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?

I spent Saturday and Sunday in Stuttgart at the "Medieval Times" event of the Junges Schloß Stuttgart. "Junges Schloß" is a museum concept especially for children - every object in easy view of children, things to touch, experience, try yourself and garments to dress up with. I had the opportunity for a quick walk through the exhibition on Sunday morning, and I was so bummed that I'm already older than ten years.

No, really. It is a wonderful museum for children (and me and the two grown-up colleagues also had a heap of fun sitting on the thrones and on the knight's horse), and if you are in the area with a child, or if you are interested in museum concepts for children, or if you are plain curious - do go there. I was really blown away by the exhibition.

If you are too far away (or if you want a look before), here's a picture of the main room, a renaissance "cabinet of curiosities" showing treasures from throughout time.


(Picture from a photostream made by the museum that you can find here.)

And those glass cases can all be opened by the staff in the museum so that the young visitors can touch the original objects in there. Awesome, isn't it?

I had hoped to sneak off and catch another few minutes in the exhibition room, but the medieval event was so well received and so well visited that there was absolutely no time for it. I spent all Saturday and Sunday spinning, explaining about worsted and woolen, combing wool and spinning even more. And letting people try themselves. Oh, and threatening my neighbour with my distaff, because that's a very medieval thing to do (and always good for a laugh).

So go visit the museum, everybody who is able - I'm sure you will enjoy it!

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.

A while ago, in Freienfels, I was presented with a bit of modern, dyed wool in a top, in different hues from brownish with a tinge of orange to deep raspberry-red.

I spun it on the hand-spindle, and then I used the opportunity to try a new plying technique, somehow related to plying from both ends of a yarn cake. I'm going to give the technique another try during the next days, and I'm planning a proper report then. Until that time, though - here's a picture of the red yarn in plying progress.

It has taken ages and the development of a severely bad conscience on my side, but it's finally done and (almost) finished: The new webpages of www.pallia.net are up and running.

Ah. Finally.

Of course there were a few glitches, and the very last pages are not yet online, but the bulk of the work is done, including burying my arms up to the elbows in the innards of .css-files (something I have never wanted to do), brushing up my html-skills to get things to behave properly, and learning how to install webshop software on a server.

Well, the very last thing is still a work in progress, so it will take a while longer before you will be able to browse a shining new online market stall, and I'm sorry for the further delay - but those things are never as easily done as said. Meanwhile, why don't you hop over to the shining new website (now also available in English) and tell me how you like it?

You may have noticed that I have made a few small changes to this blog - some weeks ago, I have added the "quick response" tick boxes at the end of each post. They have actually been used already!

Depending on how much use they will see during the next weeks and months, they will either stay or go. And you are, of course, welcome to comment on them - including suggestions for other reaction boxes (like "that was so boring I fell asleep" or "I see pink ponies dancing now").

Another change, one more important for me (and one that will be much more obvious) is that I will insert jump breaks into long posts in the future. This means that to read one of the longer posts, you will have to click for it. Those of you getting this blog via RSS feed will also have to click on the link to read the full post.

Why?


Because Germany has a really, really cool copyright collection society (called VG Wort) that accepts Internet texts.  Submission of texts involves adding a tiny picture to the text that serves as a counter and then waiting if the text will get enough hits during the year. If it does, the author will get a little money. (There's long and elaborate texts in the 'Net, explaining how to do the registration process and how to build in the counters. It's not that hard, though it does involve a few extra steps.) However, the counting will only be done if the text is read from its own proper page, not from a digest page like the front page of this blogspot blog.

So if I'm offered the chance for some money for something that I do anyway, I am of course going to jump at it - and jump break for it. Fortunately, Blogger has added the jump break as a feature recently, so longer texts will be truncated by a jump in the future, just like this one here. If you clicked on the link to read the full text, you are redirected to the page of the post, with its own specific URL - and thus your visit will count for my visit stats at VG Wort. (I hope so. At least all German visitors will be counted.) For shorter texts, nothing will change - you will be able to read the texts on the blog front page as you are used to, without extra clicks required.

(And should I find out that English language texts are not eligible for the process... you will get a message and no further jumps.)