Well. Do you know that feeling when you're waiting for some replacement of a rickety thing, desperately hoping that the old one will keep up until the new thing has arrived, or is finished?

That's how it feels with this website for me right now. Somehow, there were issues logging into the blog today. Which makes me a tiny little bit, um, anxious. There's still a chunk of things to do on the new website, including the shop setup... but I sort of feel the pressure now.

So maybe today is website-trying-to-wrap-up-as-many-things-as-possible day? It would certainly be very nice to finally get to the moving over to the new site part. (I'm also aware that there needs to be testing done before that can happen. And that there is never enough testing to catch everything...)

 

If you're looking for something to do on the 22nd of February, and you happen to be a weaver, embroiderer, or someone otherwise skilled in textile techniques, and have ideas about working with gold... you might want to apply for a spot in the Citizen Science project taking place in Vienna that day.

Here's more info, in German and English:

I'm all excited - the first batch of my embroidery silk in new colours arrived today, dyed lovingly and carefully by my friend and colleague Margit from Alte Künste. And she has managed to dye the most gorgeous yellow I've ever seen.



It's like liquid sunshine. It's like textile gold. It's warm and soft and it's yellow, yellow, yellow.

There's a lovely purple as well - and I have not yet wound off the red and the pink from their skeins into something better storeable and handle-able. Winding silk that fine, I have learned, can be a real challenge if you don't know what you are doing. The skeins, even if handled like raw eggs, tend to tangle a bit during the dyeing process. As this thread is flat silk that has been totally de-gummed, it snatches and tangles easily. My first tries at winding off silk from the skein, years ago, were the total catastrophe. I tried to do that with one of the common four-armed skein holders or swifts. Well. I very quickly found out that there's a reason why Japanese silk swifts have more than four arms... so I did upgrade to a swift with more arms, and that does make a huge difference. It's still a fiddly task. (Weirdly, it's also one that I find very hard to stop. Just past this one snag. Just until the next hitch. Just this one more. Just past this knotty tangle. Oh, is it half past three already? Oops. Well, I can do a few minutes more...)

Once  all the new skeins are wound, I can portion the silk off on the 10 m rolls for the shop, and take photos, and then you'll be able to buy it.

For today, though, I'll sit next to it for a bit longer and go "my preciousssssss"...

Some things, it seems, never change. Such as the fascination of cats with turning spindles. Or, indeed, many other textile implements that move. That can make work quite, ah, let's call it "interesting"...

I'm rather fortunate in that our little-not-so-little cat is quite uninterested in textile works, usually. She will sit down on fabrics laid out on the floor, and on my note papers and scale printouts, but she is rarely trying to catch or eat or mangle the textiles themselves or the tools I use. (She will, however, try to bite the end of a pen when I am trying to write something while she hangs out on my desk. That, I can say, is also rather annoying and not helpful at all. It's even worse than her walking across the keyboard, which is over soon, or putting her paw onto the touchpad, which can be remedied by a slightly awkward but sustainable different position of my arms.)

Anyway - the fascination of cats with moving textile tools, and especially spindles, can also be seen captured in a manuscript dating to 1310-1320. A marginalia shows St. Gertrude of Nivelles, dressed as a nun, and spinning. With a companion cat. A very helpful one. The manuscript, Stowe 17, is in the possession of the British Library, and you can see the digitised image here. (I'm not placing it on the blog here due to copyright restrictions, though I'd have very much liked to adorn this post with the kitty directly.)

Today was one of those days that seem to have been broken from the start - nothing really worked, and nothing really seemed to progress, and it was grey outside, and there you go.

So you're getting just a cat pic today. Because everything is better with a cat pic.

There's some things I really enjoy about running the shop - one of them is being able to make wishes come true. Admittedly, it's usually small wishes like "the distaff in oak, please" or "a biconical whorl in red, if possible", but, hey, it's still nice. Hunting down the fitting whorl, or wood, or whatever, is something I do enjoy.

Another perk is reading all kinds of addresses that there are in Germany. Combinations of street names and place names, or sometimes just the place names, can be rather funny. I have yet to send something to one of the well-known places with curious names, such as "Linsengericht" (lentil meal) or "Kuchen" (cake), though.

Third perk? I get to buy stamps regularly. A lot of the things I send out go by regular post, and Germany has a rather large set of different stamp designs, and lots of different stamp values, at any one time. So every time my stamp stock gets low, I get to look at the current offers. Sometimes I'm lucky, and there's something Middle Age related among them, and then of course I get those. Last time that I went stamp-shopping, there even was an archaeology-related stamp - one celebrating the 200th birthday of Heinrich Schliemann...

 

I have finally gotten around to taking photographs of the newly (well, sort-of-newly by now) arrived spindle sticks. I've restocked all kinds, and since they are handmade, they are always a little different in each batch.

This time, however, the pearwood sticks are really different - as in very, very colourful. Apparently pearwood has a quite large spectrum of possible appearances: while it's usually a kind of warm, soft reddish tone, it can range from very light (looking almost like cherry wood) to very dark (looking almost like walnut tree wood). And this time, well, my wood wizard seems to have gotten their hands on an especially colourful batch of wood.



So many different colours!  (You can get the sticks in my shop.)