I've half finished one of the most dreaded chores in my freelancer's business life: Bookkeeping. And I don't even know why I dread it that much (though by far not as much as the dentist!). It's not so bad once I sit down to do it, and since I have a very very simple system, it's not even complicated.

Oh, what system? Well... pile all un-booked things, including unbooked bank statements in a spot on the desk. When booking, go through pile paper by paper, booking each item into freeware software (easy-to-use programme, but in German only, and I don't want to be without that little helper again). Then put all items into a folder. Keeping track is very easy then: If it's in the folder, it's been booked. If not, then not.

So while keeping up with books only takes a few minutes for a whole month, out of some unknown reason, I have the tendency to wait until bad conscience cannot be ignored any longer. And while I'm not sure that my general style of working would benefit from a change, I am very sure that just booking things once a month, regularly, would be quite sensible. Now I only need a way to remind myself to book things regularly... preferably in a nice, fun way.

While working on the real wood-and-cloth market stall, thinking about the selection and presentation of goods and working simultaneously on the "market stall" website, I'm pondering how to sort and how to present the goods on the website - and what and how much information to provide with each piece.

I carry a few replicas - like the spindle sticks, the netting needles, naturally dyed silk threads, and so on. However, I don't have "perfect" replicas for sale in the sense of the original material is used for the replicas (the correct metal, the correct wood) and that they are made using only medieval tools and methods (and that would be really pricey). In addition, I carry some goods that are part or complete conjecture - I have pincushions to keep pins and needles safe, I have parchment tablets for weaving. And finally, there are some things that are first seen later than the middle ages, like the "Nähsteine", where I'm actually not sure whether they were not used before the 17th or 18th century or whether usage was just so normal/unspectacular that they are not shown on the few pictures that we have from medieval sewing work.

When people come to me on the market to buy real-life, they can just ask and I can explain and discuss things with them. In the internet - not so easy. It is of course possible to mail or phone, but takes significantly more effort to do so.
So the big question is: Do I need to write the story behind each of the objects on the market stall webpage? Or would nobody care? Do you, as buyer of things as LH equipment want to know exactly what, where, when, why? (Personally, I would.) Comments and input, anyone?

My usual style of working slightly resembles a multi-front war: Tackling several items from the list at the same time, which means that I work a bit here and then switch to another thing on the list, and maybe later to a third one. This is partially due to necessary waiting between steps on single projects, partially because sometimes I think it's faster to answer an e-mail and do the corresponding bit of work on a project at once rather than mark the mail and get back to it later on, and partially because I like some variation.

This has, as everything in life, its upsides and downsides. An upside is that I get to work on the project that currently tickles my fancy rather than stick to "Plan A", and that I am very flexible - if some grand idea occurs for one thing, I'm used to switching and will continue with the grand idea and the things it brings with it. The downside is that of course time and energy is lost in translation from one project to the next - and even if the loss is small, it will be there.

In the past months, I have often wondered whether it would be worth trying to finish one thing with absolute priority first and then go down on the list - and frankly, I'm not sure I am willing to try this. Once a deadline approaches for one of the projects, I know I'm perfectly capable of putting that project up front, and everything else does take a back seat, but I don't know if that style of work would suit me and the rather big variety of topics and projects I have in planning, under way or in postprocessing at any given point in time. So for the moment - until I get an inspiration what to change and how, or any grand hints by you, dear readers - I will probably just go on like I'm used to, working on more projects more or less parallel. Which also means that I will have my usual seemingly slow progress with things.

Speaking of progress: There actually is some for several things - planning for the new market stall has done a quite big leap, and this project is now ready for the scissors, needle and thread phase. I have done enough progress on my new (very thin silk thread) hairnet to actually see the proper mesh and for better demonstration - the very first rows are somewhat unspectacular for the viewer. So my weekend was rather productive, and this feels very good.

Now, slowly, I remember the things that I was planning to tackle before the Forum took over completely - smaller things as well as medium to big things (like the website relaunch, finishing an instructional video for netting and finding out how much fabric is needed for the new small market stall).

Yesterday, though, was mostly spent with the experiment dataset. I'm still looking at and photographing each spinner's individual output and playing around with the weights spun to see if there are general tendencies. And there are, and yet not. While for example spinner A made a totally predictable yarn only influenced by the fibres - with one fibre smoother, thinner yarn than the other - other participants have two sorts of yarn, quite thin and very thick, and they have no obvious connection to either spindle or fibre. It does need a seriously wacky spinning instrument to throw them out of their usual yarn type and thickness range, though, and sometimes not even the wackiest of spindles will do that. So this is a very intriguing start, and I hope I will find some more connections or possible connections.

I took the day off yesterday (well, mostly) and had a wonderfully relaxing time just reading, snacking, relaxing and napping, so now my wakefulness-levels are almost normal again.

Now that I'm in the quiet of my own little study again (crammed full with the boxes of the experiment), I really start to miss the chatter and bad jokes and friendly banter and "string talk" of last week. And slowly I realise that the Textilforum has indeed taken place, that we really did it, that the experiment was really wildly successful, and that I have a heap of things to remember the wonderful week by, including my first ever badge for making a fire without more than two matches (heehee! All that training was worth it!), the most ugly cardboard-piggybank ever made by man or woman (and a very well-fed one at that, thanks to the generous people at the Forum) and the now-famed cat timer that usually resides on my workdesk but had taken a venture out and did some important work in the spinning experiment.

There are already some pictures online at Phiala's blog, summing up nicely all the things that went on, including the silliness. Here's a random picture taken during the spinning experiment (they are not sorted yet, of course...):

I think that the red digits of numbers 9, 10 and 11 are already burned into my retina from weighing and packing about 300 portions of wool. And making little paper documentation slips for packing with the spun threads is not as tedious as writing each by hand, but still... change spindle type. change date. save as. print as pdf (two pages). change spindle type. change date. and so on. repeat with changed session and wool. That's somehow... mind-numbing. (But I'm finished now, and only need to print out the .pdf files.

Add to this the fact that I have decided (half-last-minute) that it would be nifty to make a statistic of how all the whorls turned out, and that it would be good to have a more accurate weight for all the plastic bags with wool in them, and voilà! there I will sit weighing things again. Once I've made it into town and bought some appropriate scales, that is.

Otherwise, not much has happened - I'm still thinking and preparing for the Forum and the experiment, while inbetween trying to take care of the last things that have stacked up during my holidays. And as usual, things always take longer than they ought to - and I'm sorry for whining that much, right in front of your eyes, right on your screen...

We are back home from a wonderful weekend at Cave Gladium, where I was lucky from beginning to end - wonderful sunny weather (even a bit too hot sometimes), what must have been the best place for a stall on the whole market (right on the "main street" between food area/toilets and the "Hurenweibl"*), incredibly nice colleagues and neighbors all around, and gazillions of people coming by for a question, a chat or a peek into my dissertation manuscript. The latter were so many and so frequent that we put a straw mattress on the ground behind my table and declared it "reader's corner".

And of course there were the requisite food stalls offering a wide variety of things (but I've seen no potato goods), a stage for music (far enough from the stall not to disturb us), there were oriental dried fruits like figs, dates with walnut and nuts, and the"Teezelt", a kind of oriental café that you get on about every larger medieval market in Germany to buy mokka with spices, mint or black tea and sweets to go with your beverage. And I just love to go there for a mokka after closing shop at dusk (because nobody can see my fine threads anyway once it starts getting dark). And a thing seldom seen: One wandering musician walking through the whole festival area playing pipe and tabor - the classical medieval one-man-band!

Taking all together, the Cave is a wild mixture of stalls selling tourist wares, stalls showing and selling wares for Living History, visitors, LH people and costumed people, and everything with a very relaxed and friendly atmosphere. And the Cave is big, no, huge even. I'd say if the Cave organisers take a little care during the next years that the tourist ware stalls don't take over, this festival will soon be as big and as important as Freienfels and Tannenberg, both events for the LH scene but open to tourists.


* The "Hurenweibl" at Cave Gladium is a tavern for LH folks only; there's a guard at the entrance allowing only historically dressed people to pass. (Cave Gladium also sports a "no-tourists-area", a meadow reached only over a little bridge with a guard posted before it as well.)
A Hurenweibel was the officer in charge of the Tross (the camp followers) of the Landsknecht armies. A lot of the tourists are a bit nonplussed by this tavern name or start laughing because "Hure" is the German word for "whore", and "Weib" today is still another word for wife, but in many German regions, its meaning has slipped somewhat from neutral or positive in former times to slightly derogatory. So people not knowing that "Weibl" is an old form of "Webel" as in "Feldwebel" often are misled by the tavern name.