Social media is, if you ask me, both a blessing and a curse. It's a wonderful way to keep in contact with others, or to get into contact and discover new people and new things or possibilities. However, it also has a tendency to eat up inordinate amounts of time.

It also has a tendency, or an inherent danger, to foster unrealistic expectations. That came up a while ago in a chat with a friend and colleague, who told me about another colleague being the aim of harsh criticism regarding the look of her hands - which she had happened to post on social media.

Years ago, I remember seeing a gold ring for offer on etsy. The artisan himself had taken the photographs, and one of the images showed him holding the (very well-made, really beautiful) ring. Now... goldsmiths are metalworkers. Metalworking is not a job that has a reputation for being kind on your hands, or skin. The photo, consequently, showed a worker's hand, and you could see a bit of grime and a lot of abrasion and the nicks and cuts and scars that years of working metal had left.

To me, that was a very impressive picture, and beautiful in its own way, as it showed both the product and the most important tool to make it. The hand was not "pretty" or "beautiful" in the sense of someone being a hand model, but to me, the contrast between the shiny clean ring and the battered hand also made it clear that this piece was hard work to make, and had a cost beyond the materials and the time invested.

Someone of the potential customers actually complained about the "ugly" picture, and that it would be offensive to post dirty, ugly hands like that. To which the artisan replied that these are his hands, they look ugly like this because that's the cost of making beautiful things, and she's welcome to do her shopping elsewhere. (Or something roughly along these lines. It's been a long time ago.)

My own hands also tend to look a little battered. This is normally nothing that I much care about - unless it's something that gets in my way when working, such as exceptionally rough skin that silks will snag on, or something that causes pain. Other traces? My hands are tools, and tools will sport traces of their use after a while, even if used correctly and treated properly and with care. When they do so, to me, they have their own very special kind of beauty, So, to me, have a dyer's hands stained bright blue or red, or a shoemaker's hands with its calluses and short nails, or a goldsmith's hands with calluses and scars and metal dust caught in the cracks of skin.

If you ask me, hands that bear the traces of work should never be something to be ashamed of. On the contrary! 

I'm home again after the absolutely wonderful weekend at the Archäotechnica. It was lovely to have a museum event again after such a long pause due to the pandemic. I got to meet old friends and get to know new people, and realised how much I missed all this.

My work space was in the cloister, where I had very good light, but not too much of it - at least most of the time; on Sunday around noon, I had a bit of direct sun, and it was very hot and very bright and hard to see what I was doing.

I also realised that I have a very, very hard time stitching and speaking at the same time. So even though there were very few and very short breaks only, the amount of stitching that got done was... well, let's say that there was no danger at all that I'd run out of embroidery work.

The gold in the picture is the result at the end of 7 hours of demonstration time - not at all to be confused as the result of 7 hours of embroidery time! 

A demo situation is always different from a proper work situation, even if the technique you demonstrate is one that needs very little attention. Your main focus, as a good demonstrator, will always be on the people coming and asking questions, or watching, and not on your work piece. So you stop things to explain, you work slower if necessary, you demonstrate mistakes or point out possible problems (in some cases making them happen on purpose), and your main aim is explaining things and not having a perfect piece at the end. (The gold embroidery quality is also not what I'd reasonably expect from myself as the result of a normal stitching session.)

Even when I'm doing a very low-demand technique such as combing wool, or spinning, I can feel a difference in how the work goes that I'm doing on a demo as opposed to doing it as work. (It's fascinating, really.) In my experience, there's techniques and things that need little or no brain, and little or no attention, and they are best suited for demonstration purposes. With these techniques, I can look at the people passing by, make eye contact, and talk to them without interrupting the work. Spinning would be one of these; netting also works very well in my experience. 

Techniques that need no brain, but focus on the work and attention are the other group of techniques where a demo is possible. These, which include anything involving stitching, are more difficult - as soon as you look like you are concentrating on something, quite a lot of people have qualms to ask something. I've had a lot of "may I ask you something" questions this weekend, and I am actually considering putting up a sign next time that says some thing like "do ask me things, that's what I am here for". I do try to stop and look up at my surroundings when I am demo-ing a high-focus technique, but it takes more effort from my end to demo this successfully and with similar amounts of interaction than a low-focus technique. 

The third group are techniques that need attention and focus as well as brain power. These are right out for demo purposes in my opinion. I just cannot give a proper impression of how something demanding is done and concentrate on getting the hows and whys across to visitors at the same time. So I'd never do a demo on complicated tablet-woven patterns, for instance. That requires all my attention, and I'd either not talk to people or weave with lots of errors and very badly.

This is also something that I explain to museums and event organisers when we're discussing possibilities for demonstrations. Usually we then find a technique that fits the event and that is suitable for a good demo. After all, a demo of the coolest and most astonishingly complicated technique serves nobody if it's just not working properly for the public.

Have you done demonstrations? Are your experiences similar?

Things are progressing here - albeit slowly. Of course my email programme was on the dead drive (one of the very, very few programmes not on the newer C: partition on a different physical drive), so that had to be re-installed and the data backup restored. This happened successfully (yay!) so I can now access my email archive again, and, even more importantly, work on the mails properly and not just in emergency mode over the mobile phone. 

There's a solid chance that the new HDD will arrive today, and then I can power down the machine here, put the new one in, and do a proper restore of everything that lived on the old place. Well, apart from the D: drive, which was not included in any backup (causing the issues with the mail programme, for instance) and I sincerely hope that there was nothing important stored on that drive, because it's dead as a doorknob.

On the upside - I have found out what caused the excruciating slowness and proneness to errors with my backup.It was an overenthusiastic Antivirus programme, which decided that since the RAID that the backups are stored on are not an internal drive, everything on them might be dangerous and contain a virus and thus has to be checked very, very thoroughly. Which, obviously, will take time...

So from now on I will try remember that, and if something concernes an external drive and then takes ages, I'll look for the antivirus as a possible culprit. If you're running into a similar problem on your computer, you can either turn off the antivir or, if using the Windows Defender antivirus (which, according to reports, is about as good in getting the bad guys as the free versions of standalones are) there's the possibility to exclude folders from getting scanned.

Oh, and because it bears repeating: if you haven't made your backup yet... well, you know. There's a lot of free and even more affordable programmes for backups out there; some external HDDs come with backup software pre-installed, so you should be able to find a solution without too much trouble. In case you don't want to look about that much at all and already have a drive of five lying around that you can store stuff on, I've used SyncBack Free for a long time and can recommend it.

I will be off travelling north tomorrow, and will return on Monday, so there will be blog silence until Tuesday... when I will hopefully also be able to work from a restored drive.

It's slow going here. Slow going part one: The resurrection of my data. The backups lie on a RAID, to make extra sure that everything is safe - but unfortunately I'm having connection troubles to said RAID, which means every copying action takes ages and then some. That is annoying, and slow going, and sometimes the connection trouble leads to the interruption of the copying process which means that some stuff is there, and some isn't, and I can't tell what is and what isn't. So things will take more time than expected. Which, to be frank, was to be expected, because just as the X never marks the spot, when has anything computer trouble related ever taken only as much time as expected?

(And just in case you are not thinking about that anyways right now: Do yourself a favour and check your backup solution. Make sure that it is current, and that everything important is covered, and that you can recover and restore your data if something dire happens. If you've been following this blog for a while, you've read me go on about this before, but, well, obviously it bears repeating. In the case you don't have a backup solution and regular backup plan yet... well. Do yourself a favour and change that.)

Slow going part two: Getting sorted (and packed) for the weekend in Brandenburg. That, though, was actually not as slow as I had feared! I have sorted my bits and bobs and odd ends of dyed embroidery silk and re-wound most of them onto better suited cores (reed cores, which I absolutely love). The gold thread is also sorted and packed, and now I am in the stage where I ponder what else I could need and put it all on the giant heap on the bed, from where it will be transferred into my rolling suitcase and, if necessary, an additional bag.

The main part of the preparation, though (and what I had expected to be slower and more gruesome) was making sure I can go ahead with gold embroidery right from Saturday morning. That meant inking my motif and doing the contour stitching as a minimum. Because gold and silk would be paired in such an embroidery, and because I wanted to be able to show at least a little bit of the silk part as well, I had planned to also do some split stitching.

This is stitched on fabric with about 20 threads per centimeter, which means that the stitches are fairly small. As you can see, there's a start made on the crow's wing feathers, and one of the corners of the frame is almost filled completely.  I'll do the last few missing stitches before the event starts, and this will give an impression of how the colour parts will look. The appropriate silks will also travel north with me so I can show that part of the work, too, if people are interested - just like I'll take some extra linen and the things to make pre-drawings or ink in motifs.

Because the thread is thin and the stitches are small, it does take a bit to get one of the corners filled, but it was enormously pleasant work - and in contrast to the computer stuff, progress was noticeable and there was no constant apprehension that there would be an error message.

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One of the things scheduled for the summer break (for the days I was not on vacation, or relaxing) was taking care of the website migration to the next major version of Joomla. Ah, website stuff again! Just the thing for late summer, right?

Of course I didn't manage to completely finish the whole shebang, but the major problems have been found, identified, and taken care of. Fortunately there were not too many of them, nor were they very hard to fix; for the most part, it's semi-brainless work to re-install newer versions of the many add-ons and extensions that accumulate over time. (And that even though I try hard to keep things as slim and streamlined as possible...) 

Now I "only" need to fix the smaller things that get jumbled during transition. That's mostly shop layout tweakings so everything is properly legible and all the legal shenanigans are covered. All that gets done on a test site, which is a clone of the live site, and I jot down the single steps to take in a list. Once everything is done and fixed and wrapped up, the live site will go offline for the transition (because it would be irksome if somebody ordered a stack of things just then), and get cloned again, and then I will go through that lovely list step by step to pull the old version over into Joomla 4.

The current website has also suffered a few little mishaps during the last update, which I (rather stupidly) did just before we went off on holidays. Most of the time, the updates go smoothly and not much is changing, but sometimes, stuff gets jumbled, or mis-aligned, or something gets lost in transition, or a link disappears - small things like that. Of course some of this happened during the last update... which I will hopefully catch all during the works on the site in the next few days. If things go well, end of next week might be realistic for the actual transfer...

I'm absolutely delighted to be part of the Archaeotechnika this year, and doubly so to get to do some embroidery demonstration there. I really like to embroider, but I seem to get around to it way, way too rarely - but this demonstration means I get to do it for two days straight.

Plus a little extra time to prep, because obviously if the goal is to show gold embroidery, it's no use to spend the first few hours of demo time checking the frame, inking the contours and stitching the contour lines... so that is what I've been doing here as prep.

First step, however, was to choose appropriate motifs. Something that is appropriately medieval, from the time of around 1200 (because the dress reconstruction I'll be wearing is from about that time), that has gold, and that is adequately easy to stitch. 

I ended up looking at the Ashmolean Bestiary, half by chance (because I was browsing the Bodleian Library catalogue for MSS from the timespan), and I've picked the image from fol. 47r, which is a crow.

There's two gold parts, the frame and the circular background, so plenty of space for couched work and the opportunity to do both linear and circular gold; I'll be doing the silk parts in split stitch and the contours in stem stitch. 

To show how the un-stitched thing looks, I might ink in another motif on the side, but haven't decided yet what it is going to be. Another bird? Maybe the delightfully weird neck-bird from fol. 82r? 

Soon it will be time for my summer break. Very, very soon - actually it will start at the end of this week already, and I'm looking forward to that very, very much.

As usual, my break will be a mix of time for relaxing, going on holidays, and taking care of things that get left behind during normal work times. There's some website work to be done, for instance. (Yes, again. It's a neverending source of work.) Some garden work. Some projects that are lined up but have not happened yet, and hopefully there will be time for them, too. Putting the shop and blog on hold for a few weeks takes out quite a bit of time-eating elements, and allows me to take a bit of a breather... and also to do some more stock-taking and, if necessary, re-stocking.

So since there will be blog silence for a bit from the end of this week: If you have anything you'd like me to blog about tomorrow or Friday - let me know!