This morning, I woke up at the wrong time - and not the usual wrong time. On most weekdays, I have  the tendency to sleep longer than planned, so I was quite surprised to find myself wide awake at shortly past five in the morning. Much too wide awake to go back to sleep.

Now, I could have gotten up and done something productive and necessary - like working on the half-finished new dress for the next season (I have nothing to wear, you know? Shoemaker's son goes barefoot, as they say). Or I could have gotten up and done something productive and not strictly necessary but already started upon - like spinning some more wheel-spun yarn to make a nice, thick skein of two-ply once that second bobbin is full.
Instead, I got up, slunk down into the cellar to fetch some wood, did a few pencil strokes in strategical places and started setting up the wood... for sawing. To get parts for a proper, medieval-style embroidery frame. Before I go to Vienna. And to have and hold afterwards.

I can always rationalize that this is also necessary work. It's a good tool for me to have, it's product development in case I decide to carry such frames at some point in the future if there's interest in it, it's good for demonstration of medieval embroidery techniques, and I really don't much care for those common round embroidery hoops that are never holding the fabric at the tension I want. And I decided to take this uncommonly early awakening as "extra time" for not-strictly-necessary-things just like this.

There was a little flaw in my plan, though. Since I didn't want to wake up the Most Patient of All Husbands, I had to stop after setting up things. So much for the extra time. Still, I did a good chunk of work yesterday evening, so... I'll be over there, sawing.

Oh, and by the way, what does the zombie embroiderer want? Fraaaaames.... fraaaaames...fraaaaames...

Can you believe there's no bus service from Asparn an der Zaya to Mistelbach on Sundays? Gah. I'd never have guessed that.

Just in case you are wondering why public transport in Austria is high on my list, Asparn is where this year's Textile Forum will take place. And the last day is a Sunday.

At least there's train service from Mistelbach to Vienna. Whew. So now I'll be working on figuring things out... and then updating the page. Life never gets boring!

Oh, and in case you haven't checked out the Forum webpage yet... go do it. Call for Papers/Registration is already running, and we do welcome you whether you come with or without a paper. This year's focus topic is "Linen and other Plant Fibres", but other contributions are of course also welcome.

There's fine weather outside, my little bicycle is equipped with normal summer tyres again, and somehow I feel like sitting in the sun and propping up my feet instead of working. But there's stuff to be done, of course.

My computer spring cleaning has yielded an amazing amount of free space on the hard disk, and there's still a good number of files to be deleted. The garden is mostly fit for the season of growth. My paper is coming along, with some more time for working on it scheduled for today. Bookkeeping is up-to-date for a change, and the new price list for the next season is almost finished. Almost... which leads me to a question.

I have found a source for good, fine and high-quality linen fabric, with much finer yarns and denser weave than normally available on the market. All of the four fabrics are perfectly suited for medieval embroidery, three of them also for counted work. And now I'm trying to decide whether to include pre-cuts in my stock of wares on offer or just sell it by the metre. Three of the cloth bolts are fairly wide, with 160 or 185 cm fabric width, so buying a metre would mean a lot of cloth.

Do you buy pre-cut fabric for embroidery? Or do you prefer to buy by the metre? And if you opt for pre-cuts, what size do you usually buy? Or do you buy kit packages instead of just the materials for a project?

I had a nice (and textile-free) weekend with lots of cake, since we went to a birthday party, and now I'm back with my nose to the to-do-list again. Main task for today is again getting the paper about the spinning experiment done - and a few mails in addition to that.

And then there's some computer maintenance to be done... After two hard disk drives died during my phd thesis time, I became obsessed with doing backups. (That has lessened off a bit in the meantime, though I'm still doing backups regularly, of course.) One side effect of the backupping-obsession was my tendency to copy everything a few times and keep backups from a few different ages simultaneously - and that, naturally, leads to very full backup drives. So from time to time, I have to do a duplicate search (there's a program I use for that) and delete the duplicates. Or at least all of the big files that are duplicates and as many of the smaller ones as I can stand. And that is also on the list for today - the duplicate hunter programme is running and will hopefully be finished this afternoon. (Did I say that there's lots and lots of data? Yes? Well, there's lots.)

And since I've been talking about backups of data, here's the obligatory final remark: If you haven't done a backup recently (and still did some work on your computer), go do it now!

Thank goodness it works again!

Yesterday's stint without the 'Net was not too bad, since I was able to work without the usual distractions. Plus, not reading or answering mails and not blogging did make itself noticeable in the time available for other stuff.

On the other hand, I do rely on the 'Net for some routine things, like checking translations or finding the best English word with the help of online dictionaries (I can type much faster than I can leaf through a paper dictionary) or explanations for stuff that I need to read up on (like, to take one of yesterday's examples, the definition of standard deviation). So I'm guessing that the time loss and the time gain probably even out for me.

And the reason for me to look up standard deviation? I'm working on a final write-up of the spinning experiment results, and trying to find the best way to visualise the different results and connections (or non-connections) to make it all understandable for the non-spinning reader. The article is planned for the conference proceedings of last year's OEGUF conference and might even appear in electronic format - I'm looking forward to see what medium will be chosen!

I'm sorry for the unannounced blog silence - our internet somehow stopped working yesterday evening, and I was without access for the morning and part of the afternoon. The friendly helpdesk man, however, told me they'd take care of it and fix the problem - and lo and behold, the Internet is back again.

Proper blogging again tomorrow!

During the past two days,  I stumbled across some very awesome and teeny-tiny stitchery. Check out these websites showing miniature stitchery of landscapes on background skies painted with textile colouring and embroidery for dollhouses in scale 1:12 (scroll down a bit, to "Beispiele"). While personally I'm not really a fan of petit point (contintental tent stitch on the Wikipedia page), because there's more embroidery thread in the back of the work than in the front, and I am much too cheap for that, those examples on the website are incredibly impressive and almost make me want to try it.

Just almost, don't you worry. I'll stick with my nice, large stitches over two threads on 20-threads-per-cm linen for a good while longer.

And finally a really nice video (h/t to Arachne, who facebooked this) with indubitable proof that textile works, creativity and innovation are never very far from each other: