It is well past time for me to get a new leaflet with information about what I do and offer, so I've spent some time going through pictures and writing some texts. Well, drafts, at least. Both of it is... not so easy.

Pictures-wise, I obviously want to use newer ones - from mid of 2016 or later, which cuts down on the number available quite a bit.

And texts... whew. I rarely feel like I'm good at writing my own ad copy, and I've frequently found that something I find to be very clear is not so clear to some other people. I also know I have a stack of older drafts somewhere around here which I just need to find again so I can have a look if they are any good; most times I find it easier to work with drafts when they have aged at least a bit.

So the big question is: Will I get pics, texts, and the time to put them together into a pleasing whole before the season starts?

You remember that ridiculously large package of wool I sent away recently?

It has returned from its adventures... looking still very large, and slightly (ahem, well, maybe more than slightly) battered.



And it contained wool, beautifully combed into top.

Lots of it. Obviously.



Of course I had to take a little bit of the fibre right away, and a spindle, and give it a little twirl - and just like I expected, it spins absolutely wonderfully.



So now I finally have Rhoen sheep wool and Valais Blacknose wool, already prepped ready to spin, in the shop! I'm ridiculously happy about this - and I hope other people will be just as much in love with these two rare sheep fibres as I am!

So... I've been doing some more back-and-forth mailing with my editor at the publishing house, and somemore poking and prodding at numbers regarding the Kickstarter, and I can tell you - it's daunting. Very, very daunting.

I would like to offer the book at a price that will end up being slightly lower than the final retails price, because I'd like to give backers the extra bit of "I got a good deal" feeling that I would want at a crowdfunding thing myself.

The problem with this is that it will involve a good deal of guesswork regarding the final price of the book - which can only be calculated finally once we have the finished manuscript, which needs to be translated first. Which is what I am going to run the Kickstarter for.

So there's some guessing involved, and some insecurity because we'll be dealing with currency change from Euro (the campaign will automatically run in Euro as I'm based in Germany) to British money, and the two are not fixed together regarding exchange rates. By now, I have run a lot of numbers, and I can already see that it will need a really, really huge number of backers if the margins are what I am currently expecting them to be. Too huge - it will look rather unrealistic, I'm afraid, so I will have to tweak and poke some more, and try to find a solution together with the publisher.

Things I'm currently planning to add, Kickstarter-exclusive, are signed (and possibly numbered) bookplates. Also possibly with some nice design on them. There will be Thank-you-postcards somewhere in the works. Most probably the majority of backers will just want the book, though, so I will really need to nail down things regarding its pricing.

Stay tuned - and keep your fingers crossed that we'll be able to hit the target when guesstimating things!

I think I've been asked recently whether I knew boredom... and the answer is, of course, a resounding "no". Whenever I think I'm sort of getting on top of things that have to be done, new stuff pops up.

Like small shenanigans in the webshop that need to be taken care of, and hunting down suitable pictures for some new advertising material. I've also been busy in getting some more information onto the Textile Forum website (the dye penetration summary is now a bit longer, and a bit more detailed), with still more to come. Kickstarter planning is also going on in the background. So... busy around here, even if there's not much physical stuff to show for this at the end of the day.

On the list for today: Taking some more photos for the shop, finishing the pallia Newsletter, and hopefully find time for some more Textile Forum work, too. There's still a good stack of experiment data that could use some analysis and research. (I keep being amazed by how much work in the aftermath an experiment will generate. You'd think that after all the careful planning and preliminary reserach, and then the actual running of the experiment, that would be most of the work... but no, most of the actual work is yet to come. Sigh. One day, I will actually be smart enough to factor that in better.)

It's a bit colder again outside, even though there was more sunshine to make up for it. I'm a little tired and a lot busy with all kinds of writing-related work, which sucks all the creativity out of my brain, so instead of a nice proper blogpost, you are getting today:

One gratuitous Cat Picture.

Here you go:

There are quite a few things in the works here right now, behind the scenes. For instance, I've sent off a huge package of wool to be carded, and I hope that the outcome will be wonderful, and that I will hear about it soon.

When I'm saying huge, by the way, I do mean huge. German post is rather generous in what it lets you send as a parcel in the higher ranges of weight and size, and I did make the most of it. This is the maximum size allowed - 120 by 60 by 60 cm - and I stuffed it chock full with wool. So much wool that I needed a lashing belt to help close it. So much that it was much, much easier to handle with my husband's help (which he was so nice as to give, as you can see from the picture).



I'm also conspiring with a metalworker to get some more, and some different, pins and needles into my stock. This is still in the starting phase, and we're working on prototypes and figuring out things, but it already looks promising, and I'm quite excited about this, too.

Finally, my colleague and I are waiting for the last bits to fall into place for the Bernuthsfeld tunic project. As soon as this has happened, we'll be able to set a date for handing over the tunic and its accompanying bits and pieces - something that I am also looking forward to very much!

 

There's a number of conferences coming up, and I thought you might be interested, so here they come:

African Experimental Archaeology Conference, March 20-22, Johannesburg. More info and registration here.

The 12th North American Textile Conservation Conference will take place in Canada, September 23-29, 2019. Their CfP is now open, and the topic is "Lessons Learned: Textile Conservation - Then and Now".

There's a conference on experimental Music Archaeology, April 12-14, in Brandenburg; more info and contact information here.

The CTR in Copenhagen is running a Saxo Summer School programme: "Textiles and Fashion in Theory and Practice through 3000 Years". It's a 10-day programme, more info on the CTR homepage.

The Dombauhütte Paderborn will have a bell founding event June 23-29, where a bell of 11th century style will be cast using 1th century methods. More info can be found on the facebook event page and on the Dombauhütte website.