We're still in full-on heatwave mode here, and though there are a few clouds in the sky, it remains brightly (and hotly) sunny. Well, at least this year nobody can complain about a nasty, cold grey summer!

In spite of the weekend's heat, we managed to have fun at a wedding party, relax, and get a new (and larger) rainwater tank installed at the back of the house. Now if it should rain, we'll get all the water that lands on half of the roof of the house (it's a saddle roof, so naturally you only get half the roof with one tank). I'm very excited to see how much water will come through into the tank from one "normal" rain. (I could do some maths and estimate how many square metres the roof has, and calculate from there, but... it's too damn hot for maths.)

I also spent some time during the weekend on website updating work*. You don't see anything of that yet, though - I have managed to clone the online shop to my local system, where it's now happily running on an installation of XAMPP. Installing that was the easiest part, though! It took a few tries and thus quite a bit of time to get everything running...

The first issues were with getting the backup extension for Joomla! to run. Akeeba backup and my hoster have sort of a strained relationship, it seems. After a while, that did work; so then I got to figure out how to get the copy to run locally. And then... several tries of updating from Joomla 2.5.x to 3.x. There's a number of steps that has to be taken in the correct sequence, and in the end I had to manually unpack the update package into the root directory and run the database fix. Main problem seems to have been template issues... but now it seems like it's running.

So I'm currently updating the shop system on the local copy, and then I will have to find a nice template for the new site. It will probably take a few months before I'm ready for the relaunch, but at least the most important step is done now - getting the upgrade to Joomla 3.x to work.


* I'm a firm believer in "never change a running system" and "if it ain't broken, don't fix it". Case in point? My graphics programme is 19 years old. But that's an old programme that works, and there are no internet security issues connected to it. In case of my website, support for Joomla 2.5 is running out, and that will in time leave the website open to attacks. And make it become more and more outdated, so... nothing left but to embrace the change. At least it's a nice reason to finally tackle the website and get it up to date again!

It's getting hotter and hotter outside; too hot to think or to do a lot of stuff. Even the cat prefers being inside today, out of the sun and heat.

In fact, she prefers lying on my arms. As I sit at the desk, trying to work. If she weren't so cuddly and cute as she's curling up between the computer and myself, with her one paw on my one forearm and her shoulder and head on the other... it's not conducive to good and typo-free typing, though. Especially not when her paw is on the touchpad, doing things with the cursor it's not supposed to do.

Thank goodness it's Friday, though, and there's an end of the week's work in sight. On the list for today, among other things: Looking at pictures from 12th and 13th century German manuscripts, preferably pictures that show peasants. The image database at the British Library is my friend for this, for now.

Searching takes time, though. Especially if you want to make sure you get as complete a picture as possible - because then you can't narrow down the search terms too much. After all, the search terms only find the things other people have identified and tagged as such a thing.

This means you might find mis-labeled items and miss a lot of unlabeled ones. So I learned a long time ago that if you want to have the bigger picture, or a proper overview, nothing beats using a very general search term and then just going through every single entry in the massive list of hits. Yes, it is a nuisance, but I have hit a lot of paydirt with this method.

So, even though I cannot search for "peasant" and get all the things I want to find, advanced search is still really, really helpful. I'm narrowing down place and time, and then I look at the pictures. Which is a nice task for a hot Friday afternoon...

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?

There's a couple of things running in the background that are finally coming together - I will be getting different kinds of needles in addition to the ones already in the shop, sort-of-soonish (these things tend to take a while). Other things are in the pipeline, but not in a stage where I can blog about it - yet. But I'm having hopes to post exciting new things here this autumn.

Also scheduled for this autumn, but something that I can already blog about: The Fleur de Lis Gold Embroidery Kit. Here's the finished prototype, finally:

It does look much nicer in real life.

I did the last stitches yesterday in the evening, when the light was already dimming down, but it was still rather light. That minimises the sparkle of the gold thread, which makes the work hard to see.

Speaking of hard - gold embroidery is really, really hard to photograph. Especially if you are in kind of a hurry, which I was this morning (and that usually leads to a bad photo day). The trick is to take the picture with underexposure, and with no direct light to avoid any sparkles. Then it can still be tricky to get the thing in proper focus, as the autofocus often has trouble with the sparkly bits; or to get the exposure right because of strong contrasts between the gold and the dark background.

So you're not getting the world's best piccies of the finished prototype yet, but I had the strong urge to share with you. Including these bad closeups:



This, by the way, is how it looks if you take a picture with flash:


Hint: Flash is not helpful...

I had such a bad photo day that I even botched the pictures of the back of the embroidery, which technically should be no problem to take a picture of. So you're getting only this bad detail shot this time (you know, because of the law).


I'm really happy to have this finished, though. The template stencil for the final version is done as well, and looks very much like the prototype here, with only a few tiny changes. The fabric for the final version is off to be dyed already, and as soon as it arrives back here, I'll cut it into pieces... and then I will gild the lily once again, a third and final time, taking photos of the individual steps for the instruction booklet.

(And those photos? I'll take them in a softbox, with the camera on a stand, and with plenty of time planned for that shoot...)

I've written several notices about the ebook piracy thing, and those we found initially have been taken down. It seems there are more popping up, though, so it feels a little like playing whack-a-mole in spite of not really wanting to do so.

Otherwise, my paper is finally about finished - just the formatting of the bibliography has to be taken care of. The lots of rain in the last days mean that I can finally finish washing my fleeces, so one of them is soaking right now. The cat is sleeping, as usual...

...and the chili plants are making nice and colourful chilis:


I've also made a little bit more progress on the fleur-de-lis prototype - one side leaf and the band are left to embroider:


Here's the view from the back:






I'm already looking forward to the next step - doing it again while taking pictures...

While the cat is sleeping right next to my feet, curled up and sometimes purring loudly, I'm doing things. Lots of them. A brief overview of what happened yesterday and today?

One of the things was sorting my way through a huge stack of paperwork (there's still some more left to go through and sort into appropriate folders, but it was a very good start). Running a business is a huge stack of paperwork on top of the normal, daily-life, everyone-has-it paperwork, and from time to time that needs to be properly sorted out and re-organised into appropriately labeled folders and binders and things.

There were also some emails to look into getting things made, or re-stocked - results of these will hopefully come in the middle future. (I've long since learned that these things take time. In some instances lots of time.)

Gillian and I have written up a stack of guest posts for our blogtour to promote The Middle Ages Unlocked, aka The Beast, and we're looking forward to see where they will end up. We had a lot of fun doing a kind of interview with each other - it really is amazing how differently two people will see and think about something they've been working on together for several years!

I'm also in the process of finishing up a paper about spinning; two fellow textile nerds have graciously agreed to give it a proof-read, so I'll get some feedback on the contents and hope to have it all done and dealt with soon. Meanwhile I'll have to beat the pictures and the references into shape.

Plus some editing work, some drafting, a lot of looking at picture websites (for the spinning paper), some cuddling the cat, some computer maintenance, some getting the book-keeping up to date (again...) and some getting things ordered via the webshop ready to send off. And shooting a gratuitous cat picture. Because it's Friday...

There are things that we see, or use, that look easy. Easy as pie, and they are convenient and quickly picked up or quickly used, and nobody ever thinks about how much work has gone into them.

Take a book, for instance. It has contents (hopefully!) and a cover and a price, and there is writing and cover artwork and editing and layouting and printing going on before you can pick it up and settle down for a nice read. Or a film - even if you know that there will me much, much more that is filmed before the cuts reduce it, it's still something different to experience it yourself.

The same is true for something like an embroidery kit. Which tells you that I am still working on it - this iteration, there is tweaking and testing of the pre-drawing, taking still more notes about what needs to go into the instructions, and testing of how well the frame works for all this. I'm also testing the needles that will be included in the kit and making exact notes of how much thread is used for which of the parts. Meanwhile, the fabric for the final version has been sent off to be dyed, and I want to have finished this second prototype by the time it gets back here.


It's not the final pre-drawing, but pretty close to how it will be, both regarding shape, size and placement. The frame on a closer look (and especially upon touch) is obviously not real wood, but it looks very nice in combination with the dark blue fabric. As I want the kit to be so complete that you can get started right away and end with something that can be used as decoration without further ado, this frame is the perfect solution even though it's very modern.

And this is how the embroidery looks at the moment:






As you can see, I have not progressed so very far. I hope to find a bit of time this evening, though, so that I can at least finish the middle leaf!

The cat, meanwhile, is thoroughly un-impressed: