Sorry for the blog silence on Friday - I had planned to do a quick blogpost in the morning, and then fair prep took over my brain, and that was that. 

Fair prep was, little surprising, taking longer than usual. Well, fair prep always takes longer than planned or intended, and there's usually something that does not get done because it gets forgotten, or there's just not enough time anymore - but not having done this for more than two years, everything was very rusty and everything took even longer than the normal longer than usual. 

No really important things got forgotten, though, everything fit into the car, and actually standing at a market stall again with real people stopping by to chat and look at things and buy whatever they needed was a wonderful change to everything online only. 

I also got to hang out again with Margit from Alte Künste, as we shared fair space as usual. 

On Sunday evening, it was the usual more-or-less chaotic packing, stuffing everything into the car, and now I'm sitting on the train on my way to Vienna for a bit of vocational training, an opportunity that I got thanks to EuroWeb. Which is absolutely wonderful and glorious, and I'm so looking forward to that, even if the timing is not perfect. (Prepping for the training workshop had to take place in parallel with the fair prep, and when I came home yesterday night, the bag for going to Vienna was already packed, so there was only the washbag to transfer over.)

The next few days, I'll get to discuss theoretical frameworks and terminology frameworks for visual identities with colleagues - that will certainly be a very interesting thing to do. It will also mean you're getting blog silence again - I'll be back here and writing on Monday, May 2.

Have a lovely week (I'm sure I will!)

While I was doing the website relaunch, I had to look at this and that. Which, obviously, included the site structure, and some of the texts. 

Among said texts were some in need of a bit of editing, or changing, or other tender loving care - and while I'm not finished with all the things I want to get up to date, or nicer to read, or both, I've at least finished one of them recently. That's a collection of online resources: Books and articles that are available for free in .pdf form. 

You can find the list under the main page category "Ressources and Helpful Things", and it's titled "Books and Articles" (much to everybody's surprise, I'm sure).

Because I try to keep my pages fully bilingual, with the same content, the page is also available in German. The contents are about the same, though the sorting is a bit different, and of course the explanatory text is in German. 

I hope you enjoy it, and find something useful in there!

Easter has passed very pleasantly, with a lot of sunshine, and good weather is always welcome here. It's still rather cool outside when the wind is blowing, but spring is truly here now. The tulips are blooming in the garden, as are the primulas, and wild bees are happily visiting all the flowers and making nests in the bee hotels. Busy all around...

...and I am busy again as well. There's post to be brought to the office, and then there's the fair to prep for. I have already started going down the lists, which include important but easily forgotten things like "charge powerbanks" and "check printouts". To make things slightly more interesting, I managed to overdo things for one of my wrists over Easter, doing gardening work. Now I have a sore arm; I don't think it's a full tenosynovitis, but certainly a warning to give the arm a bit of rest.

Which is surprisingly difficult for the dominant arm and having to do manual tasks... but currently I'm managing alright. The arm is getting warm water massage treatment (which has done the job before with similar issues), and a bit of salve to tone down inflammation, and proper car loading is not scheduled until Thursday, so there's some more time for recovery.

In case you have tendon sheath trouble, this is the warm water treatment that I can fully recommend: place the body part in question into warm water. It should be nice and warm, so not quite boil-a-lobster. Take a soft brush (or a medium-soft one, and adjust pressure accordingly) and massage the area under water with the brush. Do this daily, at least once, but more often also does not hurt (I try to go for twice or three times). That's it - simple and easy, and when some years ago I had issues with a swollen (not really inflamed, but also not really okay) tendon sheath, this finally solved it where creams and salves had no effect whatsoever.

Tomorrow is a bank holiday here - the first of the Easter holidays. We're looking forward to a few nice days off, seeing family, relaxing, and having a generally good time. Hopefully also with decent weather. The forecast did look rather bad until today, but has improved now, so there might be some delicious spring sunshine.

So with this image of a wild bee on our very recently flowering cherry tree, I'm off into the long weekend...

I'll be back on the blog on Tuesday - for a day or two before I'm off again to a fair, followed by a textile workshop in Vienna.

(Even though the pandemic still isn't over, general happenings here in Germany, like in most other countries, happen just as if it were. And, well, I'm still wary of some things, but like so many others, I'm really craving personal meetings and input, and proper human-beings-in-a-group interactions. So... it's the fair, and then the workshop, and there's some more events coming up and I am looking forward to them all.)

There's conferences coming up, and CfPs are out - here's what I found in my diverse feeds:

Dressed, The Widespread Role of Clothes, Textile Production and Clothing Concepts in Society. June 22-24, via Zoom. Deadline for submissions is April 20. Find out more at dressconference.org. 

Also looking for contributions: The conference "What's in a Name?" taking place in June this year in Braga. Deadline for contributions is April 15 - yes, that's short notice, sorry.

Finally, the conference Interwoven Society takes place November 14-17 in Lübeck, Germany. This will focus on the impact of textile industry on society; CfP is open until April 17. You can find out more, and find links for submitting abstracts, at H-Soz-U-Kult here. 

I will definitely not be able to attend the last conference mentioned - we have a date for the European Textile Forum this year, and it will be November 5-13. More about that soon, here and on the Forum website!

Sometimes you just need to have something... fun. So.

Not so very far from where I live, there's a company named BIG, and they make stuff. Among that stuff are small toy vehicles called Bobby Cars. Now, if you're in Germany and a child, you will know these things - they are small, sturdy plastic cars, classically in red, that you sit on and you push with your feet to get them moving.

Some people half-joke, half-conspiracytheorise that the cars are sponsored by manufacturers of children's shoes, because when you give the car a good push and it rolls forward, chances are high that the toebox of the shoe will drag across the ground... and if you do that on asphalt, you have a good chance of ruining your shoes very, very quickly.

I did mention that these little cars are quite sturdy, right? They will easily carry an adult as well, though adult-length legs (even if they are rather short) are hard to use for pushing when you are sitting so low. Which means that usually, you put one knee on the seat and then you can sort of get along. (Why would you do that, you ask? Well. Because it's fun, and it might bring back childhood memories, and why should only toddlers enjoy the Bobby Cars, anyway?)

Speeding along with the too-long legs we grownups have remains a bit uncomfortable. Unless, of course, it's going downhill. Then you can just sit on the thing... and go. 

Apparently there's enough people who find that appealing that there is a number of events for Bobby Car Racing. 

Some of the cars have brakes, but a lot of people just brake with their feet. Like you do on a Bobby Car, usually. (Did I mention this shoe industry thing?)

There's also this guy who got himself a scaled-up version of a Bobby Car: