I spent a good part of the weekend working on the instructions (they're coming along) and shooting even more photos of even more steps. More and more ideas on what would be nice to add are creeping in, and it's a little sad to smash them down, but the thing has already grown a lot from my first estimate (around 30 pages) to now (probably 44-48 pages, and hopefully not more).

I couldn't resist to put this in, though:





It's a tiny gold thread ornament, modeled after an archaeological find from a bishop's grave dating to the 12th century, in approximate original size. A small enough extra to squeeze in!


In other news regarding the process, cover design is on its way (I'm getting a little help from a dear friend with this), and I have feedback from several lovely proofreaders already, with more to come soon.

Final word on the pictures of original pieces is still out, though, so I'll keep my fingers crossed that I will get permission and won't have to do without the pictures showing close-ups, either because I'm denied permission or because I'd have to pay too high a fee.

And after the weekend work, I'm now a little tired and worn out, so I'm rather happy that there are some errands to run this afternoon, plus a little more embroidery to work in preparation for the last photographs, and that I might just take it a bit easy for the rest of the day.

It feels like Friday today, and while I'm happy that it actually isn't tomorrow yet (as that gives me a day more to do stuff), I also think that I'd totally be due a Friday today, and a nice weekend.

I've fallen into the gold embroidery instructions thingie, or to put it differently, it has eaten All. The. Time. Product development is two words that sound rather innocuous, but oh, the things that hide behind them. Things you have planned, or are working on and developing, have a tendency to... well, grow. Or suddenly present you with utterly unexpected problems, costing lots of brain power and occasionally some nights of sleep. I've hinted on it on Monday, but here's the long version:

I want the fleur de lis embroidery kit to be as accessible to beginner (gold) embroiderers as it possibly can be, and that includes good, detailed instructions with lots of photos so you will really know what to do, and how it might look. We do have a decent printer, and that's why I can print the one-page or two-page instructions for the spinning kits and for the distaffs at home, but printing multi-page things such as these instructions is an entirely different beast.

So I was planning on writing the instructions and then having them done up by a printer, in some form of a booklet (which is much nicer than individual sheets with their tendency to separate and land in entirely different parts of the room. Or world, if you're like me). So far, so good - but I don't know if the kit will fly or not, so I'd better not plan for insane numbers of it. Especially as it means investing in things that I do not usually have in stock and that are not easily, if at all, saleable on their own. So I've planned to do a single, smallish batch of kits and see how it goes. If it goes very well, I'll do another batch. If it builds a little nest on my shelves never to leave again because it's so nice and comfy where I store my non-sellable ideas... well, I'll be out some money and a lot of time, but I'll live.

Here's the thing, however. The lower your number of copies to be printed, the higher the cost per item. For the low number of embroidery kits that I will make for this first batch, and with the need to provide instructions in two languages (German and English)... well, let's say printing prices for these would be through the roof, and would definitely leave me with a number of copies in the language less sought after.

The solution? Make a single version of the booklet containing both languages. This does lower the printing costs per copy somewhat, but it's still rather expensive.

So at some point last week, towards the end of it if you want to know it all in detail, it occurred to me that I could do a general instructions booklet, suitable for sale separately from the kit, stick that into the kit and provide an additional single sheet with the kit-relevant additional information.

This, I still think, is a very nice solution to the conundrum of print prices and guessing how many copies in each language will be needed. It has a catch, though: General instructions are much more work and need much more writing than specific ones. They also need more pictures, and different ones, including those that need permission to be published.

Thanks to very nice people all around who answered questions and are looking into pictures, though, it looks like I might be able to pull this off in time. I've taken oodles of photos yesterday, stitched, read, looked up terms (textile terminology is always a pain in the neck), stitched more, translated, and done picture processing. The German text is almost done, the English version is halfway there, and I'm about halfway through the piccie issues as well.

One of the many pictures taken yesterday - supplies for gold embroidery and the embrodery kit prototype.

Now I'm hoping the remaining issues will clear up in time - and then there's only (hah!) layout and pre-print checks to be done. Wish me luck.

This will, more (more embroidery) or less (shoes will come tomorrow - they deserve their own spot)
, be the blogpost I intended to do on Friday... so here goes:

After my long Hugo ramblings, I did some more reading, and I'm obviously notthe only one trying to see the kerfuffle as the basis for a new awareness of the Hugo, and maybe dragging it into the Century of the Fruitbat (or whatever we have, currently). Ken Marable has made a blog to collect recommendations for things you consider nomination-worthy for the Hugo, for all categories, and open for everyone - or, as the blog itself puts it, "The Non-Slate: Just Fans Talking about What They Love". Go read his post about the blog and moving forward - I think it's a wonderful idea, and I'll make sure to visit the site.

In embroidery kit news, I've hit a snag - I have planned and put together the materials for a first batch of embroidery kits, and intended to make nice, colourfully illustrated instructions to show precisely what to do and how to do it. However, the kit will come at a price, as there's a lot of work involved in preparing the materials, and there's quite a bit of material cost as well. Making an appropriately small print run for a batch of instruction booklets would sort of still be possible, but rather in-efficient, and would add unneccessary costs. So after figuring this out, I'm now planning to make a general how-to booklet with instructions that will be part of the kit or available separately, plus an extra sheet of kit-specific information.

Work in progress. I've come a lot further since, though!

Unfortunately, the kit was on a deadline before, as I want to get it ready for the Nadelkunst. With the original plan, that deadline was sort of not too bad... but with the change of plans, the writing project has now grown considerably. Which means I'm now trying to get it all put together in time. Frantic typing, emailing, picture searching and embroidering ensues. Wish me luck. (Also, I am having lots of coffee and chocolate. Always helps.)

It's already September - I have a hard time believing that. But I'd better, since my calendar is adamant about this.

Which means there are barely four weeks left to prepare the things for the Nadelkunst in Weikersheim... I have to make new spindle whorls (which need enough time to dry, and then they have to be fired), and I also have to sit down to do some embroidery today. The pictures for the instructions are all done, apart from the title picture with the finished fleur-de-lis embroidery... so it's high time to finish that off.

Here's the slightly-advanced state of the piece at the moment:






So - on today's agenda: finish at least one side of the thing, and get some of the missing writing for the instructions done. Time flies like an arrow (fruit flies like a banana)...

(There's also two other things in the works for the Nadelkunst, both of them involving natural dyes, and one of them involving knitting. No pics yet, though... we're still working on it!)

I've been taking gazillions of photos recently, using my new softbox and lighting equipment. Most of the photos taken will be deleted again - what I'm trying to capture is not always cooperative, and thus I take five or ten pictures, and then five or ten from another angle, and then another five or ten for one that I will actually need.

Are you wondering what I'm shooting at?

It's this:








Pictures for the instructions for the fleur-de-lis embroidery kit.
Goldwork is hard to photograph, because you need enough light, but not too much light so things are clear to see and yet the gold does not dazzle. Since the details I want to show are fairly small, that means a rather shallow depth of field even with good light - which explains the blurry fingers.

I'm confident that I should have all the photos needed to explain the ins and outs of the process now, though - I only need to sort through them, trim the pictures I will use, and finish writing the instructions in both German and English. And, of course, finish working this final prototype and put together the actual kits. They should be finished in time for the fair in Weikersheim!

Finally, the spinning instructions that I wrote a while ago have been proof-read and are available in English as well as in German. Putting them into the shop and blogging about it has been delayed a bit by the summer break, but now, finally, they are here.



They are either a part of the starter kit handspindle if you order it via the English version of the website (I then get all orders in English, too, so I know to put in the right printed version), or you can get them as a pdf file directly from my shop, for free! (You will need to register if you don't have an account yet.)

There should be a download link in the pdf "invoice" that is attached to your order email (the link is not directly in the email, so please make sure to open the pdf and look for the link there).

Yesterday, I posted the picture of the finished fleur-de-lis embroidery on Facebook - and promptly got a reply that the form of the fleur is not corresponding to the typical medieval form.

The side petals on the historic versions are much wider, much more curved, and they go out more to the sides. Does that explanation even make sense? Here, let me show you:

British Library Royal 16 F II, f. 137, detail. Netherlands, around 1500.

This should make it pretty clear what the differences are. If you search the British Library database for fleur de lis, you'll get some more hits, some of them shapes that are very far from what a modern eye would expect.

So why have I opted for something so different? Part of the differences are due to the medium. The motif is much clearer if you have gaps inbetween the individual petals, as my first tries did show - so running the individual parts together as in the 1500s version would not work just as well. Partly the decision is also due to the shape of the frame - a taller, more slender version fits better with the oval frame shape than the more squat version.

Finally, my personal experience is that motifs with the pronounced changes between slender and fat (as in the leaves of the medieval version) are harder to embroider for a beginner than shapes with only gentle changes in thickness.

The whole embroidery kit is a hybrid of medieval and modern things. Gold thread and silk thread? Medieval. Basic technique? Medieval. However, a medieval gold embroidery on linen fabric would usually cover all the ground fabric, not only a little bit of it - so having the ground fabric dyed blue with indigo, and only embroidering the lily, is a compromise as well (because embroidering everything with blue silk... that's lots of work, and quite a bit of material too).

The frame itself, with its rubber rim and plastic inner rim, and its oval shape, and the hanger so it can serve as a picture frame is very, very modern as well. So are the needles that I will supply with the kit.

It's a hybrid, a compromise to offer a chance to do gold embroidery without investing insane amounts of time and money in trying it. A compromise between appealing to today's embroiderers and offering the experience of working with historically correct materials. A compromise that results in a piece with a lot of decorative value without the need to mount it into a proper frame first.

I've put a lot of thought into this, and I hope that it will turn out to be a good compromise. Let me know what you think, please?