Things that would be really helpful right now:

Another week of time for finishing that article. (Has to be finished today, due to Freienfels.)
Not having hay-fever at all.
Even more time for doing a bunch of things that are fun (and also sort of necessary) but also take time - like planting out a few of the seedlings crowding the wintergarden here, and re-potting some others, and baking a cake (with rhubarb! It's rhubarb season, hooray!)
And even more more time for some much-needed putting things into order and straightening out stuff. Plus (very important) the motivation to actually do it.
An extra-fast postal service, since I'm waiting for a heap of packets, none of which have arrived yet. Which is very sad. And they include a packet with material that I hope to use for the new market stall setup/decoration... so it should better arrive before Friday morning.

And, top of the list: profound knowledge of everything that I need to know. Preferably in form of something like eidetic memory that also enables me to exactly, and faultlessly, remember where I read something. That would be so cool.

On the plus side, the installation thingie for the flowery newness is almost complete - I only need to drill three holes and pack three leather strips as ties for it. And I'm really looking forward to Freienfels!

Dirt is nice, especially when it conserves stuff. Any archaeologist knows that.
Getting your hands dirty is nice. Any craftsperson knows that.
And any bibliophile knows that you should not touch books when you have dirty hands...

but what if you are a bibliophile archaeologist-slash-craftsperson? You will probably have at least a few books that are at least a little dirty. Now that can also be a good thing! Trust me! In a few hundred years, should your books with the dirt on them have survived, and should they be deemed interesting enough for study, stuff might happen with the dirt on them.


As it now does with the dirt on late medieval manuscripts. Someone is actually looking at dirt traces as wear patterns on prayer books, and trying to extract information about the use of said books by the reader. This, I'd say, is really cool stuff to do with dirt!

Blogger has finally changed its layout for everybody, including people like me who try to stick to the old layout they know well until it's not possible anymore.

Otherwise, stuff has changed layout too, in a manner of speaking: I have done my inventory check and combined this with emptying, checking and cleaning and re-filling the boxes for my goods. This was, of course, accompanied by the usual grumbling about how boxes in different sizes never fit into a larger box without trouble. Quite a few of the goods changed box shape and size, so I am looking forward (well, not really) to hunting for the box I remember containing x and then finding that x moved. (Yes, I did label the boxes to avoid as much of that as possible.)

All this shifting and sorting actually led to the workspace getting a tiny bit more organised in the process, which is a very, very good thing. So on my schedule for today: spooling the last rolls of yarn (new colour of fine plant-dyed silk!), putting even more things into even more order about here, and doing some serious (and deadlined) writing work.

I am using the time until the Copenhagen conference starts to do my pre-season-start inventory work, which also includes cleaning out and re-filling the many boxes I use to protect and store the wares that I lug along, and other work like dunking my baskets in water to clean and revitalise them.

And I'm very happy to announce that I can do this while sitting in a room with the newly finished Flowery Newness!

This was quite pleasant to work and did not take overly long, thanks to the appliqué technique. The motif is taken from a 15th century manuscript margin decoration; the manuscript is probably from South Germany and is a Book of Hours. You can see the inspiration page in the British Library online thingie, here.

For those interested in the technique: It's wool on wool, plant dyes (with exception of the stems, which are fake onion-dyed chemical dye), edges caught with beeswax and sewn on with plant-dyed silk thread. I had to use a substitute for the gilt leather strip that would usually have surrounded the edges; the substitute is a gilt thread (which should really be called a rope, compared to proper historical gold thread).

This flowery banner will adorn my sales table in Freienfels - and I think it's quite the eye-catcher!

If you are reading this blog, there is a rather high chance that the name "Oseberg" will mean something to you. Just in case it does not: The Oseberg ship was a Viking age burial ship and a spectacular archaeological find. It has beautiful carvings, and, as usual for a burial ship, was equipped with the burial (of course), other wooden items (such as a wagon), non-wooden items, and some equally spectacular textiles (the pictures aren't of spectacular quality in this link, but it will give you an overview of the finds).

The ship was found in 1903 and excavated in 1904. And now, it seems, the wooden items are in really, really dire need of reconservation - as this article (in Norwegian) describes.

For those of you who do not read Norwegian: The conservation method used for several of the wooden finds (not the ship) was employing alum as a stabilising agent. This has made the wood very brittle, and now it has been found that the finds are slowly rotting away from the inside, so that  they are only still kept together by the slightly more stable surface. The main items afflicted with this are the wagon and the sled. The museum has asked for money from the Norwegian government to save the finds, but this was denied. Because, the government says, the museum and/or university should be paying for something like this out of their own budget.  (They asked for approximately 5 million Euro to save the finds. And everybody knows that any museum or university can easily afford a sum like that, just so, at the drop of any hat.)
According to the article, the finds could fall apart any moment. (Thanks to Natascha Mehler and Rainer Schreg for translating all that to German, so I could translate on.)


I don't know what to say. I really, really don't. Norway is not that poor a country, and the finds really are outstanding and a piece of their cultural heritage.

Now the museum's last hope is for private sponsors. 


I still can't believe this.

First of all, if you are interested in hearing about textiles and economy, don't forget that the conference in Copenhagen starts tomorrow at 9 in the morning (GMT +1). All the links to participate via remote connection are up, and I think folks in Copenhagen are looking forward to having a remote audience too! This is certainly something that makes me feel all futuristic.

In other news, the flowery newness is not yet finished; there's still some (but considerably less) work to do - mostly the last embellishments plus the edges of the thing.

And finally, I have been looking for an alternative to amazon again (why? they are too mighty, and they know it), since they gobbled up the bookdepository online shop in 2011, prompting quite a few concerned reactions. I have now heard that at least for Germany, buch.de seems to be a good alternative - free shipping for books (in the country, at least), a decent selection of English books, and their prices are only slightly higher than those of bookdepository or amazon. I can live with slightly higher prices if the rest is fine - plus they even offer several different payment methods with no added costs, like paying after getting an invoice.

Work in progress, with real progress: My new eyecatcher for the market stall table. It's colourful, it's nice, it's not very small but small enough to fit on the table, and it has something to do with flowers. Plus, and that's a big plus, I have managed to pick a technique that does not take ages to do, for a change in my usual procedures.
The bad news for you: I have decided not to post a picture of the work-in-progress of the new sales table embellishment (one needs something new nice to look at once in a while, right?) but only show a picture of it once it's finished. The good news for you, then, is that I have some hope that I may be able to finish it today... there's not too much work left on it.

First, however, I will have to bring the car away to get the windshield repaired - the glass still has its huge crater from when a stone hit it on the way to the IRM in Borg. And after that, the day even promises to be a very nice day, with good weather - which always means I can sit in the sun while working. Hooray!