I can be found at Tannenberg this weekend - we will be going there and setting up today, and stay for the full long weekend.

I can be found on the meadow where I will have my little stall with nice goods for sale - plus a very special new something: a wool preparation station, where you can learn how to process wool with combs or cards and use my tools for that. I am also thinking about offering mini-workshops to learn (or improve) historical handspinning techniques, announced via a blackboard at my stall.

If you are in the area, I hope you will drop by!

I have the texts for the English webshop. I basically know how to implement it. I have made a backup of the site for some upgrades necessary for it.

However, I do not have unlimited amounts of time - since we're leaving for Tannenberg tomorrow, and there's a handsome list of things to take care of before that. So I will not promise that the webshop will be up in English today... I'll give it a try, though.

And now for something completely different:
There is a job offer up on H-Soz-U-Kult for a half-time employment - about Living History and its roles and possibilities, among other things. If you are interested, you can find the full job offer here (German language). I think it's a good sign that Living History is now getting its own, proper research!

For all those of you who are still waiting for the shop to come up in English: Work on that is in progress. I'm sorry that you have to wait so long, but I'm doing my best to juggle all the projects and bookings and preparation work and behind-the-scenes stuff that I have to do as well.

I hope to have the English version up and running some time next week, unless unforeseen mishaps and stuff happen. The basics have to be set up to let the shop go bilingual, which requires some updates, but it's mostly the texts and some test runs lacking.

I know that it's totally annoying to wait for something to happen, and that something takes ages and ages due to no discernible reasons at all - and I am really sorry that I have become one of those folks who let others wait and wait. But it's just not always possible to do everything at once, or even in a timely fashion. There's a lot of things that clamour for attention, and that cause shifting priorities again and again, leading to some things being postponed. Since I have experienced this on myself, I have gained a whole new level of appreciation for things happening fast, or soon. And if you have done your own website hacking and script-tuning and text-translating... you will probably know that it can be obnoxiously tricky and very much disinclined to going smoothly.

Well. All this was just supposed to let you know that I have not forgotten you who cannot use the German shop, and that it will be up in English.

The new spindle whorls are now in the shop, and it's possible to order both the discs and the new, hand-thrown ones. For the latter you can just tell me the weight you'd like - they are in a span of c. 10 to c. 47 g - and I will pick out one. (Or, while I still have most of them, you can tell me which one from the photo in yesterday's blog you would like.)

Plus there's something else in the shop. I will be giving a workshop in Erlangen on how to do medieval embroidery on October 29, where we will cover counted work, and October 30, where we will do uncounted embroidery (including a little gold embroidery). Both days can be booked separately via my Onlineshop - there's a category called "Kursangebot" - so you can come to one or the other or, of course, to both. Please be aware that there is only a limited number of places available. If you are coming from further away and need a place to stay, I can supply you with some info to help you find a place to stay as well.

I'd love to see you in October!

I had a wonderful weekend, spent with friends doing nice and weekendy things like playing boardgames (among them a few hilariously bad ones), chatting, eating cake and planning future craft projects (theirs, not mine).

But before that, on Friday evening, I finished off the workweek with some... work. Hot, interesting, adrenaline-flush-making work. I dragged our firebowl and wood and stuff out in the garden, and I started layering in wood and the now bone-dry clay whorls I made. Which makes that procedure some weird cross-over between kilnless firing and pitfiring.



As expected (because you always have them in a kilnless firing procedure), there were losses.


Most of what you see in that box, though, are not whorls, but the remainder of two of the three medieval type piggy banks that I put in as well, even though I knew there was a very, very high probability they would not survive it. (Because their time for drying... let's just say it was not generous. At all. And my mum taught me better.) But I still wanted to know, and I don't know when I'll be doing this again, so...

Losses on the pieces that had dried out properly were not so high. And most of the whorls came out whole and nice and black:


I have a thing for reducing-athmosphere fired pottery. I mean I like pottery colours, especially white and off-white, but I just dig the black stuff. I now have one (non-functional) very very crudely made piggy-bank that has no piggy shape and 57 spindlewhorls to re-stock the online store with. Not all of the thicker whorls are perfectly round, so I might have to test a few and maybe take them out, but overall they do look good. And my fancily decorated disc whorl even survived as well:


That, my friends, was a really nice Friday evening.

In case you are interested in trying medieval embroidery, I will be giving a course in Erlangen on the 29th of October and the 30th of October 2011. The first day will be dedicated to counted-work techniques (canevas), while the second day covers the techniques with free pattern design. The two days are bookable separately in case only one of the two variations is of interest for you, and the course fee includes materials (a piece of linen fabric suitable for the work and the silk (and partly gold) threads). Course language will be German (of course).

You can book both workshops, counted work and pattern embroidery via my new online shop - there's a limited amount of places, so best not wait too long!

As of yesterday, the online shop is finally gone live. You can find it under shop.pallia.net.

It actually feels a little weird to have it all out and about now, since I've been working on that project for so long now. I can now walk up to my to-do-list blackboard, brandish a rag, and wipe off the entry in the long-term project column titled "Laden". Yes, that is how it was called on my list... and then there's only four other items left in that column.

The online shop, taken all together, probably cost me around three work weeks to find, learn, implement, get all the texts written, all the items photographed and their descriptions written up, the templates tweaked and the menus made, and so on and so on. There's a few things not yet in the shop (that will be added in the second half of August), and a few things are currently out of stock, like the spindle whorls, that will also return about that time.

So here's to the new shop - may it do what it is supposed to do without glitches, and may it benefit you and me!