You might or might not be familiar with St Oswald, also King of Northumbria - I am currently definitely getting to know him a little better.

I have the pleasure to work on a 3D reconstruction of Oswald as he's portrayed in a Garden of Paradise dating to the early 15th century, and like these projects often are, there's a lot to discover and at least as many questions.

The digitised version of the painting can be found at the Städel Museum website, and the guy in question is the one to the right, hugging the tree. There's quite a lot of things going on in the image, but if I only sort of concentrate on Oswald, the primary problems are: What kind of fabrics were used? Especially the red-gold hood is rather unusual; this time saw quite a fancy for hoods with a long, dagged liripipe, and there's a number of illustrations where the liripipe is drawn through a sleeve, but Oswald... has two. That's a new one to me, definitely. (Should you have seen anything like it, please do let me know!)

The cloak could be silk or wool, but I'd lean towards some nice, fulled wool as a practical coat. Then the hose, which I would assume to be joined already, have some gold decor at the shins; the fabric could be either silk or wool. Gold ornaments re more something that makes me think silk, however, wool would be the easier and more budget-friendly choice. In addition, modern silks tend to be quite different from medieval silk fabrics, so I am not sure where I'd be closer to the mark regarding the fabric. (Modern wool is also different from historical wool fabrics. We're basically going for the looks here, trying to get as closely as possible without going for a full fabric reconstruction, as that would not be in the budget in any way, so it's compromises in each case.)

For the whatever he's wearing on his upper body, I'm planning to use some relatively heavy modern silk. Unfortunately, there's not much visible apart from the right sleeve, which looks rather baggy. As there's a teeny tiny bit of mail armour visible on the top of his leg, it can also be supposed that the garment was rather short.

So here we are. Timeframe is in the 1410-20s, so the dagged hood is definitely very nicely fashionable. There's no surviving man's garment from that time exactly, though we have two complete (with a little damage) from mid-14th century (Charles de Blois and Chartres); there's also the garment of the Black Prince, so at least there's some basis to put conjectures on. 

Still, this leaves quite a bit of guesswork, or of interpretative decisions. Which, by the way, is something that is going on so much and all the time with these reconstruction projects. (One of them is also what to start with - the upper garment? The hose? The hood? Hmm...)

I mentioned the hose rabbit-warren, right? What I did not mention is that I am also trying to tag, sort, and order all the images that have not been tagged, sorted, and ordered yet (and no, you do not want to know how many there are). Some are doubles that I can delete, some are easy to sort as a chunk (party photos, for example) and some... well, some are tedious.

One of the images was without a caption, date, tag or anything, and it has been hanging out there since it was used as one of the images in my thesis. The original manuscript is the Codex Vindobonensis 1857, or known today as signature Cod. 1857 HAN MAG in the Austrian National Library.

Back when I was writing my thesis, there was digitisation going on, but it had not progressed as far - so in some cases, the way you'd get to see pictures was through facsimiles. They are intended to be as much as the original as possible. For the thesis, I thus took the image from the book in the library in Bamberg; if I remember correctly, I requested the scan, got it on a CD, and used the image.

So picture my surprise when I wanted to tag this image today and thought the nicest and easiest way would be to find the entry for the now-fully-digitised manuscript in the Austrian Library... and found this:

This is... clearly not the same guy. First thing, my copy apparently got flipped at some point so I have the mirror image. And then - the position is almost the same, but the face is quite different; the hands are different. The folds in the garments are different, with the shirt or braies especially obvious. The leg position is a little different. And the points, the whole point because of which I was using this image, are different too. They are  much darker and much more obvious in the facsimile version.

Now I am really wondering. Wasn't the facsimile supposed to look exactly like the original? Was there a second version of the manuscript? But then, why would the images be so close and yet different? How much egg do I now have on my face because of this? Questions over questions. I'm now planning to go back to have a look at the facsimile at some point to see if at least the flip only happened with the scan transferring to me.

And this, dear readers, is why one should never fully trust anything but the original itself, no matter what. Sigh. Also it's why digitisation is The Thing, because it means there's at least a few less steps inbetween - it's digitising the object, and then you can look at it, and if it's high quality you can look at it right down to the level where you see the pores in the parchment. So if you're pointed to a re-drawing*, or a reconstruction without access to the original... be wary.

*Re-drawings, in German "Umzeichnung" used to be a really big thing in archaeological publications, as you don't need a good quality image to use for your print prep and, even more importantly, you don't need to go and ask for publication rights. I don't know whether it was just laziness, or whether it was much more difficult than it is today (it was surely more involved than shooting an email!), or whether it was a cost issue either in printing the image or in procuring the rights, and it was probably a mix of those with varying proportions of the individual ingredients. Anyways this means that a lot of older archaeological publications are full of image references to show things related to the find in context, rendered as a little black-and-white line drawing (which admittedly was much, much easier to print in the text part). If you see these, I heartily recommend trying to find the original before believing all of it. Quite often, a digital image is available today with a little use of the search engine of your choice, and you can see how it really looked... because even if you try really hard, and do really well, a line-drawing will still be an interpretation.

Sometimes, well, things sort of line up. This time, they lined up to lure me down the hole into that extensive rabbit warren that is late medieval to early modern legwear (men's legwear, that is). 

The things that lined up were a) the Alpirsbach project, b) the currently ongoing clothes-like-in-a-picture project,  and c) the almost-eternal updating and translating of the thesis project. 

The latter would greatly benefit from some more details in regard to the legwear reconstruction and development, both in the theoretical part and in the (very short, I know) practical results part. The first is skimpy as there was next to nothing known (now I know of a little bit more), and the latter is superdupershort because, well, it is toward the very end of the book and I was running out of time, and even more running out of steam.

There's this classical thesis writing timeline, you see. You start out and you're told that you should do it within three years, and at the beginning, that sounds like forever and a day, and you start, and suddenly the first year is over but well, you made progress and starting out is always a little slower, and then suddenly you are nearing the three-year mark but there is still so much to look into and tweak and to study and to read and to try and then you are close to year four (four! When did this happen!) and in some instant of painful insight you realise that really the only thing you want now IS TO FREAKING FINALLY GET FINISHED WITH THIS THING THAT IS EATING YOUR LIFE AND WILL NEVER STOP DOING SO UNLESS YOU MAKE IT STOP BY HANDING IT IN AND NO I WILL NOT LOOK INTO THAT BOOK AGAIN I WILL JUST DELETE THIS REMINDER RIGHT NOW HERE YOU GO CHAPTER DONE. Phew. 

This may be a little dramatic, but at times, that really was how it felt. I was told about this timeline before (as probably everybody starting out on a PhD is). And I did what everyone in that situation does, just like every author has to be convinced that their new book is the hottest shit ever and will sell like nothing else, and every editor has to listen to this and nod quietly and think to themselves "yeah, yeah", I was told about this timeline and I nodded quietly and I thought "yeah, yeah" and then, suddenly, well, see above. 

The legwear, at that point, was still sort of basic ideas and outlines only, and it did get elaborated on enough to pass, but, well, see above. By now, I have realised that there is enough material and open questions about just the development of male legwear throughout the centuries that it would easily merit its own PhD, so I won't be able to cover it all, but I'd like to have a little bit of extension to the short chapter in the updated version.

There's several stages in the development - at first, the hose are just getting longer but with no cut-out necessary for the crotch yet; then they have to get even longer and need some kind of crotch solution; then they cover the front as well, needing something to cover up the gap between the two leg parts. At some point, the two hose get joined by sewing them together, and that is probably only the butt first, and then there's the codpiece at some point getting added to both cover up the front (where previously breeches and shirt may have been seen) and also offering possibilities to have the construction a little easier in the lower butt and lower crotch area.

However... this hose development goes hand in hand with the shortening tunics in male fashion, and plenty of men in the not-so-fashionable strata of society just go on wearing the mid-thigh to knee tunic, and the old-fashioned legwear going with it. The other guys, well, we don't have a lot of finds, and we do have a good bit of images but they have this maddening tendency of only almost showing the bits with the crucial information. Argh.

So now I find myself pondering pattern developments (at least I have one new idea! Yay!), folding up little bits of paper, drawing on any sheet that is in reach while some question comes up, and even thinking of making small fabric mock-ups. Plus spending quite a bit of time staring at men's butts and legs in medieval art. Which is, admittedly, also kind of... fun.

Well, mess is a rather tame word for this, to be honest, but... we'll leave it at that for now.

I have promised you more about the shipping issues that many small vendors currently face, so here you go.

First of all, because most German social media posts about these problems currently are full of comments bashing the EU. (Notice that I write comments - it's not the posts themselves.) Personally, I do stand very firmly behind the idea of the EU. We are stronger together, and many, many of the things the EU does are really wonderful. I am also old enough to still remember the hassle of border controls, and the constant maths in your head of trying to do currency exchange calculations while shopping for coffee or food or souvenirs, and the problems of ordering something from a small shop outside your own country, with different currency and all. Joining up under an umbrella that helps us to negotiate better with other large nations like China and the US, and making things within the EU simpler and more harmonised - that's a great idea. Unfortunately all great ideas struggle with small-mindedness, and may also struggle with egoism, and that is surely part of why some things, intended for the very best, go horribly pear-shaped and suddenly find themselves rather brown in colour and on a rapid trajectory towards the next fan.

I am also all, all for the reduction of waste and environmental impact. If you've been hanging out on this blog for a while, you will know that sustainability and reducing unneccessary waste are quite high up on my personal list. We have numbers for the EU (well, for the whole world, but anyways), and packaging waste (especially single-use plastics) are a huge portion of general waste, so it is important to act in this respect. Whcich means... in general, the EU idea of unifying waste and packaging material treatments across all countries, and sequentially introducing more rules for better sustainability - it's great, and very, very necessary.

So where did things go wrong? Previously, we had different rules for each of the EU countries, with different thresholds for import, different costs for package waste licensing, different minimum amounts for that. Quite a few countries had a de minimis threshold, so you'd not need to bother registering for a handful of packages each year. We are talking literal handfuls here; like many other small sole traders, I am not sending more than at super-duper-most five packages per year to any one single other EU country*.

All these countries had established their own systems, and they are vastly different from nation to nation. Obviously, all countries were somehow convinced that their system is the bees' knees, and did not want to change it or adopt anyone else's instead. So, consequently, there was no agreement on new, EU-wide regulations. The only thing that happened was that there are the same labels in all of the EU now, and each country now works on the same baseline: They still have their national waste licensing system, and you are still required to enter it if you ship to that country, but there are no more thresholds with the intention to offer the same terms everywhere and to everyone. That, unfortunately, means that you have to register via a licensed, notary-confirmed authorised representative in each single of the 26 countries if you intend to offer selling into that country, and this starts at the very first package. And with this harmonised, they have not even agreed on the same fee structure or waste amount tiers, which means that one country you might have to register and it's a minimum amount of 100 kg of paper you pay for, and in another one it might be 30 kg.

If I could be sure to have a shipping volume of around 250 packages per year into any single country, I could add around 3 Euro to the cost in every shipping tier, and it would work out approximately (if the licensing fees are not too high in that country, that is). With less shipping volume, it's not even worth doing the maths for that country. 

The EU has planned some exemptions for small vendors, but their definition of a "small company" is one with less than ten employees and less than two million Euro turnover per year. They have been told, time and again and not just within the last few days, that these rules are way, way too much bureaucracy and way too much expenses for small traders. However, nothing has happened. Which means that the really small vendors, the solo entrepreneurs and similar tiny ones (in German you'd say we are a fly's shit), we're getting grouped in with companies just below two million turnover per year. This, dear reader, cannot work well, as anyone knowing and doing a little bit of simple maths will be easily able to understand.

Unfortunately, and this is where I do get a bit grudgy now, the EU representatives were not even able to agree among them all on a really ridiculously low de minimis threshold.  There's always be going to be malcontent people where they are just above a minimum line, but really, if we're talking about amounts that an ambitious granny could post to her family each year - even if it's only ten parcels free to other countries each year, that would already help the really small ones.

Because, and here's the next bit of irony: Many of the small traders whose statements I've read do say that they are happy and support the general idea of waste control and waste management. They are also trying to comply with the rules as best they can** - so consequently they are stopping shipping. Some are already very frustrated about all the rules and regs that, for instance, make it harder to re-use packaging materials on top of all the other stuff that you have to keep up-to-date with. Quite a few of them are holding a grudge, but I have not seen any of them state we need to leave the EU. That is done in the comments by some readers, mostly of the right-leaning-maybe-already-brownish tinged fraction that really have no understanding of how shitty that would be overall, and have obviously also not paid attention to what Brexit has turned out to be. (Spoiler alert: It has turned out to not have been a good idea.)

So where am I going with this text, apart from getting it all off my chest? One, hopefully you can understand a little better now why so many shops have stopped EU shipping. We fly-shit traders really want to have nice, fair rules that we can adhere to, and can't use more insecurities because of grey zones. Two, if you are unhappy about the situation (which I very much hope you will be), you have some options: Write to your EU representative(s), or call them up if you like phone calls better. Write to the EU commissioner Jessika Roswall. Leave a statement in the official feedback page (it has opened August 6 and will be open until September 10). Sign the (new) petition about this mishap. Tell your friends. And then... please do something that makes you happy, to balance out all this shit.

I can tell you that I have spent much, much more of my time and energy on this whole kerfuffle than was good for me. I have hoped against hope that I'd get heard along with all the other tiny shops. I have read the texts of the regulations, in English and in German, trying to find the exemption for the small ones. I have cried with frustration of having so, so many things that it is really hard to conform to, and you know that you are in a grey zone here, and there, and there, and there, and at some point it adds up and you lose the energy to keep up when the next one comes up where there's just no way around. There's also the little issue that many of the people I work with, and am getting goods from - both for the shop stock and for my museum work - are in some other EU country, and most probably they, now, are also stopping shipment within the EU. Something like the Alpirsbach hose project? The fabric came from Sweden - so nope (or add another c 500 € to the cost of the fabric). My dyeing expert? Lives in France. Some of my spindle whorls? From Belgium. If I have a regional source, I'll go for that, but many things are so niche that I'm over the moon if I can find anyone at all willing to do these things, and chances that they're outside Germany are very, very high. 

I am not sure what is to blame for this all going so utterly and senselessly wrong, but I am sure that it's something profoundly human (but maybe not very good-human) that is part of all this.

Having to stop shipping to UK because of Brexit, and to the US because of taxes and tariffs was frustrating already. Having to stop on what I had considered, more or less, the home turf hits much harder, and differently. So for now, I will let this thing rest, and hope that it will resolve itself in some way. If it doesn't do it quickly and you need something shipped from me, or from any other small vendor in a different country, your best bet will probably be to find a friend who lives in that country, and do the ordering and shipping via them.

Good luck, to all of us.

* At this volume, shipping abroad is basically customer service, and if calculated properly, I guess the work time invested overall in keeping up to date with shipping cost changes and shipping rule changes, plus the extra filling out of import forms probably more than eats up the revenue gained with these shipments - but I enjoy having my stuff travel the world, and I know the pain of not being able to get something just because you're too far away, so I have never done the maths on that correctly, on purpose. 

** It is, in fact, no small feat to even just keep up with the developments so you know what you have to change, or check, or amend, or look out for. There is no official channel that will give the stuff to you in somewhat digestible form - so you can either spend a lot of time trawling the EU and national rules pages, or hope that you're lucky and will hear about it in time, or sign up to some "vendor help" newsletters that will give you most of the news at some point, but always in a way to make you feel like buying some programme or service from them is your only sensible way to deal with the new shit. If you're a 200 employees company, you'll have someone dealing with all the law stuff and compliance shenanigans. If you're just one person... every hour that this research and the consequent adaptations for compliance eat up is time that you can't spend on your core business. And believe me, it's not done with one hour per change usually.

I am back! So what should I catch you up on?

It's still ridiculously hot outside. The extreme heat was also the reason for a change of plans that we made for the summer holidays - we had planned to go cycling for two weeks, but I am, unfortunately, not functioning well when exercising at temperatures of 30° C outside. So our first change of plans was to go for a paddle on the Main instead. This plan dried up together with the water levels in said river, which were too low for paddling on the interesting parts.

So Plan C (good thing that the alphabet has a few extra letters) was made, and executed, and that was a short but very beautiful hike on the Goldsteig. The German love of over-engineering and over-securing things does not stop before hiking trails, so we did enjoy one of the "premium trails" this country has to offer... which means that in theory you can see the next trail mark (usually some painted or printed sign) already when standing at the previous one. The theory doesn't always come through in practice, but most of the time, so it's actually very nice for strolling along without looking at a map, gps, or other orientation aid for most of the time. (It would be possible to walk without any kind of map, actually, but it was nice to check at some points where we were in relation to the next place of interest.)

For me, it was also a bit down nostalgia road as we passed places that my Grandma had lived in, or talked much about. We were only walking for four days, but could enjoy some nice quiet nights in the tent and had absolutely perfect weather for hiking. We came back and the weather got hotter again, so we could not have hit it better. Bonus effect: That hike was on our list for a long time already, but was too long for a weekend and too short for a normal summer holiday. 

Other stuff happened as well during the summer break - or, well, did not happen. This would have been a sensible solution for the new EU packaging and waste regulations; unfortunately, there was no agreement in the relevant groups, so everything stayed as it was in the previously published version. The TL;DR for this: no matter how large your shipping volume, you have to pay a lot of money for licensing fees, making EU shipping for most small players unaccessible. I will post a longer rant, with things you can do about the thing, tomorrow.

What else did not happen? The full re-launch of my website (and nobody is surprised here, I think). At least it's getting there, or maybe creeping there; most of the software availability issues have been resolved now, the blog has shiny new updated software compatible with the next version of Joomla, and the new newsletter software and template is almost good to go (in spite of my messing up the migration repeatedly. Sigh.)

Also going on, though in the background: Prep for an exhibition that is to have one man from an image coming to life. These days it's technically possible to take the image of a face and have it transformed into a life-sized 3D head, but not everything that is technically possible is also... well, the smartest or most affordable option. In our case, it's a question of the budget, and I'd rather get proper fabrics than an overly nice head. So the plan is to take the figure we have and fit it with a buff that will be printed with the face of the painting figure. Was that in any way understandable?

So anyway I got to the funny part of fitting a disembodied head (as it's easier to handle) with one of my buffs and, for aligning the painting face as best as possible, marking some key spots (with, of course, my beloved charcoal). It looks rather funny:

It also fits only semi-well over my own facial features, because my ears are higher up than the head's ears, and my nose is smaller and therefore my ears are further to the front than the marked ones. Or something like that - I could not see it for myself, because unlike special fancy full-face masks for morphsuits, this material is not really see-through.

Now we will have to see how this all plays out, and how it will look once we've got it, and got it on the figure. Fun times! 

By pure chance, I realised two days ago that the mobile menu in my homepage does not behave as it should anymore... which inspired me to do what I thought of as a quick little fix to get it from "extend submenu items on click", which did not work, to "have items permanently open" which is not ideal, but better than having most of the pages inaccessible.

The whole thing resulted in me being unable to access the page. That was... unexpected. It also took me way, waaay too long to realise the error was something out of my reach to fix. So I contacted my hoster (who I still maintain is the utter and absolute best, and if you need someone to host you, I do recommend Schwarzkünstler, who has always helped me fix the things that I usually caused myself by bumbling around and doing something stupid). He let me know that this error was only limited to my own IP address (phew!) and fixed it (double phew! and to my grand appreciation in the evening way after normal work hours). 

I'm still not sure how I managed to kick myself out, but, well. I learned stuff (always good!), the issue is hopefully fixed now, I sort of have a plan on what to do with the rest that I should have taken care of an unholy time ago, and I can go back to the things that were actually on the list to do yesterday, and which all have deadlines as well. Um. 

(You can imagine, I think, that the website issue induced panic meant about nothing of the other stuff happened. Sigh.)

That said - if you run into any issues on the page, whether shop, blog, or main pages, please please do let me know. I am trying to look things over and give them a check after every change or update, but the pages are that large these days that chances are very high I will miss stuff. Especially since it also depends on browsers and stuff.

On the plus side, I did put in some extra "Aaaaaaaaaargh" time yesterday evening puzzling over the Alpirsbach hose again, and trying to find out where things went askew (literally, as there's way too much twist in the legs). Good news: I have pinpointed the issue, with the kind thinking help of the Most Patient Husband of Them All. Bad news: To fix it, I'll have to undo the whole test piece. Which I will not do right now, but instead try a second version and try to do that correctly this time around. And then... the Real Thing (TM). Wish me luck.

With the last Textile Forum focusing on tablet weaving, I was preparing for running empty (or almost empty) of tablets due to that... which didn't happen, because most participants brought their own.

But still, stocks were running low, so I started on the quest of getting more. For this, you need a) something to punch them, b) someone to do the punching, and c) something to use the punching tool on. The first two were comparatively simple, but finding a good source for the right material... wasn't.

The old ones I had were made of some special kind of cardboard with a very good stability in both directions, and quite firm if you press on the sides, and a not-horrible colour (brownish).  It took a bit of looking around before I found out that it's indeed a special kind of cardboard, and then it took a while longer to realise that bookbinding and other paper-workery stuff are only a side use of the material, and that it's mainly used for isolation in electronics. 

Then it took a while to sort out the possibilities of sourcing it there. And finally, I could get the stuff for not as horrendously a price as it would have been through bookbinding suppliers. 

The punching tool, by the way, looks like this:

I also learned that there's a specific lingo to all the punching stuff, too, which was fun - as was the tour of the local printing press who ended up doing the punching step, and who were really lovely and nice all along.

The tablets are looking just like the old ones - so that was a success, I'd say. And now I have stock again for a good, long while!