I'm off to the Allgäuer Nadelstiche - drop by if you are in the area and say hello!

As usual, it was a long and busy day yesterday, and an early start today to get almost everything done for the fair. Mind you - almost.

Once upon a time, I thought that one day I'd be so perfectly organised it wouldn't take long to get ready for a fair... ah well. By now I have learned that yes, there might be a lot more routine in packing up stuff and getting things ready, but then there's always something more to fine-tune or to do a little bit differently and a little bit better, and that does tend to eat up all the extra time and then some.

I have newly organised display boards now, and new price tags, and things are a little bit differently set up, and I have a new and larger Fummelkasten. So while I did not get all things done, I am pretty content - and very much looking forward to the Nadelstiche!

 
 
 

You probably guessed it: Yesterday's work was more of the same, and today's will be too. There was, again, not much time not eaten up by the fair preparations, though I did find a few minutes to go out into the garden and enjoy a little bit of sun and a look at the flowers coming out. Like these:



Otherwise, there was sorting and making and re-plenishing and packing going on. Winding yarns and sorting whorls got done -  now all my reaining whorl stock is sorted by weight.



I have 2g-slots for the whorls, so when I get an order for a weight range, it reduces weighing and looking for stuff - though I usually get the scales out anyways and try to match the weight stated as closely as possible.

And when someone comes at a fair with a certain weight range in mind, these boxes are very helpful, too!

Only three days left before I leave for the first fair of the year- counting today. You michgt be able to imagine the state of things here, and if not, let me give you a hint: all kinds of things are stacked, heaped, drawn out, moved around, checked, and scattered over the place. There's packing material and flyers and there's the box with stuff that is helpful when setting up, and there's the immensely helpful master packing list for fairs that needs to be gone through.

There's also an insanely long list of stuff still to take care of. Much of it is just small things, but things that should not be forgotten, hence they are on the list. Some of the things are seemingly small things that I very much hope will turn out to be actual small things, or I will be in trouble. One of those is making a new Fummelkasten.

The Fummelkasten (which might be translated as "touchy-feely-box") is a thing I invented as a solution to the eternal fibre-selling problem: no spinner wants to buy fibres without touching them. Few people also want to buy fibres that have been touched by a gazillion people so they are all mated and felty, or have gotten disordered, or both. So I have a box with fibre samples of all the fibre types I am selling, and people can touch these to their heart's content, and wen they turn all matted and felty, I replace tha sample with a new one. The only problem is that with the addition of the Rhoen and Valais blacknose tops, I don't have enough space in the box anymore... so I have a new one, which needs finalising the inner structure, and then needs the samples, and of course an info sheet saying which fibre is which. And that you are welcome to touch.

Also, this sometimes gives me these priceless moments of a child going to the box, reading the "welcome to touch" message, and going ahead to compare the different fibres. Quite often, the parent then objects to this, and then gets educated by their offspring that in this case, it is perfectly fine to "look with the fingers". This has happened a few times already, and I always find it utterly hilarious!

And on we go! Or on I go, and you are along for the ride. Well. Whatever.

We'll start today's list off with another online collections database - that of the National Museums Scotland. If you're looking for things from the Orkneys, among other finds, it's the place for you. (There are spindle whorls and spindles, by the way.)

Not an image database, but a links collection, and a nice way to start off an image serch are the pages from Larsdatter (which you will probably know, but I am listing them here as they have just turned up in the bookmark list, and they are worth a look).

Theoretically an image/object database, but the search function does not work for me, is the Kult.Doku database. (Probably the php scripts are outdated, as the site is from 2003). It collects treasures shown in Austrian Landesausstellungen (big national exhibitions) in a database, with information taken from the exhibition catalogues. You can browse the catalogue entries, though - "Ausstellungen" gets you to a map of Austria, where you can select a federal state. That gets you a list of all the exhibitions there, some of which have their data online and if you click these links, you get the list of objects. A little awkward, but a nice way of getting an overview on things.

A proper database, with tagged images, is Mandragore. It searches images from manuscripts in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, provided you know the French word for what you are looking for. You will see a thumbnail and can see a slightly larger image as well, but the ones I took a closer look at were usually too small and/or too low in resolution to make out details properly. There is a remedy for that, though, at least in some cases - armed with the knowledge of what image you want to see, from what manuscript and on which folio, heed over to Gallica, the search engine for the BNF, and search there for the manuscript to enjoy the digitised page in very good resolution. You can also use Gallica to search for other images and books.

I've been busy as a little busybody yesterday, winding yarns and making more distaffs and distaff DIY-kits and printing out info material and cutting reeds for spools for thread and counting things and casting new beeswax pieces and taking stock and re-ordering things, all in preparation for the Allgäuer Nadelstiche and Wollfest Hohenlohe, coming up the two next weekends. There's still plenty more to do - go over my display boards, check all the price tags, print out some new ones, and sort and pack even more things, but I think I'll get it all done in time. (There should be some writing going on, too, but alas, that has not happened the last few days.)

Today will see some more preparation for the fairs, and then it's the Easter weekend, which means I will be taking time off and having a breather, and hopefully the weather will be nice enough for a few longer hikes together with the most patient husband of them all.

So I'll be back on the blog on Tuesday - see you then, and have a lovely few days whether you celebrate Easter or not!

Did I mention that my list is long? Really, really long? Here we go on, with more links to picture databases and manuscripts:

The Utrecht Psalter, dated to 820-830. There's also a newer, annotated version, where you can get exact inforamtion about which bit of the illustrations corresponds to which bit of the text. No searching for picture contents, though, in either version.

The Harry Ransom center database is called "image database", but it is more a manuscript list - at least my two standard searches for "spindle" and "yarn" yielded no resuls. Searching for "Mary" did - so texts or titles are in the database, but not detailed image contents. (This, by the way, is how I test.) Oldest MS is the Tegernsee Miscellany from around 1000. If there is adigital facsimile available, you can download it as pdf, no previews of the MSS online.

You can also search the collections at the V&A London, which will yield images of objects. No manuscripts, though.

Both texts and images from a number of German museums and libraries can be found via the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek. Obviously search results will depend on how well each participating institution as tagged their items, but you will get results for at least some image content.

KiK-IRPA in Brussels, the Belgian Royal Institute for art, has a search engine called Balat. It will search image contents, but is best used with Dutch or French terms on the appropriate pages - at least my impression is that the English terms are patchy at best.

That's it for today for you. For me, the list has shrunk a bit more than just by those items - I had a few obsolete ones, and a few doubles. So there is actual visible progress - which is really nice! And I can tell you that I have glimpsed at least one more proper picture database further down the list...

And on we go. Still lots left...

Here is an alternative gateway to browse images from the Bodleian Library. There's a thumbnail overview for each of the individual manuscripts, and the mss themselves are sorted by century and area of origin. The pics seem to be in the main database as well.

Heinrich-Heine Uni Düsseldorf has a digital catalogue where you can browse individual manuscripts. So has the Badische Landesbibliothek Karlsruhe. So has the Uni Darmstadt.

Individual manuscripts can also be found at the British Library in their Turning the Pages section. Manuscripts include the Luttrell Psalter, the Bedford hours, a Medieval Bestiary and the Sherborne Missal. No image search though, and you really have to leaf through the books.

Most of these lists don't allow for a search on image content, which is sad, but rather easy to understand - tagging all the images is a huge task! Makes me wonder why I filed them under "image databases", though, and not under "manuscript lists". Ah well. I'm correcting this now.

To finish off for today, here is the Gebetbuch Karls des Kahlen, a prayer book dating to the 9th century.