Not Friday yet... but almost. Almost! However, there's three more things on my to-do-list for today that need doing, so I'd better move on. One of the things already checked off today?

Making more bands for distaffs, both for the DIY kits (provide your own stick) and for the ready-made distaffs. 

That's always a nice, calm bit of work - cutting the bands, then hemming one end (the free end, once the band is attached to the distaff). A little bit of really easy sewing, perfect to listen to a podcast or something similar while doing it.

There's also been some cutting of pin shanks, some yarn winding, and some printing of instructions - so I'm slowly getting there again. Now there's a little more writing work to be done, and then dressing distaffs to send them off for the workshop tomorrow. Plus more writing, plus some planning for exhibition stuff.

Well, it is certainly not getting boring around here!

The latest delivery of spindle whorls has arrived - just in time, as I was running low on some of the weight ranges. It's always making me happy to sort the new whorls into stock...

...and then send them off to new homes, one by one, as they get ordered. There's quite often some rummaging when I get requests for a specific shape or colour, or for both - so I might dive into the stash and not just the sorting boxes, but the boxes are very handy, and are also what travels with me when I go to a fair or market. Very handy - and it saves searching through a big box of whorls and weighing them several times!

It seems to be the season for CfPs - so here's some more:

The European Association of Archaeologists have extended their Call for the 30th Annual Meeting in Rome, Italy. The conference will run August 28-31, and the new deadline is February 12.  You can find out more about the conference and also the submission portal via their website.

There will surely be quite a few textile sessions there again, and one of them is Session #733, Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Archaeology of Roman Textiles. 

Finally Friday - a little bit more of writing work to do, and then I'm looking forward to the weekend, first a little bit of knitting conference tomorrow, and then some time to fully relax and do nothing on Sunday. 

Where hanging out (or falling off the wall) in places like this counts. Maybe not as doing nothing, but more as a relaxing activity.

And then next week there's spindle whorls to sort (a fresh delivery has arrived today), and distaffs to prep and send off for the workshop in March, and maybe some more pins to make. It's definitely not going to be boring then either! 

... that old banking cards and credit cards are electronic appliances. At least in Germany, according to the law, because they contain a chip!

Which also means that you're not supposed to just cut them up and put them into your domestic trash; they should be handed back to the bank, or placed into the appropriate recycling station.

Here's a nice little instruction on how to cut them up, by the way. (That mightbe handy outside of Germany as well...) I wonder, though, how they are going to recycle the tiny, cut-up chip? 

Something for the German speakers today - the GNM (Germanisches Nationalmuseum) in Nuremberg is offering a position as museum education specialist for two years, to re-design part of the permanent exhibition. If that's in any way interesting for you, check out their full description of the job here on the museum website.

 (And just in case you did not know, if you're looking for a job in Germany for historians or related subjects, H-Soz-Kult is a good place to check. The position listed above is also there - and lots more.)

 Insight of the day? My website is rather large, taken everything together (the years of blogging, with images, have added up, and so do the shop pictures). Which means that if I take backups of the site (a good thing), I should sort of keep an eye on where I put them, and at some point delete them again.

I've been pretty good at doing that on the website/server itself, as there's limited space available there and I would have run out long ago otherwise. Not so good at keeping track of the backup backlog and buildup on my computer itself, where I'll pull older backups (but not so very old) before deleting them from the server, just in case. Or, when there's a larger change on the website coming up or a migration is necessary, I'll pull backups down and do a local install. 

Migrations and larger changes usually mean a generous number of backups, too. And I've been rather happy to close the thing after getting everything up and running when I did those larger changes... which means that the backups stayed in their little corner of my computer. No problem and nothing wrong with keeping them for a month or two, mind you, until it's clear that everything is running smoothly with the new setup.

However... after a month or two, I'd totally forget about having them. Until I've recently come across some, neatly and nicely labelled (as opposed to others) and realised how much space they are eating up, all of them combined.

So I've been doing a bit of maintenance on the side. Just in case you now feel like that might be something you should maybe do, here's my two favourite tools for finding and deleting stuff that has served its purposes:

WizTree - this scans your drive and sorts folders by how much space they take up. There's also a nice visual to quickly show you what you have, and how large individual folders and the files therein are. 

Anti-Twin - this looks for duplicate files and lets you remove them (either by selecting them manually, or by folder, or other criteria). It has not been updated since 2012, but it's still downloadable and does work with Windows 10, and according to the site also Windows 11.

As always, make sure you know what you're doing before deleting things - but don't be like me and hold on to ten year old double backups, just in case! ; )