As of yesterday, I am proud owner of a wool picker and a spindle wheel - both are old tools, and both will need a bit of work to get them into proper workhorse state again.

More things that need work are lying in great stacks here on my desk or are ganging together on my to-do list, leaving me slightly fazed (especially since there's a vacation coming up). Well.

The online shop, at least, is being tested now and it looks quite functional; I only have the links left to do to hook it up to the blog and the webpages, and bar any catastrophies it will go on line this afternoon. (Which is not so perfect timing, getting the online shop on now, with said vacation coming up - which means I will not be able to ship things during the first two weeks of August. I'm sorry for that, but I will not wait with getting it online until I am back, I'm so happy to get this running and out of my hair for a while.)

So... expect some changes to the website and a new link to the shop coming up both there and in the blog sometime today!

I've been really busy and have gotten the shop up to the testing stages. A few more photos, a few more entries, getting rid of the last couple of glitches and a test buy with Paypal, and the shop will be ready to get online. It will be a completely German version only at first, because Holy St. Bureaucracy has determined that to have an English language shop, you also need to have English language terms and conditions in addition to all the item descriptions and stuff, and I haven't gotten around to doing the legalese translation work yet. There's pics of most things, though, so you should be able to browse even if you do not have any German.

I'm really looking forward to getting this finally up and running and off my to-do-list, since it has eaten a lot of my time already. I've learned a huge amount of stuff at the same time, though - including muddling around in the innards of php scripts and tweaking css files, and it's always nice to learn something new.

If you have been waiting to order something from the shop and would be willing to do so during the test run, please contact me - I would be happy to have a test buyer or two during the next days.

For those of you who are waiting for the pallia online shop to finally pop into life, here's a current account of how it stands:

I have finished listing most of the wares - all the often-requested ones are in the shop - and they "only" need their photographs taken to get things going. So there's a photo session in my near future.

I have also made good progress on the legalese part of the thing; the necessary legal texts are all written and linked into the shop surface, and I'm full with knowledge about a few legalese details and how to solve them once the shop really starts rolling. There's one issue left to solve, but that is for a special still very secret extra of the shop... and won't delay the rest of it from going online.

What is going to delay the online release (apart from me being in Leeds next week, for example) is that I still need to do some testing and, before that, a good amount of template-jogging for it to look remotely like it should. While I have done a very little work with .css before (see the new, re-vamped pallia.net website), I am still finding my feet with Joomla!, the basic structure for the shop module that I now have. I did spend my evening yesterday working on baby simple things like adding a second menu and removing unwanted information - things that just eat up a lot of time until one has learned how things roll and what the logic behind the structure is.

This is the curse of doing all things single-handedly: You have to do it yourself. All of it. Yes, there's technically the possibility for me to have somebody else set up the shop and do all the prelim stuff, but since I will have to work with it later on, I have to know stuff about the backend and use of the shop scripts and underlying scripts anyway... so I might as well learn it right now.

That's how I am currently doing with the online shop - just to keep you up to date and from wondering what ever has happened to that project. I'll give you another update once I'm in the testing stage, and I might need some testing help then. If you cannot or do not want to wait anymore, though, please just e-mail or phone me to order things. I can still handle orders - luckily, my shop frontend is not me!

At the moment, the winter garden is feeling quite sheepy - with Rhönschaf sheep fleeces hanging out to air, dry out completely and be sorted (and probably partly combed).

Rhönschaf is a sturdy, rather large sheep with white, longish wool that has a nicely defined, wavy crimp. I have four fleeces; one of them will be put on hold for a workshop on historical wool preparation and spinning, and the rest of them...

Closeup of one of the fleeces

The fleeces are very good quality, with little to very little dirt in them; most of that falls out when combing the fibres. The sheep come from a good, sheep-friendly home and spent most of their time outside. The wool is not felted and very easy to comb, even without prior teasing or beating to loosen up the fibres; there's a pleasant amount of lanolin in it, but not too much.

The wool, when combed in the grease, has a chamois or light eggshell colour; it washes up into a clean white with water and maybe a smidgen of soap.

One lock after rinsing.

If you now feel the strong need to get your hands on some of that wool, you have several possibilities: I will sell you wool prepared into these lovely nests of hand-combed top:

Hand-combed top, in the grease, for spinning worsted yarn.

... which is ideal for worsted yarn - smooth, thin, strong yarns for your weaving or sewing needs.

If you have never worked with hand-combed top before, let me tell you: It will be much more expensive than industrial preparations, because we're talking about serious time investment here* - but it's also vastly different from industrial preparations. The short fibres are removed, there's still all the lanolin in,  there are no felted bits due to washing, and since I started working with those historical preparations, I don't like to touch the modern industrial stuff anymore.


If you prefer to do your prepping yourself, you can either get raw wool from me to use your own equipment. Or come to my stall at Tannenberg, where I will have a nice combing station, and you can use my combs to prepare wool for yourself.

* and you all know how I feel about fair pricing in crafts, right?

As you may have noticed (due to the obvious lack of a blog post declaring my victory over the online shop setup and testing), the webshop is not running yet. Of course.

Have you ever stumbled across those ads promising you to set up your own online store in just a few minutes, free! or for such a low price! It only takes a minute! Go do it now! - have you? Well, let me tell you... it's not that easy, and it will definitely take more than a minute.

If you want to do it properly... much more than a minute.

First of all, there's always the choice whether you want a pre-hosted "rental" shop or whether you want to host and run your own software. Rentals are easier to set up, yes, but they will charge you a monthly amount or severely restrict your product number. A self-hosted shop means you will have to familiarise yourself with the software (once you chose one) and get it to run smoothly and properly. In my case (as you may have guessed), I have opted for self-hosting, and I have actually managed to install both the basic CMS and the shop module after reading up on and fumbling with different softwares for three days.

Then it's down to the shop itself. Design the surface (or at least adapt the template a little and construct a good menu), insert all the products complete with their tax rate, price, description, title - oh, and photo. I haven't taken the photos yet, by the way. If the shop is supposed to come in German and English (at the moment I'm working on the German version), all the text has to be translated as well.

Then there's the payment stuff. Figuring out which payments to use (by the way, what do you prefer? I'd be grateful for a comment!) and getting an idea about how much of the price will go to the payment service as service fee.

Then there's shipping and handling. And that means divining a shipping fee with which the customers will still be able to live, but which will cover a) the cost of the actual shipping fee by the shipping company; b) the cost of packaging materials; c) the time required to drop off the package or the cost of getting it fetched.

And that, my friends, was the easy and straightforward stuff. One thing is still missing: Revering the Holy Saint Bureaucrazius. Because, you see, we're in Germany here... which means that for opening an online shop, you not only need a trade licence (got that), you also need proper, waterproof, non-dissuadable Terms and Conditions. Well, preferrably. And then you need a Privacy Policy declaration. And a declaration of return and withdrawal rights for the customer, because it's a "remote buy" process.

And finally, because the recipient of the package will probably toss the box it came in into the trash, you actually need to pay a fee to cover the recycling costs of the cardboard or plastic or whatever you use for packaging, unless you can prove that the recycling fees for them have already been paid by somebody else. Which is a real bummer if you do not expect to sell a lot of stuff.


All that paperwork-ish work and all the setup work required has thus lead Sabine from the Wollschmiede and myself to wonder if we shouldn't just team up for the online shop and make a common one. Now... we'd only need to figure out how to do that technically, logistically and bureaucratically - because if we do it together, it might even induce some more official paperwork.

Welcome to Germany.

It's always planning time.

And I'm thinking and planning about extending my range of wares a bit more, maybe for the next summer season. Yes, I know it's early, but those things can take a good amount of time.
One of the things that I am thinking about to include is a niddy-noddy (or stick reel) after historical evidence. I have looked at the tools linked on Larsdatter, and I have a few more things in my bookshelf, but I haven't decided on one yet.

I'd like to offer a niddy-noddy that is in keeping with the sources (best would be a completely surviving one) and not too large - the Oseberg find is quite big, and I'd much prefer a smaller one. In addition, I am very happy to hear about your experiences with niddy-noddies or other stick reel variations to make sure that it's not only historically correct as far as possible, but also get the functional details right, and that I choose a model for the reproductions that will also suit a modern buyer.

So... gentle readers, what do you expect from a reeling tool? Do you happen to know of a find of a complete one (except the obvious Oseberg one)? Would you buy a reconstructed medieval niddy-noddy? And how much would you be budgeting for it? Or rather spend money on some other textile tool - like an embroidery frame, or a distaff?

I'm busy as a bee this morning, with all the usual last-minute packing and sorting for a workshop to be done. The printer is churning out my workshop papers right now, there's a goodly sized heap of stuff sitting here waiting to be carried into the car, and I'm all but chomping at the bit to go. And really, really looking forward to getting people to play with gold thread, plant-dyed silks and the best quality linen I've seen in ages. Good materials - good feeling while working.

Since I'll be far from here (why can't Vienna be closer to home?) and will be there some days - a meeting for Textileforum is planned for Monday - there will be no blogging until Wednesday next week. However, if you're in Vienna or close to there, you can stop by on Sunday evening, when there's a little "bazar" starting at about 18:00 in the Tympanum (Eulenspiel) in Prinz-Eugen-Str. 6 in Vienna. You will be able to shop in the book assortment that Gregor from buchportal.at is bringing, as well as browse my collection of odds and ends connected to historical textile techniques.