I've learned that my book "Kleidung im Mittelalter" is currently out of print... which is, in a way, good news (because that means it has sold all its copies, obviously) but, on the other hand, bad news (because it's out of print and thus not available at the moment).

I'm in contact with the publishing house, and it does look like there might be another print run. I'll keep you updated!

The sun is shining, it's cold outside, and here are things from around the Internet!

There's a project on indiegogo to get a Mini-Mill from Canada all the way to Iceland, to spin the wool from local sheep into nice yarn. You can support that project starting with a 4 USD donation, and there are multiple perks to get hand-picked wool or yarns. So if you are looking for some really special fibre or yarn... you might find it just there.

Hugo Nomination Season is upon us, and will run until March 17. While I am, as usually, abysmally behind in reading current stuff, I do intend to nominate at least a few things. EscapePod, for one thing - and since there's some more spinning hours in the weeks ahead, I think I might find one or two more stories from 2016. In the "Best Related Work" category, Gillian Polack's "History and Fiction" is actually eligible... and I hope to find some more exciting stuff before the deadline. Hints about books and short stories published in 2016 that blew you away are utterly welcome!

While we're on the topic of reading, Aarhus Press Free Ebook of the month is "Elephants are not picked from trees", a book with stories about the taxidermied animals in Gothenburg National History museum.

Not free, but available again in digital version after they went out of print: past issues of Experimentelle Archäologie in Deutschland/Europa. You can have a look at the volumes on the EXAR website and click through the "buy" link to land on the publisher's homepage, where you can buy pdf downloads of individual articles from out of print volumes.

I'm not spinning today, for a change - the yarn is still in transit, and once it has arrived (the two-ply to be woven together with some variants of the yarn for the next batch), we can discuss what I spin next, and how exactly regarding thickness and twist.

So instead, today there was finally time to sort out some paperwork, pay bills, make some space on the desk and now I will have to do the beloved (hah!) book-keeping and tax stuff. One day I will be rich enough to have somebody do that for me. (Maybe. Probably, by then, I'll have come to terms with it and have become so efficient at dealing with that stuff that I won't need somebody to do it for me anymore...)

Anyway, while I am doing stuff that is not spinning and not knitting, here's a picture of the current state of the knitting (which I'd rather be doing):

I have a Pirate Roberts on the needles, and I'm halfway through the pattern bit, so almost finished. Here it is only a few rows into the pattern part:


Also, the Vignette cardigan is almost finished. It needs blocking now - though I have discovered that one of the sleeves, due to Weird Yarn Shenanigans, looks much more pink than the rest of the pieces, so I'm considering knitting it again (from a different skein, obviously):


Aaaaand that being blogged, now I'm finally out of excuses not to get started with the bookkeeping stuff!

This, my dear readers, is eighthundredandseventy metres of Coburg Fuchsschaf two-ply:


weighing in at 1630 grams. It is a honking big chunk of yarn, and it will travel off now to be woven into a fabric of the kind once used for packing up stuff.

Yay.

There are days, sometimes, when things are just... not as usual. Today turned out to be one of them, partly due to my parents stopping by, and me trying to cram the usual amount of work into the day despite having coffee and a chat with them. The severe lateness of this blog post is thus due to my routine being thrown off plus the computer doing some shenanigans in the late afternoon, when I actually fired it up and would have had the chance to see, on my virtual to-do list, that blogging has not happened yet.

But, on the plus side, I did manage to get things done. So... the spinning of the next batch of yarn is finished, and I'm sitting on a heap (a true heap!) of really thick two-ply yarns. Tomorrow will see the yarn sent off after taking a few photos of the skeins, and the yarn, for documentation purposes.

Because, you see... I recently found out that there can be a quite remarkable difference between how yarn looks in the skein and how it looks in the fabric. Which is... interesting. In the Firefly oh-god-oh-god-interesting way, kind of:
Well... it looks like I will have to take care not to add too much twist (I cannot believe I'm really writing this), or the cloth will not look as it's supposed to look. I'm also developing a few more thoughts and hypotheses about twist angle and its reliability, all of which are interesting but not helpful at the moment - though they should be good, juicy stuff to talk about at NESAT in May...

Time for a link roundup again!

If you're interested in experimental archaeology, you might enjoy taking a look at the Butser Farm archives - Butser was one of the first places to do experimental archaeology, and still is a famous name among ExArchies.

Fur was an important clothing material right along with textiles - and if you'd like to read some more about it, Cotte Simple has a fur primer (with lots of pictures).

You prefer harder stuff? Like stone? COGA (creation of gothic architecture) is a website with detailed information about building phases of churches in France, for instance for Notre-Dame-du-Fort in Étampes. I find it utterly fascinating!

That was not the hard stuff you were thinking of? Medievalists.net has a link to a paper about medieval women and their recourse to arms.

I will recourse to the spinning thing now. There's still some more yarn to be made...

Thank goodness it's Friday - I'm really looking forward to having a weekend and catching up on sleep. I mentioned that things are exciting a few days ago, right? Well, the downside to all that excitement, for me, is often a lack of sleep time. As in I go to bed, I fall asleep without a problem, but then I wake up way, way too early... and have a really hard time to fall asleep again. Hard time as in "normally it doesn't work at all".

So after a while of tossing and turning as little as possible (so I don't make myself even more awake and, even more important, neither the cat, who will then pester me to serve her food, nor the most patient husband of them all, who does not deserve to be woken by my sleeplessness, get disturbed), I usually give up, get up and do something more or less useful. In this morning's instance, that was some more spinning, and some more plying.

The weekend, on less than adequate sleep and the corresponding amount of coffee, though, is beckoning harder than usual now. There might be some extra spinning to get the perceived stress level of "so much still to spin" down a bit... but there will also be time to relax, and go for a climb, and do some more fun things - which is just what I need to balance out all that excitement!