One of the nice things about events such as the IRM, or other fairs, is that you meet up with colleagues and get to chat with them about all kinds of things. Which includes learning about stuff...

When I met up with the guy who makes my bronze sewing needles and bronze pins, he told me about having had trouble with his arm (which had kept him from working for several weeks); and he also told me about having counted the tools and aids and other items that he uses to make a single humble pin.

Can you guess how many?

Twenty-one. Twenty-one items are used to produce each single pin, ranging from general things such as hammer and anvil and abrading medium to several special items such as the tool to wind the wire into spirals for the heads, and the special tool to compress the wire coils into the nice round shape they are supposed to have.

I think this is fascinating - and it shows again how easy it is to underestimate production procedures for small, everyday things.

I'm back from the fair, and it was lovely - even though the weather did its very best to be as Aprilly as possible. We had sunshine and rain and snow, so I was really glad about my place inside the building, even though it was a little darker than I'd have preferred. My room neighbours were lovely as well, and a lot of people stopped by to look at things and chat.

The way home was long, though, even with an overnight stop at some friends' place - lots and lots of dense traffic and stretches of road under construction, with more of that aprilly weather featuring torrential rain interspersed with snow and sunshine. Plus I'd caught a bit of a cold, so I was so happy to have arrived back here on Monday afternoon that I let the cat totally distract me (and promptly forgot to blog).

Today will be a rest day to make up for the missed weekend. Hooray!

[caption id="attachment_2380" align="alignnone" width="600"] The weather is still really aprilly this morning. Case in point? Our tulips in the snow. Huge snowflakes!

I've been busy as a bee these last few days with preparations...


and now the car is packed with goods, there's a cold box with food in there (I'm already looking forward to the barbecue evening for all the traders on Saturday), plus tables and tablecloths and all the odds and ends that are needed for a sales table - I'm off to the first event of the season!

If you go and visit the IRM, make sure to drop by and say hello; I'll be in Room 8 (which is one of the bathrooms, very nice and cosy).

Glasgow Textile Conservation has a blogpost about the conservation of an 1820s cap. More textile links? Aisling has posted about three different variations of a single pattern (in German, though).

Jstor Daily has a nice post about weird names of food.

In other news, the sun is shining, the cat is napping on the sofa, and I'll be packing stuff into the car now for the trip tomorrow. And finally - here's a gratuitous pic of the madder in the garden, growing nice and tall in the spring sunshine.
It is not alone, this little stalk. In fact, madder has a tendency to take over as much ground as it can - a bit like peppermint plants... only with more red in the roots. This autumn, I really have to harvest some of the madder roots, or there will be no space left for anything else!

There's a lot of politics going on at the moment, all the time, that make me wish... I'm actually not really sure what to wish for. Probably some more human decency for everybody, plus some more awareness and shit-giving for those who are actual high-ranking politicians, and a bit more common sense (again, for everybody, I'd take an extra serving of that too. Can never hurt).

TTIP and CETA are still not off the table, even though there's been more petitions and protests against them than I can count these days, and every German politician should have realised by now that the majority of the people here do not want either of these agreements.

Syngenta has been granted a patent on tomatoes. Freaking tomatoes. A patent. Patents are for inventions. Nobody invented the tomato. Patents are not for breeding, or anything would be patented. Can you even start to believe it? (If you can't, and would like to help stop this utter madness, you can join the mass opposition here. German version is here.)

The refugee situation is still surrounded by myths and people say the stupidest things, or use them as scapegoats. It's war over there. War. I can totally understand that people are trying to leave - I can also totally understand that most of the refugees are staying much closer to home than Germany, the US, or the rest of Europe, hoping for that madness to end soon, making it possible for them to return home. Can we please all show some human decency and be happy for the people who actually made it out of that hell alive? Maybe imagine how we ourselves would feel if we had to choose between hell on earth where once home was, and family and friends and comfort, or leaving everything behind, risking our lives and that of our loved ones to take refuge in some foreign place far away?

Really. What is up with humanity?

Sometimes, there's a shimmer of hope, like when the Paris Agreement was made - we do need to change to sustainably energy and stop the climate change, and the Paris Agreement is an important step in the right direction. However... plans are to start implementing things in 2020. That's years from now. Also it has to be signed and ratified by governments all around the world before that - and there is no time limit on when it has to be ratified... so it might all peter out into nothing. (There's again somewhere you can sign to try and help speed this up. Hope springs eternal, right?)

There's also no end in sight for the madness that is the EU vat. There are still plans afoot to extend the rules to physical goods sometime in the future, and I'm still afraid of that, because that would probably mean the end of my business. I have addresses that I could write to, but I'm so tired of all this and sort of hopeless that it will change anything. I know that is not true, but I still don't have the energy to sit down and write that letter, and send it off. It makes me angry at myself, and sad, but the task still sits on my to-do-list, so I haven't given it up completely yet. Maybe next week.

Sigh. Sorry for the rant.

First of all, here's how the red-and-yellow tulips look today:


They are lovely, and they seem to be really robust - several years ago, a friend brought us ten red-yellow bulbs, ten black ones and ten white ones. There's one small white tulip left from that planting, the black ones have all disappeared by now, but the red-and-yellow ones are going so strong that I even had enough bulbs for a second cluster somewhere else in the garden last year. (I'm a little sad about the white and black ones. I really liked them!)

In other news, I've been busy working on one project which I cannot disclose yet, plus preparing for both the IRM (drawing closer and closer) and the Internationaler Museumstag, taking place on the third Sunday in May (so this year it's May 22). I'll be in Darmstadt on that day, demonstrating really early textile techniques - think neolithic times. This is a bit earlier than my normal focus time, so I'm extra excited and happy to do something different this time around, and have been doing some preparation work for it. (That will include taking a few photographs for the programme and PR, which is on my to-do-list for tomorrow.) Some more prep work is also planned - I'll have to harvest a few samples of plants that were used for these proto-textiles, but this is a task better done nearer to the actual event. Speaking of which - the programme for the day in the Landesmuseum Darmstadt is not online yet, but I've had a sneak peek, and I can tell you that it is chock full of interesting things!

A long while ago, I wrote a blog post titled "How to untangle a skein of yarn". The reason for this post was my having had a, hm, let's call it an incident with a winder and a skein of yarn. Of very fine, lovely and pricey silk yarn.

Cue the necessity to find out how to untangle said skein and salvage the yarn. That inspired the blog post, and it's since been one of the most read posts, as well as a rather high-ranking result when looking for instructions on how to untangle yarn in a search engine.

So I've finally translated the post into German, and it's now available as text in both English and German on my main website. I do hope it will help more people in the future!

In completely unrelated news - we went indoor bouldering on Sunday, and that was a lot of fun, plus resulted in sore arms for me today. We'd been climbing (classical top-rope climbing) years ago for a while with some friends, but never got into it on our own. Bouldering doesn't require ropes or harnesses and somebody you can trust to secure you; instead, you pick a route and get started. Plus the climbing gym had a nice café to hang out with friends. We're definitely planning to do that again in the future!