I always find it utterly fascinating how much variation there is between different kinds of wool. On the photo you can see three balls of top, each weighing 200g. They are obviously very different fibres!



The Manx wool in light brown is the most voluminous, the grey Gotland fibre is smooth and straight and thus rolls up quite tightly, and in between the trusty brown Eider wool - which comes out a bit darker on this picture than it actually is.

Just like they are different in density when rolled up into a ball, they also feel very different. And I'm always stunned by the readiness of the Gotland wool to felt even though it feels so smooth and slippery. I think it's the felt-happiest wool that I have ever seen...

They are finished! After a good while of painting sessions, all of the QuoddHeroes miniatures are finished, and protected by a double coat of varnish. Yesterday they went back to their happy owner, hopefully to see many fun game sessions there. We've been promised an epic session playing that game once the general situation will allow it again.

It was a lot of fun painting these - especially since there were many different styles, and a few new playgrounds to explore. There was a light source in one case, and freehand details to draw in in another, and doing glazing, and playing with drybrushing and different kinds of washes, and edge highlighting, and a lot was learned in that way.



In the game, the cubes move by rolling from the face they are standing on to one of the adjacent faces, so that another face then sits on top. Each has a special action connected to it, so you need to plan your moves carefully in order to get where you want to get. Accordingly, there's two of each of the cubes, one to sit on the board while playing, and the second identical one is used by the player to handle. Actually turning it in your hands while thinking about what to do makes an incredible difference to just thinking about it, and is really necessary.



Each of the sides looks differerent, to make it easy to see which one is which, and they are all shown on the player board, of course. Sometimes they hold something in their hand on one side only, sometimes on both sides. Usually there's quite a difference between the left side and the right side, but not always - the mini on the far right, for example, only has a tiny watch as a difference between left and right.



They all have a face, and feet, and carry something like a backpack on their backs, or there's a cave or hollow with something inside in some instances.



Those were a bit tricky to paint, but hey, challenge accepted!



In some cases, the image on the player board and the actual sculpt of the miniature were a little different, and in a few cases, there were significant differences, which also made things a bit tricky. I was trying to go for "as close to the player board as possible" in these, which meant trying to match the colours, or painting in some details not in the sculpt.



I also tried to make the two in each pair as identical as possible, which was not always easy, because I like to paint with mixed colours... and you inevitably have too much or too little of an individual mix. For me, it's usually way too little, and then it is hard to match the mix again for the second piece.

Two of them don't really match the colour on the player board really well; one is a bit too dark (the magenta-furred one) and one a little too blue (the robot-like one), but overall, I'm really happy with how they all turned out.

So there's another thing for me to look forward to when the pandemic gets under control: Actually using these in game play!

It's Friday (hooray!) and I'm very much looking forward to this weekend. Not only because hey, weekend! but also because there are exciting things happening.

Thing One: Flights of Foundry con has started, and I'll hang out in the Dealer's room on Discord... plus I will do a spinning-with-handspindle demonstration on Sunday, 13:00 German time. Registration is still possible, as far as I can tell, and it's free, so come and drop by!

Thing Two: The livestream with Q&A about the Lengberg garments that I've posted about yesterday. This will take place on Saturday (tomorrow!) at 20:00 German time.

Thing Three: Sunday is the International World Heritage Day in Austria, and the Natural History Museum Vienna has prepared a programme together with a few of its research partners. There will be things to see about the salt mines in Hallstatt and the work being done there. Yes, THE Hallstatt of the glorious bronze and iron age textile finds. Find out more about the event (in German) on the NHM site, or go here to find the livestream from Hallstatt, on April 18, from 13:30 German time onward. Or go here to watch Pfahlbau TV on Sunday, starting at 13:00 German time.

Whatever you do, I hope you'll have a gloriously fine and fun weekend!

Exciting news has reached me yesterday - on Saturday, April 17, there will be a live Q&A about the Lengberg garment reconstructions on Youtube, run by Marion McNealy, Rachel Case and Beatrix Nutz. I'm delighted that I heard about this in time!


So if you have no un-topple-able plans for Saturday evening, the livestream starts at 20:00 German time, and here is the link to the Youtube channel where it will take place.

This photo shows a happily sleeping cat:



While that may be no big new thing, the fact that the slow-motion-penny has finally reached its groundfloor destination might be. Today was the first time the little cat used her stairway-board to get up onto her cat bed without getting a reminder first that yes, this thing exists and yes, it's possible to use it, no necessity to try and jump up if you don't feel like it, little cat.

Yesterday, she still waited for such a reminder from me as she was considering how to get up onto my desk. This morning, after having polished off some food, she strolled into the office, went to the cat stairs, walked up and lay down for a nap, witnessed by the Most Patient Husband of Them All. So yay! It only took, what, about two months? We installed the thing around February 15 or so - proving that it does take an old cat some time to learn a new trick, but it's not impossible at all.

So... there's some site maintenance coming up. Fortunately, it seems like I've fretted way more about how difficult that might be than it was worth. Fingers crossed it will run smoothly, when I run it one of the next few days. Just in case this interests you, here's the background:

This website runs on Joomla!, which is a free and open-source CMS (or content management system). Basically, this means something you install to give you a basic structure, and a lot of templates that you can use to get a certain look. It's a good bit easier and quicker to handle than writing html from scratch, and uses the new-fangled things like css and javascript and shenanigans like that. It also keeps you updated on any new developments coming in, as there's a bunch of people working on the system, keeping it up-to-date regarding security, database versions, and whatnot.

There's several CMS to choose from, if you are setting out. I decided to go for Joomla! (yes, with an exclamation mark, even though that makes for awkward typing) because when I was first looking into making an online shop, I found a shop software that looked sensible and useful to me, and that was based on Joomla!. So when I set up the current site, pulling everything together into the same base made sense.

The blog, however, was running on blogspot back then. I wanted to migrate the whole thing, and found that J! doesn't have a good blog setup suitable to get the thing over. That may have changed by now, but back then I found there was a plugin that could be bought, integrating  Wordpress (which is primarily a blogging system, unlike J!, which is more a general-content-in-articles system) for blogging into a J! site. Ah, the things that are possible these days.

That's why my blog is running on Wordpress inside a J! installation.  From time to time, there's updates for some extra functions coming in, such as the spam protection used in this blog. The most recent one then made said anti-spam break because it doesn't support the current WP version that I have... since the special circumstances mean I don't get the regular updates for Wordpress, and those for the inside-J!-version usually came quite a bit after the regular ones. (If you caught a glimpse of spammy comments, these happened during the c 24 hours that I needed to find a replacement for the plugin.)

So... I went to check for an update for the plugin I have, and found out that there is sort of one. The company who made Wordpress4Joomla is not offering it anymore as a subscription service - the files are now available on GitHub, for free. Even better, and slightly unexpected: an update was included in this list just 2 months ago, to the almost-newest version of Wordpress, 5.6. Which is very, very nice, basically - but since there's just the files in the repository, and no support or explanation, it means some figuring out had to be done on what to do. Hence the fretting. Accompanied by some looking into options in case I don't manage to update the thing, and/or updates stop completely and I need to change to some other blog plugin.

In the end, after looking at previous installation packages and the files in there, I started up the (already rather old) copy of my site running locally on my computer, and tried to just copy the new files with changes in them over the old ones, bringing my WP first from 5.1 to 5.2, and then from 5.2 to 5.6. And lo and behold! it did work, as far as I can tell from this test.

Which means that I can go and try to do it on the actual live and running thing, here. As soon as I have a bit of time and the necessary inner calm to do so, because it's always a little nerve-wracking to do things like that... even if there's backups to roll back to the previous version in case things go pear-shaped.

I'm really happy, though, that I was an adventurous student with enough free time on my hands back when the Internet started to become what it is. My first site, done just for fun, was written by hand in html in a plain text editor. That gave me a good, solid basic understanding of things internetty - and over the years, by having to keep at least partly up to date with how things developed, I gained enough understanding of the scripts and things that came into being to not be completely daunted. I can more or less understand some things happening when I read scripts - not well enough to do my own programming, but it suffices for a lot of small tweaks that are necessary in some cases. And that, when it works, is also deeply satisfying!

Yesterday, I got asked on Instagram how much wool I can get on a spindle... which is a very good question.

It's been a rather long time since I last tried and measured this. Most of my spinning is done for a specific purpose, and most of the time that is demonstrating or testing something - which means I usually spin smaller amounts of yarn, frequently of very thin yarn. So it's rather rare for me to try and pack as spindle with yarn until it's really, really full.

What is "full", anyways? Different people have different opinions about that. For me, it means that the spindle will not run easily and efficiently anymore when I flick it. The point where this occurs will, of course, depend on a number of factors: The type of spindle, the technique you are using to spin, the kind of yarn you are making, the density of the fibre, the density of the yarn, how you wind it onto the spindle, the placement and size and weight of the whorls you are using. I also find that with the growing cop, it can be necessary to adjust how I wind the yarn. At the beginning, it's helpful to spiral the leading thread up the spindle shaft before making the half-hitch. With a large cop, this can sometimes stop working so well; then I wind around the bottom of the cop, go straight up to the tip of the spindle, and place the half-hitch.

As my spindle fills up, I also replace the whorl I used at the start with a smaller, lighter one, so that the spindle turns quickly and nicely again. At one point, no whorl is the best whorl. At some point, the spindle, now whorl-less, is so full that it will be harder and harder to flick it into a speedy rotation, and that is when I declare it full.

In yesterday's test case, that happened at a total weight of a little more than 50 grams. The spindle stick comes in at about 8-12 g, depending on the stick, so that means I fit about 40 g worth of thread onto the spindle.



Which, if you ask me, is a pretty decent amount.