The Textile Forum is almost upon us! And thus, as you might have expected, I will go on a little blog break until I am back and sanity and some semblance of order have returned as well.  

The photo, by the way, shows the loaded car on the way to the Forum a few years back...  this time, it should be a little less stuff to pack. But still going to be plenty!

I will be back on the blog on November 19. See you then!

I'm back home for a bit after the wool festival in Backnang - which was lovely, and full of nice chats, and two spinning workshops that were very well received (at least I got a lot of positive verbal feedback, and nobody hit me over the head with a distaff! I count that as well received overall). 

It was very, very exhausting, though. If you're a solo trader and give workshops, you have basically no break at all. The setup I had - two workshops while running a booth throughout the whole weekend - was only possible because of the wonderful support of the Alte Künste-Team, who graciously occupied my booth and sold stuff for me while I was gone (thank you so much again!) and the help of my other wonderful neighbours, Frau Wöllfchen, who also had an eye on my stuff when I had to run off to the loo.

Because, let's face it - if you're a solo trader at these markets, reality is that you turn up in the morning when the place opens for the exhibitors, get your stuff sorted out, then you're there all the time except for a loo break when necessary - which is run to the toilet, do your stuff, and run back. If you're really lucky, someone from the team running the fair has organised a coffee distributor who passes by your stall and offers you a cup, or if you're really really lucky you have someone to spot you for ten minutes so you can have a breath of fresh air and maybe catch a cup of joe yourself. You're not getting out of your corner otherwise until the end of the day, when all you want to do is go to your overnight place and have something to eat and quiet and an early night to recharge for the next day.

Mind you, please, I'm not complaining. That's just how it is, and on a good fair, the day is so full of chats with people you don't even realize how time passes, and may even have trouble finding the time to eat. (You learn quickly to just make that time, no matter what.) Being in that rush, and knowing you're managing all this by yourself has its own kind of feelgood attached... and it's not that you don't know how it is after, at the latest, the first fair or show you're doing solo. (Kind-of-pro-tip: If you are on a fair, and have the time, and there's a solo trader you like - you might make their day if you ask them if you can fetch them a coffee, or something else.)

And there's always the unexpected talks about half- or very-way-off topics. The quiet chat with lovely people. The unexpected laugh, or crazy little action. In Backnang on the weekend, one of the giggliest times was the visit of the Green-Eared Cat (who is a very well-known personality at wool festivals here, and some of that may rub off on her taxi people). She turned up with her personnel, but of course the little piece of the Bamberg cloak reconstruction I had with me to show to people was only large enough for the cat herself to try on.  (The personnel will have to get themselves to Bamberg into the exhibition, where the full-size object is available for humans of any size to try on.)

But the cat did try it on, and to all our great delight, it fit her perfectly: 

So now it's sorting everything back, then packing for the European Textile Forum. Last prep for that is also running; we're still wondering about the best way to form artificial pearls, for instance. 

There's also two paper drafts that have to be finished and handed in, and some orders to be sent out, so I'm definitely not suffering from boredom right now!

Well, not quite - I'm still in the prep stage, printing stuff, sorting through things, re-stocking and packing up stuff so I can transport it to the wool festival in Backnang this weekend.

Tomorrow morning is a checkup appointment, tomorrow evening is the opening ceremony for "Vor 1000 Jahren", the exhibition in Bamberg, and Friday is set-up day already, so it does feel like it's almost the weekend. Which also means I'll be taking a few days off the blog - I will be back next week once everything is back home and (more or less) back in order again.

Go meet me in Backnang and say hello if you're in the area; you can find me on the stage together with Margit from Alte Künste and Frau Wöllfchen Heike.

The IMAREAL in Austria offers a series of lectures called "Materielle Welten" , and the one upcoming on November 6 is in English. The lecture starts at 17:00 MEZ and is titled "Seal Bags and Relics: The Case of Thomas Becket", held by Jitske Jasperse from Madrid.

You can join in for free; find out more about the series here (page in German) and about the upcoming talk here. 

I'm absolutely ready for the weekend to come - having successfully wrangled the tax paperwork stuff for the last quarter of the year*, it's now on to finishing the orders to be sent off, and then... weekend.

Next week will see the final prep stuff list for the wool festival in Backnang worked off (making lots and lots of distaffs has already happened), and then I will dive into a flurry of activity with the exhibition opening in Bamberg, the wool festival in Backnang, and then the Textile Forum.

Maybe I should start calling the time from mid-October to mid-November or end of November "Crazy Season"?

* Dutifully assisted by the cat, who came to sleep on my desk while I was doing it. Fortunately I was quick enough this time to take the stack of paperwork from her very-near-future resting place and put it to the side, so I could at least work on it. It has happened before that I was not quick enough and had to postpone tax work or book-keeping, as there's no way the individual papers can be pulled out from underneath the furry paperweight!

When I was small, I remember there being a regular children's magazine coming into our hose, and that included a "Bastelbogen" on the center pages (at least some of them did). So you could cut out and glue together a little house, or something else. They'd quite often find their way onto the train scenery that came downstairs from the attic around Christmas time. (I think the scale more or less fit, but frankly I didn't really care. The important thing was that I'd get to cut and fold and glue and then have a little something to put there.)

Later on, I once made a large cardboard castle... which then stood on top of a cupboard for ages, getting a little messed up and dusty and deteriorating a bit over time. These days, I usually pass when given the chance to buy one -  I still like the idea very much, and I'd enjoy the making, but then I never know what to do with the models. (I guess one could glue them to the ceiling and make an upside-down landscape there?) In case you also have a liking for those lightweight mini buildings, and don't mind having them stand around then, you might want to take a look at the Schreiber-Bogen website or, to be precise, their English shop. I've linked you straight to the churches, but there's also houses, ships, and whatnot.

Me, I always get a little nostalgic seeing these paper model sheets. One day,  though, when I have too much time...

I think I mentioned more than once that one thing that I really like about this line of work is that you can always expect something unexpected to come up. Case in point?

I've recently learned about a non-toxic stand-in alloy for quicksilver, and just ordered some for the upcoming Textile Forum. Why? Because there's a find of artificial pearls embroidered onto a tablet-woven band, and we're planning to try and find out how they might have been made.

There's an analysis of the remnants (which is mostly plaster and some protein), and there's a few surviving recipes from the late Middle Ages. Those quite often contain some base material like ground-up soft stone, egg white as protein, and... quicksilver. (Some also have fun stuff like the bones from the skulls of carp, and young doves to put the half-ready pearls in, then to be wrapped in bread dough and baked... but we'll stay with the simple stuff.)   

So. While I'm all for keeping as close to the original as possible, using real quicksilver for our trials was out of the question. On the other hand, though, the fact that it appears in a number of the recipes hints toward it having an actual function in them... so it felt like not the best option to just omit it. To my great happiness, there's a new alloy of different metals that is used to replace quicksilver these days. The trade name is "Galinstan", it's liquid at room temperature, it looks silvery, and we'll see if it will do the trick.

Now to organise and order the rest of the stuff that we'll need... and then on to the normal, boring housekeeping stuff like book-keeping.