I'm participating in an Instagram challenge initiated by the group Hochwaldkelten - and today, they are asking about the favourite place for (or of) Living History.

Uh. That was a really hard question for me, and got me thinking very hard about all the things I did in all the places that I did them... which were many, and varied, and about all of them were utterly wonderful and I have fond memories of them. Of sitting in the train, and in the car, and even in the plane or the airport, travelling to an event or a conference or a museum or a research project, with all the anticipation involved. Of hotel rooms and hostel rooms and pensions and the homes of friends and colleagues, where I stayed for a while. Of sleeping spaces on floors in open air museum houses and of my own medieval tent and one time even in an old jail cell. Of museums, both the parts open to the public and the places behind the scenes, the depots and cellars and staircases and offices and - very important, of course - the break rooms and tea rooms. The markets and fairs, with all their hustle and bustle and the challenge of fitting everything into the space provided, which is different every time. The workshop places and demonstration places.

So, so many different places. So many wonderful meetings with colleagues, with friends, often times both. So many wonderful teaching experiences, and demonstration sessions, and getting close to actual medieval objects.

In the end, though, I ended up posting this as a picture of my favourite place:



Because this part of the floor in our place has seen so much action, and so many things, and when it gets involved, something fun is about to happen. This is where I set up work tables for larger projects that need a table, or where I sit for works like weaving the Egtved skirt.



This is also where I take photos of things for my documentation - like the Bernuthsfeld tunic reconstruction:



or the reconstruction of this late medieval fabric:



The cat, of course, was not sent off to the museum along with the cloth.

So in the end... that's my favourite place in regard to work, in some way. How about you? What's your favourite place for Living History, or for crafts, or both?

 

So, here we are - de-gumming results:

The procedure I did yesterday resulted in colour loss and definitely loss of some, but not all sericin - the silk still has a rather firm hand and is stiffer than I'd expect it to be if completely de-gummed.

 


You can see the narrow band of lighter silk on the gummy original silk, and the completely de-gummed and then dyed silk on the left side. Maybe I should take another small sample of the gummy silk and try to get all the gum out by boiling it within an inch of its life? See what happens then?

In other news, I've been busy in the background working on the website re-launch. As usual, it eats up all the time it can and then some, and there's other things to take care of and work on (such as the Egtved Project, for which you're also due an update), too, so it's actually feeling a little like a wonder that I have made as much progress as I have. The learning curve is also rather steep - in the past few days, I've successfully dabbled in CSS, altered php scripts (do not leave an extra . in or you will get a lovely error), edited sql tables by adding columns, written an sql update thingummy to replace values in a column (it's called Abfrage in German and I don't know the English term), and used a regular expression for a search-and-replace routine. I've also cursed the inconsistency of things when an installation went wrong and pondered the pros and cons of starting over or not. (Verdict? I'll try, and if it goes wrong, I'll go with the semi-clean install that seems to work okay for now.) At least I cannot complain about lack of challenges in all kinds of fields!

 

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...)

 

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"...

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.)

There's a lot of things going on here in the background, but none of them are spectacular. There's book-keeping to be taken care of (because of, well, tax paperwork being due and such stuff).

In addition, I'm working on the relaunch of the website. It's, well, not coming along too quickly, as these things tend to. At the moment, I am having severe struggles with CSS stuff regarding how the shop page looks... because even though I found what commands should technically fix the problem, I have not found the sweet spot yet where I can actually insert said commands.

Even though I started my internet career back in the days when it was cool to have your own website (I was Team Geocities), and you were coolest if you hand-coded your html for that in a text editor, I've not kept up. Which means that now, with the modern developments of website stuff, I'm sort of only half-literate. I can dabble around in some of the code, I can understand bits and pieces of what CSS and javascript and php codes do, but I cannot write them from zero, and if it gets more complicated, I'm lost. All this means that I can fix smaller issues and tweak things, but it's a bit hit-and-miss. Mind you, what I do know is still immensely helpful in 80% of all my use-cases, but when it comes to setting up or adjusting basic layouts like now... I'm sort of at my limits. (Any CSS wizards willing to have a look?)

In other news, as soon as my current book-keeping and other urgent stuff are off my desk, it will be the Return To The Spinning Machine - the last batch of yarn for the last piece to be woven for the Egtved project is due to be spun. And then, finally, there's also the rings on the skirt to be done... where I think I have a good method now (which may or may not be a possible method for how it was originally made), but it needs a little bit of fine-tuning and practising before it can start in earnest.

So. Lots of things, and none of them spectacular... but more than enough to keep me more than busy.

There was more packing of parcels today, and more prep work for the courses - both the spinning one, and the sewing one. My dressing of the distaffs was supervised by an expert for fluffyness and hair:



I've also been dabbling a bit on the shop relaunch. It's coming along, albeit more slowly than I'd like it to, but hey, what can you expect regarding anything that involves computers, right?

Basically, the shop and site relaunch means a clean, new installation with a template that is compatible to Joomla 4, and I'm trying to find the right balance between "keep everything as it is and get it done as quickly as possible" and "this is the perfect time to make some changes and make everything better and add a gazillion new texts and images to the page which means I will never ever be finished".

The main points are a new shop installation (in hopes that the glitches that happened in the past will then be history), a blog migration to a different system in Joomla (because I'm not sure if my current wordpress-in-joomla thing will continue to get support) and, yes, a little bit of restructuring of the main page. According to my tests, the new template will also mean the site is visible, and mostly useable, without javascript turned on. (The shop, of course, needs JS to function.)

So - if you have any suggestions for the site, or site structure, or comments on what you like on the current one, or dislike - please let me know in the comments. I'm grateful for any input, whether it's regarding the blog, the shop, or the main page, the content or the layout.