Planning the season has progressed enough for me to set a few new workshop dates!

These are, in short:
A workshop in Piacenza, Italy, in English language on April 13/14;

two single-day embroidery workshops in German language in Erlangen, on May 18 (counted work) and May 19 (picture embroidery);

a two-day workshop to tailor a garment in Erlangen, October 19 and 20.

For the workshops in Erlangen, you can book your place starting now - just follow the links for more information and booking possibilities. And if you have a special project or a group of like-minded friends, why not arrange a private lesson or a private mini-workshop? Contact me per email if you are interested!

There are things that are fast and easy to do, there are things that aren't, and then there are things that will just gobble up all the available time and then some. Just like most of yesterday was gobbled up by finalising that reviewed (and thoroughly re-worked) paper.

The most interesting thing about it? The three proofreaders (thanks again! you did great work) sometimes totally agreed on which phrasing was totally crappy, and sometimes totally did not agree. I got to pick and choose, somehow.

So today I'll spend a half hour more on the last bit of the thing, finalising it for submission, and then I will get rid of it. Finally. Whew.

It makes me wonder, however. How much time is writing a paper supposed to take? I suspect there will be a huge range of timespans eaten by paper-writing, and probably time spent is not correlating directly to paper length. Or even paper importance.

I woke up today to a wintry-looking world again - it has snowed more than 12 cm by now, snow is still falling, and everything is covered in a soft, fluffy layer of white. The cat has ventured out anyway, and she will probably be quite wet when she comes back. But that's not what you are here for, right? You are here for... juicy links. Here you go.

Coming up in the V&A in March is a new exhibition called "Treasures of the Royal Courts", showing among other things treasures from the court of Henry VIII.

And in case you prefer reading about stuff right now instead of looking at it some time in March: I have recently re-discovered a link to the Electronic Theses Online Service the British Library offers. You can search the EThOS database for authors, keywords, the usual; and quite a few of the theses are downloadable for free.

Finally a little bit of curiosity: have any of you experience with spinning on a spindle held (and turned) in the hand? If so, what do you like about that technique - are there advantages to turning in hand compared to a suspended spindle?

It's a good thing that it is finally Friday - somehow, this week feels like it's been chock-full of activities of all different sorts.

Which it probably does because yes, it was chock-full of activities. Remember that to-do-list thingie I posted about last week? (In case you did not, here's a blogpost elsewhere that nicely explains it.) I'm still using it, and for the first time in ages I am not feeling only daunted by a very long list of things I have to keep track of and have to keep care of. Instead, I have been getting a sense of achievement by getting stuff done - some (relatively few, though) of my to-dos from the huge list have been dealt with (though most have led to more items being added in turn). What, to me, is even better: I have managed very well to get my "dailies" done. Dailies are small tasks that you set yourself for daily repetition, such as "sort books on shelf for 10 min".

Which means there has been noticeable progress in the sorting of the library (aka the bookshelf behind me). Noticeable progress in looking through a very old bookmark list. And very noticeable progress in me sticking to doing at least some shoulder and neck exercises to keep those computer-work tensions at bay. Keeping track of these little things and motivating myself to do a small bit every day, nibbling away at very large and time-consuming tasks, is something that I have been remarkably bad at in the past. Sticking with doing ten minutes of book sorting (and entering book titles into the database) for more than one week? That, for me, is really very good.

So this little to-do list tool has really done something for my productivity, and it has passed the first test: it has been in use for one week (actually more than that) and I haven't fallen off yet. In fact, I'm still very happy with it. And feeling very motivated. (And I have a goodly list of tasks to take over for the current daily tasks once those books and bookmarks have been sorted. Like going through my main bookmark list... which is, regrettably, not really organised at all.)

Oh, and by the way, here is one of my favourite at-your-desk exercise videos:

When we started out with the idea of making the very first Textile Forum, we had just a limited number of goals - we wanted to make the Spinning Experiment possible, and we wanted to try if it's possible to get people from different backgrounds together to exchange knowledge, and practical knowledge.

After the absolute success of that first Forum in 2009, we decided to try making it a regular fixture. This was just four years ago, so it's not a real long-standing full-fledged tradition yet. Quite on the contrary, we are still finding how to make the Forum even better, to get better connection between the academic and the practical side, and how to establish it as a true long-term thing.

What I did not expect back then, or dared to dream of back then, is that we would have our own publication one day. But largely thanks to one person taking the stick and running with it (and gently hitting the contributors, including me, when appropriate, with said stick to keep them working) and doing all the editing work, we will have one. And now, since the proofs are in my inbox and our editor is waiting for the feedback, it suddenly feels much, much more real than before.

I will keep you updated once we have a firm publication date - and I am so looking forward to this!

I have two very different links for reading material to share with you - first of all, the work-type one:

JSTOR (which is an electronic journal archive) has introduced a new programme "Register and Read" with a limited amount of free journal papers for everyone. You can read up to three papers online, for free, at once; and after 14 days you can choose a new paper to substitute the old one. More information and an Excel list with the journals in that scheme (which I cannot open since it's .xlsx format) are on their info page, here.

And reading pdf texts as well but completely different: Neil Gaiman has made a writing-and-illustration art project together with Blackberry that is currently still running. Apart from having several stories available for download, for free, there's also the possibility to hand in artwork illustrating these stories. And here's the link for your delectation.

A few days ago, someone pointed out another sciency search engine on the web in one of the comments: Scirus. Meanwhile, I have managed to try it, and it might be a good additional way to find things - articles, books, pdf files - regarding a research topic.

Like usually, it is a bit biased towards both patent applications or natural science articles (because more of that is on the net than, say, scientific articles about the performance of a 16.5 g spindle whorl on different spindle sticks), but it's nice to have a second place to look in addition to Google Scholar.

Speaking of alternative search engines - I have been trying to get a little more independent of Google search recently. Because, you know, monopoly is not good, usually - and total dependency is not good either. So I have given DuckDuckGo a go.

DuckDuckGo searches stuff but does not rank it by hits like Google does by default; they have a very, very good privacy policy (that is so good it will havoc stat tracking functions for webmasters, since you will not hear about search terms used to find your site); there's goodies like instant calculator and password generator, and no ads except from a very unobtrusive sponsored link.

I have, by way of testing, put it into my browser as the default search engine. It is very interesting to see how different search results can look, and quite impressive how much Google "tunes" the results. I'm not totally convinced I will stay with it forever, though - and I still use Google for some stuff. I have noticed that in quite a few cases, I have a much easier time finding the site I am looking for with Google, thanks to their sorting algos. And the Duck has no image search (something that I need not too infrequently).

However, I like their policy. Go give them a try - maybe it's just the (additional) search engine you were looking for.