Having a webshop means sending stuff away - in my case to all corners of the world. (To a lot of them, at least.) Which can mean a multitude of different tariffs depending on the size, weight, and place the package has to go to.

Which means that sticking the appropriate stamps onto a package... can take a bit of research beforehand. I ship most things using the German Post (which is now called either Post or DHL), and for any address questions I go and consult Frank's Compulsive Guide to Postal Addresses (and thank you so, so much for that, Frank!).

In the end, packing things up, putting the address and appropriate postage on a package are a task that needs concentration (so you get it all right) but is still sort of dull. Which means anything that makes it more fun is a nice thing, and much appreciated.

And my, have I been having fun recently... because the German Post brought out an extra-special fancy stamp featuring Asterix this year, and I've bought a small stack of them. So if you ordered something at my shop, and the postage I have to stick onto it falls into the right tier, your package might look something like this:



These stamps always make me smile, and I'm really happy that I get to use them on actual mail that goes out to hopefully make other people smile as well - even if it's just for a few minutes before tossing the package into the paper recycling. (Though if you know a stamp collector, they might appreciate it, too...)

Another year is over - it really flew by... and today, my calendar reminded me, gently, that it is blogiversary day. I started this blog in December 2008, when I was starting to work freelance full-time, so it is turning seven today... which means that I have actually been blogging for about a fifth of my life.

It was a wild and crazy year, 2015, with 205 blog posts up till today; with not only one, but two books published (the Beast, which I did together with Gillian, and Working Medieval Gold Embroidery, which I did on my own). I went to a few yarn fairs or other fairs, there was a Textile Forum again, and there also was the Great Relaunch of the blog and website.

I had no huge museum project to do this year, but there were a number of presentations, demonstrations and workshop, and plenty of work went into development of a few new things for the shop - spindle sticks in different types of wood and the large gold embroidery kit that I had been thinking about for years already, to just name two of the things.

There were also, you might have noticed, a few more pictures than before, as one of my friends told me off for not posting piccies often enough... which may have led to a few more gratuitous cat pictures thrown in with the others.

Now the year is winding down, and though I have a few more things that need to be done (as in I can hear that whooshing sound of a deadline rushing by), I can also start winding down a bit already. The seasonal baking is well on its way to being finished (yesterday saw the gingerbread baking being completed, apart from a little chocolate coating that still needs to be applied), we've made most of the plans for the holidays, and the weather is also starting to get more wintery.

[caption id="attachment_2071" align="alignnone" width="677"] Nuremburg-style gingerbread, all baked, chocolate-coated up and waiting to go into its storage tin. The choc cooled off a little quickly, leading to the matteness and white layer on top. It will still taste fine, though - and my baking has a clear sequence of priorities that goes a) really yummy, b) lots of it and c) looking okay.


It was a good year, 2015. There's still a little bit of it left, and I plan to enjoy every little bit of it - I hope you will enjoy it right along with me!

Yes, I'm sure the last thing you want to hear about (again!) is the website stuff I've been dealing with... but bear with me one last time, as it's not my own website. Instead, it's the site of the European Textile Forum - which also had to transfer to a new server when I was changing my provider.

I took the opportunity to do some long-overdue overhauling of the site as well. It's not completely done yet (there's more stuff lined up to be made available again, in the new structure and hopefully in a more accessible way), but it's online, it's serviceable, it now also runs on Joomla! and there are a lot of small, behind-the-scenes changes that should make organising work for the next Forum a good bit easier for me. (Easier is always nice.)

[caption id="attachment_2048" align="alignnone" width="640"] This is how the page looks now - much nicer than before, I think. I hope you like it, and like always, if you have feedback - it's more than welcome!


I asked my new Internet guy to make the connection to the new place yesterday, and it went through delightfully fast, so you can now join me in enjoying the new site. And if you're interested in the Forum, or know somebody who might be, there's a newsletter you can subscribe to and we'll send you the occasional news and Call for Papers.

(My new Internet guy, by the way, has the wonderful company name Schwarzkünstler. That translates, literally, as "black artist", and that would have been someone in the printing business way back when printing was still new and it was still considered an art. Which means, as the internet is sort of the new form of print in a way, I get to have a little private squee for that name every time I see it. Which is very, very often at the moment, with all the logging in and transferring files...)

Aarhus University Press has a long list of books in their catalogue, and they include Else Oestergaard's "Woven into the Earth", the wonderful book about the garment finds from Greenland. They also have a monthly campaign of one e-book that they post on their site, downloadable for free.

Guess what this month's ebook is? Right - Woven into the Earth. Go here to download it, and feel free to spread the word. The book is absolutely wonderful and a must-have if you are interested in medieval garments. (h/t to Christa, who found this first.)

Other delightful news - the open-air museum village in Düppel, where I went to give a presentation this summer, has won a cultural award given out by Berlin. Congratulations!

About a month ago, I posted about thinking to start a Patreon campaign. In the meantime, while building the new website, I've thought some more about it and, obviously, decided to try it out. You've probably seen that Patreon link thing right on top of the blog sidebar. Maybe you even clicked on it and had a look at my Patreon page (thank you!). And you're possibly wondering why I am doing this, and why now. So here's a list of questions (that I totally made up myself) , and my answers to them (not made up, of course).

Why are you doing this?
I love doing research on historical textiles, and textile techniques. I also love writing about them, and telling people about things, and teaching them. Getting to the Aha! moment of "this is how it can be done" is one of my favourite things, both when it happens to me and when I can help making it happen for others.

One of my ways of sharing textile research is this blog. However... I have to make a living somehow, and that means the blog doesn't always get the time, attention, and textile-research-related posts I would like it to have. Especially the latter.

Having some income through Patreon for the blog would help me in two ways at once: Firstly, it gives me an excuse to spend more time on textile research to blog, as people are obviously so interested in what I have to say that they are even willing to toss money at me for it. And secondly, having that money does help to relieve the pressure to get other things going to make the income I need, so I actually do have the time to spend.

So you would like me to pay money for something you do for free, and you do anyways?
Well, kind of. I'd like you to support the blog if you can and are willing to - and if you would like more posts on textile techniques and stuff. It's an experiment, of a kind. If this tanks and nobody hops on the Patreon train, I'll just go on like I do now - with a regular blog post every weekday, with the occasional gap, and an occasional larger post now and then. The blog will continue to be part of my workday, but it will also stay in the not-priority part of said workday.

If this patreon thing does work, however, the blog will get more of my time and attention, you will get more posts like I did in the last two days, and I'd be totally thrilled about all this. There's also a few more shenanigans in my wild patreon-related dreams, including tutorial videos - in case this really takes off. (Which would be so, so cool.)

What is Patreon, anyway?
It's like an on-going kickstarter, but based on a person's work instead of on a specific project. You support the creators you like by sending them money either per month (which is the model I chose, since the blog is a regular thing) or per Thing they create. You can cap your maximum monthly spendings on each artist. The lump sum of all your support money is deducted from your credit card at the start of the month, Patreon takes the fees due (card company and their own) and give the creators the rest of what they got paid.

Your Patreon isn't very popular, though. Why should I be (one of) the first to support it?
Um... well. There's this German saying that goes "Aller Anfang ist schwer" (every beginning is hard). Like on Kickstarter or any other crowdfunding thing, momentum is really important, and projects that have gotten a lot of love and support already are more likely to get more support, both financial and by spreading the word.

My campaign is new, and I'm not a big name, so it hasn't started with a lot of momentum right away. So why should you jump in? Because you like the blog and have a few dollars to spare? Because you like being first? Because someone has to do the first steps?

There's actually people on Patreon who bolster their patron numbers by mutual pledging, as in "I give you 2 bucks a month and you match my pledge and give me 2 bucks a month too". Well. I'm not going to do that, thankyouverymuch. If this thing goes on to be the least popular project ever - I'll wear it.

Okay. So what if I do it and don't like what I am getting?
You can opt out at any time and stop paying! If you feel like it, you can also let me know what you didn't like. I won't lie and say that I feel bursts of joy about being told about  things I'm not doing well, but I'm still happy to get negative feedback, as weird as that might sound. It's the easiest and most straightforward way to make me figure out what you like and don't like, and I can make changes based on that.

I'd like to support you, but not over Patreon/not with money. 
Thank you! You can support me in many other ways. Link to my blog when you find an interesting post. Tell people about my work. Tell them about the Patreon thing if you think they might want to support it. Consider buying things at my shop when you need textile tools. Tell other people about the shop. Comment on the blog (I love comments!). Write a review on one of my books, or on something you bought in the shop if you got something, and post it. (Amazon is the most helpful place for book reviews, by the way.) If you did buy something in my shop and there's a problem or something you don't like or that doesn't work properly, tell me about it. (If you do like things, feel free to tell me as well, that always brightens my day).

All these things help me, and let me do a better job. I love what I am doing, all aspects and elements of it (well, except maybe for the book-keeping...) and just getting feedback, both positive and negative, does help a lot.

So. Let's see how this Patreon thing goes, right?

Sometimes, you go into things a little naively, right? Well. When I was planning the blog migration, I was hoping that I'd like working with wordpress instead of blogger, but didn't test it much (as there was no viable alternative, I figured why test if I have to cope anyways).

In that case, it all worked out - I'm totally in love with the new blog platform. It's so much nicer, and so much easier to use, and it looks so much better, I'm over the moon (and I hope it's as much better for you as it is for me). Though I was in for a big shock this morning when I logged in and found that my user permissions had somehow, magically, changed to "subscriber" instead of "administrator", preventing me from doing any of the admin stuff like, say, moderate comments or write a new post. That must have happened when I told my account to call me "Katrin" and not "shopadmin", which I am, too, but not on the blog, thankyouverymuch. Good thing the Internet is there to tell me what admin rights look like in the mysql database (like this: a:1:{s:13:"administrator";s:1:"1";}), and where to find them in the table, so it was an easy fix.

Other things that I went in naively are not working as well yet. So I'm still hitting snags on the website relaunch, and some of them have hit me hard. Like the broken links problem.

The shop urls are rather robust, and so I had sort of figured that a simple redirect from the old shop subdomain to the new spot of the shop should work. (Naive, I know, but there wasn't really a way to test it either before the relaunch.) Well, it didn't (which you will have noticed if you've tried to click an older link to the shop from this blog, or anywhere else where the shop was linked to). I installed a plugin for Joomla called ReDJ (which has outstanding support, by the way, I totally recommend it), but it is not working for all old links yet. I'm working on it (or rather I have asked for help since I'm not able to figure it out on my own, see "outstanding support" further up).

These web page issues are like an itch I cannot stop to scratch, so I snuck some weekend work in. And that means that while a lot of the links are still broken, you will at least be getting a custom (and hopefully amusing) file-not-found page. Curious? You can try this if you want to know how it looks.

Some other things are also fixed now - there is a mobile blog menu (or should be - if you're reading this on a mobile device and cannot find a link to the menu at the very bottom, please let me know). There's also a fix installed for the nasty redirect to the main page, away from the shop, when you have logged into the shop. A few more other things are on my list, but they are not as time-critical (or as annoying), or as quick to implement and so will have to wait a few more days.

Other shop things will have to come first... like the addition of new spindle whorls (I have a new type to offer), and I also have cochineal powder for sale now. They need photographs first, though, and descriptions - the first I will be adding into the new shop. Stay tuned! And if you find something that doesn't work (in addition to the links, that is) please do let me know!

And hello there, shiny new website. Also: hello there, trusty readers who have followed me here!

Yesterday was a thoroughly exciting day, and I'm utterly happy and relieved that all went as well as it did. I had a lot of fun live-tweeting the migration, and I was really relieved that I had done so much preparation to make sure everything would work.

As it did, more or less - and now I can take a little more time getting used to the new place. New blogging platform, new shop layout, and I have added a lot of tweaks to my Joomla installation that should make it work better and hopefully also faster. (There's one more in the pipeline, but I'll give it a few days to settle any other issues first. No use in muddling up things more than necessary.)

So what did I do yesterday? I transferred the updated data (with current orders, customers and products) to the shop installation that was already on the server (not yet a live server). I transferred the old blog to the new spot here and adjusted the layout. (Theoretically, I could have done this with a couple of test posts and then only need small tweaks, but I figured it would all go okay in the one fell swoop.) I fixed link redirects from the old shop site to the new place, tried to make sure everything is working as it should, and tried very, very hard not to get distracted by small issues that could easily be fixed later. (If you're reading this blog on a mobile device, you are experiencing the biggest of the issues left: there's not yet a menu for the blog in the mobile view. I have an idea on how to integrate one, though, so you might find a menu link appearing right at the bottom of the page in mobile view in a few days.)

This was all possible to do in one day because of a lot of work invested beforehand. The new site was completely ready for the content from the shop and the blog to be plugged in, and I had tested the blog import a few times before. (Not the plugging in of data for the shop, so that was a bit of an adrenaline spike.) I have not done proper time tracking, but my rough estimate is that about 4 solid weeks' worth of work have gone into the new pages - and I'm happy about every minute spent on them. It was lovely to get things to work just right, or to appear just so (with a few exceptions that are left, but hey, nobody's perfect), and I also enjoyed learning about all kinds of things. How to tweak css. How to dabble in php (which on my level is mostly looking for someone who found a solution to my problem, or at least a very very similar one, and then copy-paste the code, cross my fingers, curl my toes and hope it works).

Having the migration thing still hovering on my to-do-list really was a big thing, and now it's done, a lot of the pressure is gone. Which is very good, as I'm behind on a bunch of other things, which are all on my list for today. Sometime next week, though, I'll have to go do some internetting work again, as the website for the Textile Forum needs to do a transfer to the new server as well.

For those of you who have missed it and would like a look, here are my tweets from yesterday, all storified up.

I hope you like the new look of the shop and blog - please do try out the new comment function, too, and tell me what you think!