was time well spent or only time in which fun has been had.

I am still feeling my hand muscles from gripping the wool combs all weekend.

I now know that I am totally spoiled in regard to properly prepared fibre - I was not really having fun with that yucky commercially prepared Merino top. So little fun (and so much yuck), in fact, that I did much prefer to make me a quick, not-very-well-done bit of top on my combs to do demonstration spinning.

Just in case that you (like me) have not yet seen pictures of how silk throwing to get organzine actually works, the process is explained (with pics) on WormSpit's blog.

Oh, and this little blog has gained its 100th "follower" - welcome! This does feel like a real milestone for me.

This blog post is late. Not just because somehow I fell asleep again and woke up much later than I had intended to, but also because I had not the shade of an idea about what to blog today. This lead to me totally having to do this and that little chore before sitting down to blog - and then I found the mail where somebody told me that one of my followers was a porn spammer. And can you believe it took me a good while to figure out how to block that guy? (Turns out that you have to click on "Followers" from the dashboard listing of your blog, and not from the blog itself. Gah.)

So now I'm back to 98 followers, a bit smarter on how to block somebody from the list (though I hope it won't be necessary often) and still out of an idea for something nice to blog about. So instead you get a gratuious photo from out of my private life:



Yes, that's from the wedding.

Oh, and almost one hundred followers - anybody up for a bet on when it will reach three figures?

That was... hilarious.



I just love British humour.

First of all, a "G'sunds Neus" to you! (Literally, that's "Healthy New", the wish for a good and healthy new year.)

I'm back from our traditional New Year getaway with friends, and it was as gloriously relaxing and immensely fun as I had hoped for and expected - lots of good food, staying up late and having very late breakfasts, and all time was garnished with friendly banter and bad puns. And my current pair of socks is almost finished, despite extensive changing of the pattern.

So now it's back to work in a brand-new year, and I'm looking forward to see what it will bring!

It's time... time to realise that the year 2010 is almost over - there's just a few more days in it for us, and most of these will hopefully be taken up by meeting family, catching up, eating, drinking and making merry. And that makes it time to take a little look back on the year gone by...

2010 has been a busy year for me, with lots of things happening - the book got out, I traveled a bit more than the year before, our Textile Forum went to Italy for a wonderful week at the Archeoparc, and I got married to the most patient of all men (a November wedding with outside photography makes you really grateful for a warm room afterwards), and we had a wonderful wedding, celebrating with friends and family. The TGV, my new little market stall tent, sprung into existence in only eight days of crazed frantic sewing, right before the season started with Freienfels, and has since housed (tented?) me well on the markets and fairs of the season. And this little blog successfully got through its second year (with only a very slight decline in post count compared to last year). Conferences and markets brought me into contact with a lot of new people and brought forth both lots of laughter and fun and good, serious discussions.

Looking back on it, it was a really full year, and a really good year as well. It did bring its bad moments, but we made it safely through, and I had plenty of good and glorious times to counter the bad bits. So now that the year is almost over, I'm looking back happily - and I'm looking forward to find out what 2011 will bring and be.

It's time to settle into the festive mood for the last few days of the year, and that means it's also time for me to wish you all wonderful holidays and a good start into 2011 (the first year in this millenium not to wear at least two zeros in its number!) Have a good time, as little stress as possible, and enjoy the quiet and dark bit of the year!

(I am determined to do so too, and take a nice long relaxing break - proper regular just-the-same-as-2010-blogging will resume on January 7th. See you on the flip side!)