I'm running low on hand-formed spindle whorls, and due to a number of different reasons, I haven't gotten around to making more for a good while now (which is the reason why I'm running low). One of the reasons was the cold weather and lack of sunshine. I usually make the whorls sitting in the wintergarden, because there's a table with a suitable surface, and lots of space if needed, and I've just gotten used to making them there. Unfortunately when it's cold and the sun is not shining at all, that place is very cold - much too cold to sit there and make little bits of clay into spindle whorls.

Today, though, for the first time in a long while, we did have several hours of sunshine. So it was finally warm enough out there to clear the table, sit down, and get started on the next batch of whorls. 

 The next interesting question is: Will I manage to make the right amount of whorls in the right weight brackets? Funnily, sometimes I get into a sort of groove, and make a lot of whorls in a similar weight, and that's not necessarily the weight range that I need them to be in...

There's progress. Isn't that nice?

Said progress is going on in multiple areas. First of all, the personal/health thing is one part - I've been tracking all my food, which is annoying and a nuisance and sometimes feels really ridiculous (weighing out salad, thank you very much), but at least it's working. I've managed to more or less stick to the goal of not eating above a certain amount of calories, and it's showing on the numbers of the scale. That is nice, and motivating, and keeps me going even though it's hard at times. There's been a distinct and very lamentable lack of cake these past weeks, and reduced amounts of everything, especially the non-crucial stuff like chocolate. (Well, chocolate is crucial in some regard, but when push comes to shove, it's unfortunately empty calories, and there's not much space for these in my plan.) A few more weeks of this are looming ahead, which is sort of disheartening (soooo long to go!) but on the other hand, I managed to do this for months back in 2016 so I know I can do it. 

What I can definitely say is that it is easier now that I have the HRT to keep me sane, and sort-of-normal, and functioning on a basic level. I did try to do dieting stints in the past two or three years, but just didn't manage to get the necessary motivation and stick-to-it-iveness.While the basic fact remains that it is always possible to reduce calories and thus lose weight, there are definitely life and health circumstances that will make it harder, and depending on all kinds of factors, possibly also temporarily impossible. 

There's also progress on the shop stock overhaul; replenishing things, taking stock and finally getting new stuff into the shop did happen. There's a plan to rearrange some of the storage furniture here as well, which will take place after I've been to the Nähtreff at Rothenfels, because then the storage shelves will be more or less emptied out anyways (as a lot of the stock travels with me to be set up as a market stall). 

The website is mostly up and running, with a few remaining issues to be solved and some articles (that have been taken offline a while ago) to be re-written and placed back online, but none of that is crucial or really time-critical (at least not compared to other stuff), so for now, I'm good with how it works.

Next on the progress list is removing some of the old backups, and setting up a new (better) system; I've been using a backup programme that leaves me not so very confident in its reliability. (In case you're wondering: It's Acronis. The programme puts everything in a huge archive file, and when I try to access them on the RAID, there are sometimes hiccups that need to be resolved, probably due to the connection quality.) This means it's time to re-evaluate, and switch, and make space on the RAID to get the new version going. That's a slow progress as well, but things are happening here too.

Of course, there's the usual long list of stuff to be done - writing stuff, sorting stuff (in my next life, I will be more organised, and less messy, at least that is my cunning plan), organising travel for the next events. Preparing workshops at Rothenfels.

No progress yet on planning the next online workshops, something very high on the list... but overall, it feels like things are going okay. Which is a very, very nice feeling!

As you might know, I have this slight... thing... about backups. Due to the fact that during my working life, quite a few hard disk drives have gone under, so having a backup of stuff is really, really important for my peace of mind. 

Which means, too, that periodically old backups need to be removed. That's something I always have a hard time with - but this time, it wasn't made hard by my internal resistance to deleting old files, no, it was made extra hard by Windows itself.

Before I swapped out one of the drives, I did a full copy to an external HDD, which means that a full, and theoretically run-able Windows installation resides on that disk. Which is not needed anymore, so I told my computer to delete it.

It didn't.

Turns out that the Windows files are not owned by me (even though logged in as the administrator), but by some straw figure thingie called "Trusted Installer". Who does not permit me to delete the stuff.

There's a workaround (of course there is), which makes it necessary to go into the security settings of the folder and swap the owner (to myself, of course). Which I tried to do, but suddenly, the disk was full... and it was not possible to change the settings anymore. Because, well, no space.

I am still confused as to how it could get fuller than before (there wasn't too much space left, but not next to nothing!) but I did manage to find a few things that I was allowed to delete, and now hopefully the owner swap will run its course, and I'll be able to make space again.

Oh Windows. I could have done without these shenanigans...

There's actually new stuff in the shop - I've finally managed to take pictures and get the new kids in. It's fibres for spinning this time - first of all, two nice, naturally coloured types of wool, from the Bergschaf breed. The lighter variation is a nice, warm brown:

The second colour is a very, very dark brown - so dark that it can quite legitimately called black. I like both variations, but the black is my current favourite. 

And the third new fibre in the shop? It's.... cotton!  While that wasn't the most common fibre in the Middle Ages in Germany and the surrounding area, it was in use - for padding at first, but later also as the weft thread in fustian, for instance.

Because of a series of chance, I learned how to spin on a hand-spindle using cotton... which may have played a role in my persisting penchant for spinning thin yarns with high twist on heavy spindles... because cotton needs quite a bit of twist to make a stable thread, and I had limited amounts of fibre, and if you're a spinner, you can probably guess what happened.

Because after finding out about the pesticide use and water use of conventionally grown cotton, I've switched over to organic cotton or none at all, so this is (of course) also organic cotton. 

You can get all three from my shop, finding them among the spinning fibres, of course. 

It's been a good while now since I've run out of the brass pins in the shop, but somehow there was this and that and things didn't line up, and I never got around to sitting down and making new ones. 

Today, though, I really felt like doing something practical again for a bit, after all the website and writing things, and I got out the metal-working supplies and started a bit of pin-making.

It begins with preparing the heads, which are made from wrapped wire, then cut into bits: 

Then shanks are cut and hammered into the little head coils, and then I do some more hammering to make sure the heads are decently stuck on the shanks, and then the annoying bit starts: sharpening the tips.

The photo shows half-finished tips on some pins. I'm still not completely happy with the workflow in that part of the process, but at least I'm getting pins already. Some more grinding, and some more testing of possible methods to come... and soon, pins to come back to the shop. Yay!

Today was, again, mostly eaten by website shenanigans - a bit of testing here, a little tweaking there, a lot of finding out what still needs to be checked, tweaked, or resolved. Among that, primarily, is the fact that there are a lot of broken or malfunctioning links due to changes in the URL structure, and it turns out not all of that is easy to fix with a simple redirect. Not because there wouldn't be the possibility of the redirect, but because apparently there's some issue with the multilanguage setup of the site...

The problem mostly impacts the blog, so it's not the end of the world, but it is rather irksome. I'm also not yet happy with how the shop looks, with all the items dancing up and down, and the buttons happily appearing further up or further down, but changing this is not something I can do in just a few minutes.

I'm pretty sure that there is a way to get it all lined up properly, but that most probably requires some more knowledge in css and doing stuff that contains the word "flex", and the main problem with that is that it needs extensive testing, because you tweak things to look good in one browser and with a certain width of the window, and then you switch to something else and suddenly it looks like shit combed over. 

So for now, I'm going to settle with "hey, at least it's functional" and see if I can resolve the issue without too much of a headache, and too much time down the drain. After all, there's workshops coming up that I have to prep for, and there is a rather urgent need to make more spindle whorls, and then there's a presentation being planned for the second half of February that I'm very, very hyped about. More to follow about that as soon as I can tell you!

It's always good to have open access publications available - and if you are looking for OA Journals, you might find this Directory of Open Access Journals helpful. 

And if you're reading German and looking for something about clothing regulations in the Early Modern Ages, there's a fairly new book out about those from the archives of Wismar: