Right in the middle of the preparing-for-November madness that is going on here, I have finally, finally managed to take photos of things. New things. For the shop.

Exhibit A:


Stone spindle whorls. These have been on my wishlist for oh, so long, and finally things came together: finds to base the whorls on (from Coppergate, York, dating to the 9th to post-12th century), and somebody willing and able to make them. I'm very happy with these, and I hope I won't be the only one!

There's even more whorl-y goodness. The lovely potter who makes my wheel-thrown whorls has made another batch, and has made more different forms this time: biconical, roundish, and the conical/discoid form I had before. So, Exhibit B:


I'm all in love with all the new whorls, and sorely tempted to diminish the stock by sneaking some of them (or, to be fair, a lot of them) into my own personal toolbox...

I'm not entering a title, though. I'm not. Because today is somehow... weird. I did manage to get a stack of stuff done, most of it in preparation for the next fairs, but I'm still feeling way behind, and would have liked to be much, much faster. Story of my life.

Parts of that stack of stuff done today include:

Updating and printing my spinning instructions. (While the downloadable version is available for free through my shop, you get the printed-out instructions in the spinning kit, so I need to print some more from time to time).

Getting together with Gillian for a chat - we're planning a crossover blog interview in celebration of the Beast's release as paperback, and it was my turn to get interviewed. I'll have the pleasure of pestering Gillian with questions next week, and you will see the results here on the blog.

Taking photos of the oil lights in action. I'm still totally in love with these things - they have been produced for ages (the three-bladed swimmer has been made, unchanged, since 1808) and they are just so incredibly nice to use, both for atmospheric lighting and for keeping your tea hot. However, the concept of using these swimmers is rather forgotten today, so people often stand in front of the swimmers at my table, looking puzzled. So I obviously need some explanatory thing to sit around on my stall table at a fair - and this, also obviously, needs photographs.

[caption id="attachment_2574" align="alignleft" width="265"] Atmospheric lighting. With a wineglass, a bit of water and some oil... and the swimmer, of course.


[caption id="attachment_2580" align="alignright" width="265"] Keeping tea hot. Because life is better with tea, and tea is better when hot. Obviously, right?


Actually that was the main bits I did today, as these things all tend to eat up more time than you'd guess at first. (Photos, in particular. Never underestimate the amount of time needed to take good photos - especially if they involve tricky lighting conditions. Or gold embroidery.) The rest was eaten up by the usual day-to-day things such as sorting out emails and working on the current paper/presentation projects. And having coffee. Plus tea. Tea was obligatory since I had to take teapot warmer pictures!

Spindle whorls are lovely things... whether they are made from ceramics or from glass. Or from stone. Or bone. Or antler. Or lead.

Speaking of which - I've been selling ceramic spindle whorls for a good while now, but these are just a small part of the picture. So I'm really happy to have found, quite recently, two crafters who are willing to make spindle whorls from bone and spindle whorls from stone. Which means I get to broaden the material selection of whorls on offer a little.

Which also means I have to pick out whorl shapes and whorl types for these crafters to make. That's a task I like - but I also know that it's not easy to get a good overview over spindle whorl finds, and that tastes can vary a lot. So - if you are a spinner, and you know a specific spindle whorl find from stone, bone or antler that you would love to have replicated: do let me know about it. I cannot make promises at this time, but if it's not too outlandish in shape, size or weight, it might become part of the new stock! (If you have specific ceramic whorls that you'd like to see for sale, I'll be happy to hear about these too!)

So... any wishes?

 

There's not only seedlings sprouting, there's also, finally, something new in the shop again: Handmade iron needles!


I was able to buy the remaining stock from someone who made these needles for a while, and they are finally all sorted, polished, and ready to be sold.

Making needles such as these, I've been told, is not easy - there's a lot of breakage when the eye is punched in, for instance.

[caption id="attachment_2330" align="alignnone" width="640"] Closeup of the needle eyes.


That's one of the reasons the needlemaker stopped doing this, so the small stock I have of these needles are all that remain, and probably all there will be. So, like so often when I get my hands on remaining stock, I'm all torn between happiness that I have at least a few of the wonderful items, and sadness that these are the last, and there will be no more of it in the future.

For now, though, there are needles - and I am very happy about that!

Having a webshop means sending stuff away - in my case to all corners of the world. (To a lot of them, at least.) Which can mean a multitude of different tariffs depending on the size, weight, and place the package has to go to.

Which means that sticking the appropriate stamps onto a package... can take a bit of research beforehand. I ship most things using the German Post (which is now called either Post or DHL), and for any address questions I go and consult Frank's Compulsive Guide to Postal Addresses (and thank you so, so much for that, Frank!).

In the end, packing things up, putting the address and appropriate postage on a package are a task that needs concentration (so you get it all right) but is still sort of dull. Which means anything that makes it more fun is a nice thing, and much appreciated.

And my, have I been having fun recently... because the German Post brought out an extra-special fancy stamp featuring Asterix this year, and I've bought a small stack of them. So if you ordered something at my shop, and the postage I have to stick onto it falls into the right tier, your package might look something like this:



These stamps always make me smile, and I'm really happy that I get to use them on actual mail that goes out to hopefully make other people smile as well - even if it's just for a few minutes before tossing the package into the paper recycling. (Though if you know a stamp collector, they might appreciate it, too...)

The website redesign is finally all done and finished. There's a few more articles I'd like to add to the main page, but they are not time-critical - and the rest is all done. The menu structures are fine, all the links seem to be working, and a few of the remaining tweaks and checks can only be done once the site is connected.

I've tried hard not to waste too much time on small things, but then sometimes it's the small things that make all the difference. So now and again, I spent a few hours trying to get something to work because it would be oh so pretty, or oh so cool. A good bunch of hours was also used up because I had to learn something new - how to handle css stuff, or how I have to build the menu structure in Joomla! for my breadcrumbs to work properly, or how to size and position an svg grapic. (SVGs are cool. They are vector graphics that you can have your browser draw, so they are nice and nifty and resize very, very well. If you know how to resize them - so in case you need somebody to explain it to you, too, here's a wonderful blogpost about it.)

So tomorrow will be the day - I'll take the old shop offline, migrate the data to the lovely new shop, and then ask for the connection to be made. That will probably take between a few hours to a day or even two, depending on how fast the name-servers catch the update. This is all very, very exciting, and I hope it will all go well!

Today was a good bit more successful than yesterday. It looks like I finally found the issue with the Joomla! migration to 3.x (there's an extra folder in the libraries that messes up everything, and once that is deleted, all runs smoothly); a quick facebook query resulted in multiple comments that you don't mind having to activate JavaScript to see anything too much; and the template I found does look like it could be a nice solution for my site, both for the main site and the webshop.

And, hopefully, the blog. I'm looking into pulling all things together so blogposts will also be hosted on my own server, taking it out of Google's hands (as blogger is part of Google). My current plan is to leave everything here on the blog, but additionally migrate all the content to my own site, and then blog on there (with a link to the new place here, obviously). My hope is that the migration will solve the wonky search issues that Blogger has (if you have ever tried to find a post on this blog using the search box, you'll know what I mean - search is not really reliable). Plus it would have the benefit of my having to spend time on one site only, and to give my three places a similar design, finally.

I will only do it if I can do a clean migration, though, and I'm currently looking into options for that. The easiest and most straight-forward one that I found will not migrate comments or tags, though, so it's completely out (that was CMS2CMS, in case you want to know).

And now for something more textile-related - I have finally put the gold embroidery kit into the shop!

The core of the kit - motif drawn on cloth and mounted in frame, plant-dyed silk, gold thread and embroidery needles so you can get started right away!

 It is available here. The kit contains everything to get started right away, down to the embroidery needles (you'll need your own pair of scissors or shears, but that's it), and ample instructions - a sheet with specific instructions for the motif plus my book about gold embroidery.

I made a few photos of nice, colourful yarns as well, but I haven't yet figured out how to put the scarf kit into the shop. See, there was this co-production with Margit from Alte Künste, where we developed a lengthwise-striped scarf together, to be sold in a kit. Margit picked yarns, and I took care of the pattern - easy enough to remember it, interesting enough to keep you from dozing off while knitting.



The first batch of scarf kits is sitting here, ready to go get knitted, and we have twelve different colours for the skeins:


For each kit, you get to pick three skeins in colours of your choice (that's 150 g of wool alltogether). I'm trying to figure out how to make this selection process as smoothly working as possible, but the system is resisting a bit, so it might come down to you having to list your yarn choices in the comment when ordering. I'll give it another try tonight!