I'm back home from a wonderful trip to Vienna - and now I'm relaxing a bit from the hustle and bustle of the last few days before I sit down to do a few necessary things.

Vienna has two drawbacks, if you ask me: One, it is much too far away; and two, it is much too big. Well, I don't mind the latter so much unless I have to go from here to there in the car. But driving in Vienna... uh. It's huge, there's lots of traffic, and there are sometimes very creative road layout details that can really surprise an unsuspecting person.

Apart from interesting routes in Vienna and a wonderful workshop with highly motivated participants - that bravely fought their way through brick stitch and couched work - I had lots of coffee, some gorgeous chocolate cake, delightful chats, a heavenly mushroom risotto with garlic bread one evening, and generally lots of fun. Oh, and a little field trip to the museum in Asparn where we'll have the Textile Forum in September. Though I had planned to take a lot of photos there, I sort of did forget while I was on site - but at least I took one picture of the house that will be ours for the Forum week:





And we will be next to this gorgeous reconstruction of a celtic sanctuary:



I'm already looking forward to September - I'm convinced we'll all have a wonderful time in Asparn!

I'm busy as a bee this morning, with all the usual last-minute packing and sorting for a workshop to be done. The printer is churning out my workshop papers right now, there's a goodly sized heap of stuff sitting here waiting to be carried into the car, and I'm all but chomping at the bit to go. And really, really looking forward to getting people to play with gold thread, plant-dyed silks and the best quality linen I've seen in ages. Good materials - good feeling while working.

Since I'll be far from here (why can't Vienna be closer to home?) and will be there some days - a meeting for Textileforum is planned for Monday - there will be no blogging until Wednesday next week. However, if you're in Vienna or close to there, you can stop by on Sunday evening, when there's a little "bazar" starting at about 18:00 in the Tympanum (Eulenspiel) in Prinz-Eugen-Str. 6 in Vienna. You will be able to shop in the book assortment that Gregor from buchportal.at is bringing, as well as browse my collection of odds and ends connected to historical textile techniques.

While I am finishing up stuff here and packing together all the stuff I am going to need during the weekend, I will just toss you a link to the V&A page about embroidery - just in case you don't know it yet.

It is here, complete with a little database of the embroidered objects they have. And I  stumbled across another thing on the V&A site: They have a youtube channel where you can watch videos about restauration and conservation work - or other informative videos. Like the stunning work for the Champlevé enamel. Do go spend some time there (so that I did not get stuck there alone)!

A long time ago, when I was in school, there were subjects I did like better than physics. Or mathematics.

And then, after finishing school, I started studying medieval archaeology. Hey, that's something where you don't need maths or physics for, right? That's what I thought.

This does not hold true, though, if you do heritage conservation as your "side study" course. Because once you go out and start measuring up the building, you need to lay a basic grid to start with. And that basic grid has to be right - so there's maths to calculate the angles and, even more importantly, to calculate the accuracy of your work. (Not accurate enough, you do it again.)

And you don't need physics only if you don't want to do experiments with spindles. (Or other things, probably.) So now I'm reading up on spinning physics for spinning tops and getting tutoring from the Most Patient Husband.

Which proves, again, two points that I did learn some good way back: Physics can be totally fascinating, and there's nothing that won't come in handy somewhere for doing archaeology.

It's foggy outside, I seem to have caught a summer flu, and I'm thinking about whether I should have stayed in bed this morning. So no proper blog post from me today, and I don't even have a nice link to give you.

So. This blog is boring today. Go have fun somewhere else. And I hope to be fitter and equipped with more content tomorrow.

The weekend before last, there was a small offiial ceremony at Hartenstein to officially "welcome" the two chess players into the museum. You can see a picture and the German article here.

There's not much else in news otherwise - the weekend was filled with other pastimes and things so that I didn't work on the embroidery frame again, and all the rest of the current projects is not finished either. So I'm picking up where I left off Friday - and I'll try to finish the frame some time today.

Things are progressing nicely here - the sawing work for the frame is all finished, and now I need to drill holes (lots of holes) and join up the parts. And then attach a strip of fabric or a band to the rollers top and bottom so I can dress the frame.

In case you are wondering how dressing the frame works, there's a nice, detailed description on Mary Corbet's blog "Needle 'n Thread". She also gives a lot of tips, tricks and hints on embroidery technique, though it is of course modern embroidery. Mostly, the difference is in the materials - cotton ground fabrics and cotton yarns, or synthetic silks, or modern metal threads. But there's also a difference in the approach to the materials. Modern stitchers are not as opposed to wasting a bit of the embroidery thread as I am (though that might just be me), and stitches can often have as much or even more thread running on the backside than on the front. Finally, judging from Mary's blog, it seems as if showing the back of the work is something usually not done.

Personally, I think that looking at the back of the work is at least as important as looking at the front. You can appreciate design and shading work from the front, and you can appreciate efficiency and stitching technique (and in my case, historical correctness of said technique) from the back. I am actually a bit miffed if somebody looks at my embroidery, tells me he or she embroiders, too, and then doesn't turn it around.

I am also of the opinion that there should be a law for the publication of surviving historical embroidery. A law that makes anyone writing about an embroidered piece to post at least three good quality photographs, showing a) the complete piece with measurements given in the text; b) a close-up of a detail, showing all the stitch techniques and materials used on the piece, if possible with a ruler or other size indicator on the photo; and c) a close-up of the back side of said detail, also with a size indicator on the photograph.

Why that? Because it's darn hard to find out how they did it without being able to see the flip side of a piece! With a photo of the flip side, it's at least possible to try it yourself and then compare to see if it's more or less matching the original. That is of course still not as good as sitting in front of the real original embroidery, but it's a good start. With only the front... all you can do is stitch it up and hope for the best. And that, my friends, is just not cutting the mustard - at least not for the nitpicky folks like me.

Now where do I propose that law? Any suggestions?