There has been no more snow for quite a few days, and it was quite warm - at least compared to when it was really cold this winter, since we had temperatures of down to -18° C then.

Now it's much balmier, with a little bit of sunshine and positive degrees of temperature for most of the time. The snowdrops are in bloom, and the first three crocuses are also flowering already. A few of the tulips had already started to push out a leaf or two back in November, and those leaves are now a good bit frost-bitten, but the rest of the tulips are only starting to push through now - and it seems that my parting of the bulbclusters and replanting them as individuals last autumn paid off, at least I can now see gazillions of tulip tips everywhere.

All this means it's time to tidy up the garden and fix a few things there. Which is going to make a welcome opportunity for good-weather breaks during the next days - I have a presentation to prepare, one article to fix and expand, and one article to write, so escaping to the outdoors for a little time (because that sprawl of thyme in the flowerbeds has to be thrown out!) is really nice.

Sometimes, it just takes a while for all kinds of things to turn towards favourable constellations... and it seems that I might get a shot at a portable Great Wheel, with a little luck and a bit of woodworking.

For those of you not familiar with a Great Wheel: this contraption (also called Walking Wheel or wool wheel sometimes) is the very early form of a spinning wheel - basically, it's a hand-spindle mounted sideways and connected to huge lightweight wheel by a drive band.

Image from British Library Manuscript Royal 10 E IV, f. 147. Dated to last quarter of 13th or first quarter of the 14th century. Link to the catalogue entry with more information.

There are a few common problems with building a wheel like that, especially when it's part of the intended use to lug the thing along to different events: It has to be properly functional, it should be correct regarding materials and construction, and it has to be possible to take it apart enough so that it can fit into the car. Add to this the fact that the images are not always very clear, or have a proper perspective, and that one can build a functional wheel much easier if one has worked with this type of tool already, and there's quite a bunch of difficulties. Plus it's of course necessary to have the wood, the tools, and the crafts abilities to make such a thing.

Well, some of the basic construction and concept problems sort of came up with a few solutions almost by themselves yesterday evening. A woodworking workshop is at the moment magically appearing in our basement, including a gadget necessary to steam-bend wood. There also is a little leftover wood. And I should be able to procure the metal parts for the wheel with little or no trouble, the way it is planned at the moment... so I will do some thinking, and some scheming, during the next weeks. And who knows, with a little luck and some dusty woody work... there might be another wheel in my future.

(Oh. You might have heard that saying about how spinning wheels are herd animals? It's totally true. If you do not want a herd of spinning wheels, you should keep your one and only wheel isolated. Don't get a second one. Don't even lend one from someone else for a while. They will start multiplying then. It's probably best if you don't even leave it alone in another room with a second wheel. They're almost as bad as rabbits. Really. I swear.)

I have managed to finally get some more of the nasty small things done - tweaking a few of the texts at the shop, getting bookkeeping stuff up to date, thinking about new products, settling a few date issues - and now the next things looming up on the horizon (or not so far off, to be fair) are both the conference in Vienna (where I'm still waiting for the final verdict on how much time I will have), a paper to finish for some other conference proceedings - relating textile production to daily life in the Middle Ages - and the IRM.

The IRM is a goods and service fair in a museum not too far from Trier, taking place March 31 and April 1 (and it's not an April Fool's joke). It's a fairly new project, this fair, and I am not sure what to expect. Since this is the very first fair I'm going to as an exhibitor, I am also not yet sure what to bring and how to do the presentation. Something nice and new would be splendid to bring there... but I'm not completely sure what. Maybe an embroidery package? There should be time enough for me to prepare a few, including instructions and background info. (Your input on this, as always, will be very welcome!)

If you've ever wished to take a walk along the Bayeux tapestry, but you are not getting to Bayeux for now, you can do so virtually - the full tapestry is on the internet.

Now usually, I'll be one of the crowd that says horizontal scrolling on webpages is evil - but in this case... it's just cool.

I'm currently preparing the powerpoint slides for my paper at the "3000 years of Colour" conference, and I'm having the usual problem again: I need an intro bit explaining what I was doing, then some words about methodology and experiments, then the intro to the experiment design and the data gained from it.
And by the time I can get into talking about the analysis, this means quite a lot of time has gone already. And I need to keep it much, much shorter than I would like to. This is such a common problem when you're working in a niche field - I usually end up taking about 5 minutes to explain what I am doing, and why, in a conference paper. Many of the conferences on experimental archaeology only give you a 20 min slot, so that means a quarter of my allotted time is gone before I can get properly started with my research and results presentation.

Can somebody please invent something to slow time during a talk? That would be so, so nifty sometimes.

By pure chance, I stumbled across this a while ago - someone doing incredibly awesome art with thread. But in a completely different way than expected:


This is one of the pieces Devorah Sperber makes, and it boggled my mind. You can see more of her work showcased here - and it really, really is worth a look.

Now if I had space and money for a few thousand spools of yarn and an acrylic ball...

It's not the first time that I write on this blog about how I dig modern technology. Or the InterBloggoTubes. But it's time to mention one incredibly cool (and meanwhile also incredibly successful) idea: Crowdfunding. Or, to be more specific: Kickstarter.

I first found out about this platform and the idea it carries - get normal people to fund an expensive project with their money, getting a little (or sometimes not-so-little) input from many persons - when Neil Gaiman blogged about a short animated film project on Kickstarter. And since then, I have looked there now and then, browsed the projects... and sometimes even fell in love with one of them and backed it.

In case you do not know about crowdfunding yet, here's the Cliff's Notes: Someone has a project that needs more money for getting it going - like printing a book, making a CD, or filming something, or making a gadget of some sort. Sometimes, there is a market for the item in question, but it is commonly only reached via middlemen (publishers or similar), or there's even more investment needed to distribute the item so it gets to the market. Lots of projects die in this stage. Enter crowdfunding: now the someone in question describes the project, maybe even with a little video, and asks for help in making this. Not just help though - anyone who backs a project usually gets something back: a copy of the item in question, a personalised item, a limited edition thingie, and so on. So basically you future-buy something that would not come into existence without your future-buying it.

Kickstarter also has a very good system of handling the logistics: you can change your pledge at any time until the end of the drive, and you will be charged only once - after it closes - and only if the project reached its funding goal.

And in case you now wonder whether this can function... it can. There's a lot of purchasing power in the hands of geeks, and those folks are prone to find out about something like Kickstarter. And if you need more proof about that, check out these two still-running projects that both have more than a million dollar in pledges now - a drive for funding a comic book reprint and a drive for making a point-and-click adventure game (close to two million now). And if you would like to see a truly amazing marketing strategy in action, make totally sure you check out the updates of the Order of the Stick drive. This is how it's done, and I'm in total awe about how Rich handled this.