I think I've been asked recently whether I knew boredom... and the answer is, of course, a resounding "no". Whenever I think I'm sort of getting on top of things that have to be done, new stuff pops up.

Like small shenanigans in the webshop that need to be taken care of, and hunting down suitable pictures for some new advertising material. I've also been busy in getting some more information onto the Textile Forum website (the dye penetration summary is now a bit longer, and a bit more detailed), with still more to come. Kickstarter planning is also going on in the background. So... busy around here, even if there's not much physical stuff to show for this at the end of the day.

On the list for today: Taking some more photos for the shop, finishing the pallia Newsletter, and hopefully find time for some more Textile Forum work, too. There's still a good stack of experiment data that could use some analysis and research. (I keep being amazed by how much work in the aftermath an experiment will generate. You'd think that after all the careful planning and preliminary reserach, and then the actual running of the experiment, that would be most of the work... but no, most of the actual work is yet to come. Sigh. One day, I will actually be smart enough to factor that in better.)

It's busy bustling around here, both with my fingers on the keyboard, with more ETF website work (almost done far enough to launch, though!) and other kinds of bustling. Kinds that have resulted in something like a wool explosion in the wintergarden... all due to new things planned for the shop.

I've been offering both washed, uncombed wool and carded/combed for a good while now, and there's a very, very obvious preference in regards to what gets bought more. Guess what? Of course - the ready-to-spin, prepared fibre. And I totally get this - while combing wool is a fascinating process and allows for extremely fine control of what goes in and what does not, it is a good chunk of work that requires both time and appropriate tools. So in most cases, I would also prefer to take readily prepped fibres and sit down and spin, skipping the prep step.

I have now found a small fibre mill that is willing to process a chunk of fibres I send them, so I'm planning on having Valais Blacknose wool combed up into a band, good for spinning without having to work on it first. That's exciting, and that also means I have to sort and pack the wool to send it to the mill. Hence: Wool Explosion as I sort my way through the fleeces I have here from the last shearings.

It's all very exciting - partly because it is very hard to estimate how much of a price I will have to ask for that wool in the end; that depends on how much of a weight loss there is through combing, and that is hard to impossible to guess. So I'm hoping I will end up with a sensible number to put onto that price tag - and that it will all turn out nicely!

Here, stuff is progressing. Coffee is being drunk.
I'm still hard at work on the Forum webpages, getting them into a nicer order and stuff on them easier to access. Putting more stuff in there, too - which means I might need to up my contract with my provider a notch, to have more space for the stuff.

I'm also trying to finalise a little survey about the Forum to see where we might be heading. I love the format of having one full week, and the combination of a lecture and some practical part, but it might pose too much of an initial hurdle to those not already straddling the line between theoretical or academic work and crafts practice and experience. I also have the suspicion that a full week is too long for quite a few people - so Sabine and I have talked it over, and Michael and I have, and we might do a bit of a change, this year or next, depending on how it goes.

The survey is not quite finished yet, but I hope to get it done and out and tested later today, and then it will be time for a newsletter and spreading it out, hopefully gaining a lot of insights. Ideally, I'll also get the site done and polished before it goes out, but I think I might not, and I'd rather have more time for the survey than less - so it all depends on how productive I'll be today. And possibly early tomorrow. So... I should get back on it, right?

It's the season of people looking for ideas - things to give to others, things to wish for. So in case you're one of the many, many folks on search of good ideas, here are three things - all of them related to tablet weaving, and all of them guaranteed not to catch dust:

If you're interested in tablet weaving, especially in the brocaded kind, you have probably heard about the book "Ecclesiastical Pomp and Aristocratic Circumstance". It's a nice collection of tablet-woven bands, even though there's not a lot of images of the original pieces in the book. It appears that this has gone out of print, but it's now available as a pdf download from Nancy Spies' Etsy shop. At 12 USD, it's also quite affordable!

The same thing has happened to Anna Neuper's Modelbuch, also originally published as a paper book, also out of print and now available as pdf. In this case, you have to invest 5 USD.

Louise Ström has written a booklet about how to do tablet-woven patterns without a pattern draft. The motifs are fairly traditional Scandinavian ones, where you have variations in each pattern section, resulting in a band with non-repeating (though similar) motifs. This, too, is available as a pdf download via Etsy and will cost you about 18 USD.

Disclaimer: I do own the paper version of Pomp & Circumstance, but know neither of the two other books. They have ended up on my list, though...

Oh, and by the way - it's Blogiversary today! Nine years of blogging!

The 2017 issue of the Archaeological Textiles Review is out, and as usual, it contains a number of interesting articles. You can read the table of contents here, and you can order it via the webshop, where you buy a membership for the Friends of ATR and get sent the print copy of the Review.

In case you haven't stumbled across them yet, the back issues (starting with issue 57 from 2015) can be downloaded for free from the ATR website. Which is a totally great thing!

I'm back at the work desk, trying to battle my way through stacks of paper that needs to be taken care of, as well as stacks of email that has to be dealt with. It's amazing how many mails can run up in just a few days of not-really-in-the-office time!

The symposium last weekend, by the way, was an utterly wonderful thing - not only did I get to meet a lot of lovely people again that I meet way, way too rarely, there were also a number of new faces to finally connect with the names I've been reading here and there, over and over again during the last years.

Add to this a number of really interesting and well-presented papers, a concert featuring medieval music in the beautiful Marienkirche with its astounding acoustics (and I still have a selection of earworms from that), a wine tasting with wines made from old grape varieties (including the wine that saved Oswald von Wolkenstein's life as he held on to the barrel when shipwrecked, and a wine that has been processed following exactly the instructions in the Capitulare de Villis, down to reconstructed tools), common meals both in the conference place as well as in the evening, and you have a wonderful event that I would call wildly successful - and I do hope that it will not have been the only or last one of its kind!

Now, though, the season of events and conferences is finally over for me, and there's hope of things becoming a little calmer again. Which includes a chance of actually getting back on top of the things stacked here, both physically and virtually...

I'm back home, there's an insane to-do list (which includes my fair homework, of course and as always after a fair), and here's pics, as requested, to prove it did happen...


The beautiful baroque garden and, in the background, the Orangerie. The garden was incredibly and delightfully colourful, with lots and lots of different flowers in bloom, and we had good, sunny weather almost all of the time - so the visitors were really in for a treat.

There were, of course, also a few water basins with fountains. It was a proper baroque garden, after all.


I was in the left-hand wing of the Orangerie, almost exactly opposite the door - a lovely spot to stand.


To make things even nicer, I had wonderful stall neighbours: Gunhild Fette, who teaches hand-quilting, and Monika, who runs a yarn shop in Ochsenfurt. Monika had also brought her friend who demonstrated tablet-weaving and nalebinding, much to my joy and delight, as I could send everyone interested in the techniques over to her instead of making do with my small demo objects behind the stall counter.

And this was my view from my workplace:


Not so much to be seen from the garden, but the windows were gorgeous by themselves - and the autumn colours on the hillside were a treat to look at, too.

So it was a really nice three days to spend (though, as fairs tend to be, fairly exhausting). Now it's back to the old list of things to do, taking care of shop orders and emails and getting back on track, quickly, to be finished with the preparation for the next few events and other things coming up. Next on the list: the reconstruction project for the Bernuthsfeld bog body tunic...