Are you familiar with the conference proceedings of the EXAR? That society started out as "Experimentelle Archäologie in Deutschland" and later proceeded to be "in Europa". The papers published in their yearly proceedings are mostly in German, but if you do read German, there's some very, very interesting pieces among them.

I've recently hunted for some specific papers and found that while the individual tables of contents of each volume are on the EXAR website, there's no overview. So I made up a pdf for the first batch (when the proceedings still had "in Deutschland" in their name) and a second one, with all the contents in one file.

Here they are: Inhalt "Experimentelle Archäologie in Deutschland Bilanz 1990-2002" and Inhalt "Experimentelle Archäologie in Europa Bilanz 2002-2014". Enjoy!

(By the way, I have a stack of these books twice. If you are interested, I'd be happy to sell them - just let me know which ones you're interested in!)

The book is at the printer, and I hope there will be no more shenanigans. I shall wear any typo left in there, and any US spelling, and any glitch in line lineup - I'm fed up with doing corrections on it, and I'm also rather unhappy with how communication with the printer worked out. I will think thrice about using that service again.

Well, anyway, in case you like numbers, here's a rundown of a few numbers related to the gold embroidery book...

Days before today I wanted to have this dealt with and over: 2.
Number of pages in the final version: 56.
Number of different fonts: 1. (Thanks Thorsten!)
Percent the amount of pages has gone up from first estimate:  80%.
Percent the costs for making have gone up since my first calculations: 100%.
Days delayed due to post issues: 1.
People hijacked, cajoled or otherwise finagled into helping in some way: at least 16.
Number of phone calls undertaken due to the book: 5. (I strongly prefer emails...)
Number of times checked for errors, including typographical errors: at least 7.
Photos taken for the project: about 650.
Days I woke up way too early because of the book: about 10.

In case you wonder about the insane amount of photos taken, it went like this:
a) Make a list of steps that need to be photographed.
b) Set up equipment.
c) Do the embroidery for the steps required, holding a remote control thingie in one hand and peering through the camera viewer while stitching. (Optional: Realise that there are some movements that are hard to do when holding a remote control as well as the embroidery frame and a needle and the gold thread.)
d) Press the button on the remote control.
e) Slightly change angles of the piece that's being worked and press the remote control button again.
f) Repeat e) several times.
g) Look at photos. (Delete lots of them again.)

One of the many photos that did not make it into the book. See the remote control thingie sticking out of my right hand? The button is under my ring finger.

h) Realise there should be another one, or a different one of that step, to make things clearer.
i) Repeat c)-g).
j) If necessary, repeat h) and i).

I promised to tell you more about this scarf, right?

A while ago (these things all take their sweet time), Margit mentioned that she'd like to put out a scarf knitting kit using her wool. She wanted a pattern with lengthwise stripes, and I offered to design a pattern for this.

So this is the result of our joint venture:


A colourful scarf, easy to knit, looking the same on both sides. A fringe to add some playfulness, too. We're both very happy with how our tests have turned out, and to have it finished in time for the Nadelkunst. Actually, as I'm blogging this, Margit is sitting down and putting together the skeins for these scarves - each pack will have three skeins of 50 g wool, in different colours, plus the instructions in either German or English. The wool is a very nice and soft, yet sturdy yarn, from a German company and hand-dyed with natural dyes by Margit.

I'm looking forward to having the sets here next week, and I'm thrilled that I will be taking them to Weikersheim!

Here I am, well into the final bits of work on the embroidery book - tweaking, resizing, colour correcting and inserting pictures. Tomorrow will be a library day, where I will read and look up the final few books to give further reading suggestions for all the interesting stuff. (Or at least some of it.)

After that, the only things remaining is taking care of the cover layout (where I'll be getting some input from a friend), doing one printout of the whole shebang to check for any bad things that have crept in, do a final proofread to fix typos, and get a general impression on how nice my layout is. Fortunately there's a lovely book I got one day from a friend:


(That's "Graphic design for non-graphic designers", and it's a really wonderfully helpful book, and it's out of print, but you can get the ebook.)

 There's instructions for lots of stuff in there, including on how to set up the type area for a book. So I looked at that part again, did some thinking, and then did some drawing on a piece of paper. It happens to be a printout of the text (with no layout yet). Fun! And this is how the result of my having fun looked:

As much as I love computers, for some tasks you just can't beat a pencil, a ruler, and a piece of paper.

 Then the only thing left is to finish the front matter (German bookpeople call that the "Titelei" - which sounds very nice in a weird way, I think).

If things all go according to plan, I will send it to the printer on Monday... so only a few more days for me to spend in the thrall of the book. I'll be very happy when I can turn to other things again!

I spent a good part of the weekend working on the instructions (they're coming along) and shooting even more photos of even more steps. More and more ideas on what would be nice to add are creeping in, and it's a little sad to smash them down, but the thing has already grown a lot from my first estimate (around 30 pages) to now (probably 44-48 pages, and hopefully not more).

I couldn't resist to put this in, though:





It's a tiny gold thread ornament, modeled after an archaeological find from a bishop's grave dating to the 12th century, in approximate original size. A small enough extra to squeeze in!


In other news regarding the process, cover design is on its way (I'm getting a little help from a dear friend with this), and I have feedback from several lovely proofreaders already, with more to come soon.

Final word on the pictures of original pieces is still out, though, so I'll keep my fingers crossed that I will get permission and won't have to do without the pictures showing close-ups, either because I'm denied permission or because I'd have to pay too high a fee.

And after the weekend work, I'm now a little tired and worn out, so I'm rather happy that there are some errands to run this afternoon, plus a little more embroidery to work in preparation for the last photographs, and that I might just take it a bit easy for the rest of the day.

It feels like Friday today, and while I'm happy that it actually isn't tomorrow yet (as that gives me a day more to do stuff), I also think that I'd totally be due a Friday today, and a nice weekend.

I've fallen into the gold embroidery instructions thingie, or to put it differently, it has eaten All. The. Time. Product development is two words that sound rather innocuous, but oh, the things that hide behind them. Things you have planned, or are working on and developing, have a tendency to... well, grow. Or suddenly present you with utterly unexpected problems, costing lots of brain power and occasionally some nights of sleep. I've hinted on it on Monday, but here's the long version:

I want the fleur de lis embroidery kit to be as accessible to beginner (gold) embroiderers as it possibly can be, and that includes good, detailed instructions with lots of photos so you will really know what to do, and how it might look. We do have a decent printer, and that's why I can print the one-page or two-page instructions for the spinning kits and for the distaffs at home, but printing multi-page things such as these instructions is an entirely different beast.

So I was planning on writing the instructions and then having them done up by a printer, in some form of a booklet (which is much nicer than individual sheets with their tendency to separate and land in entirely different parts of the room. Or world, if you're like me). So far, so good - but I don't know if the kit will fly or not, so I'd better not plan for insane numbers of it. Especially as it means investing in things that I do not usually have in stock and that are not easily, if at all, saleable on their own. So I've planned to do a single, smallish batch of kits and see how it goes. If it goes very well, I'll do another batch. If it builds a little nest on my shelves never to leave again because it's so nice and comfy where I store my non-sellable ideas... well, I'll be out some money and a lot of time, but I'll live.

Here's the thing, however. The lower your number of copies to be printed, the higher the cost per item. For the low number of embroidery kits that I will make for this first batch, and with the need to provide instructions in two languages (German and English)... well, let's say printing prices for these would be through the roof, and would definitely leave me with a number of copies in the language less sought after.

The solution? Make a single version of the booklet containing both languages. This does lower the printing costs per copy somewhat, but it's still rather expensive.

So at some point last week, towards the end of it if you want to know it all in detail, it occurred to me that I could do a general instructions booklet, suitable for sale separately from the kit, stick that into the kit and provide an additional single sheet with the kit-relevant additional information.

This, I still think, is a very nice solution to the conundrum of print prices and guessing how many copies in each language will be needed. It has a catch, though: General instructions are much more work and need much more writing than specific ones. They also need more pictures, and different ones, including those that need permission to be published.

Thanks to very nice people all around who answered questions and are looking into pictures, though, it looks like I might be able to pull this off in time. I've taken oodles of photos yesterday, stitched, read, looked up terms (textile terminology is always a pain in the neck), stitched more, translated, and done picture processing. The German text is almost done, the English version is halfway there, and I'm about halfway through the piccie issues as well.

One of the many pictures taken yesterday - supplies for gold embroidery and the embrodery kit prototype.

Now I'm hoping the remaining issues will clear up in time - and then there's only (hah!) layout and pre-print checks to be done. Wish me luck.

This will, more (more embroidery) or less (shoes will come tomorrow - they deserve their own spot)
, be the blogpost I intended to do on Friday... so here goes:

After my long Hugo ramblings, I did some more reading, and I'm obviously notthe only one trying to see the kerfuffle as the basis for a new awareness of the Hugo, and maybe dragging it into the Century of the Fruitbat (or whatever we have, currently). Ken Marable has made a blog to collect recommendations for things you consider nomination-worthy for the Hugo, for all categories, and open for everyone - or, as the blog itself puts it, "The Non-Slate: Just Fans Talking about What They Love". Go read his post about the blog and moving forward - I think it's a wonderful idea, and I'll make sure to visit the site.

In embroidery kit news, I've hit a snag - I have planned and put together the materials for a first batch of embroidery kits, and intended to make nice, colourfully illustrated instructions to show precisely what to do and how to do it. However, the kit will come at a price, as there's a lot of work involved in preparing the materials, and there's quite a bit of material cost as well. Making an appropriately small print run for a batch of instruction booklets would sort of still be possible, but rather in-efficient, and would add unneccessary costs. So after figuring this out, I'm now planning to make a general how-to booklet with instructions that will be part of the kit or available separately, plus an extra sheet of kit-specific information.

Work in progress. I've come a lot further since, though!

Unfortunately, the kit was on a deadline before, as I want to get it ready for the Nadelkunst. With the original plan, that deadline was sort of not too bad... but with the change of plans, the writing project has now grown considerably. Which means I'm now trying to get it all put together in time. Frantic typing, emailing, picture searching and embroidering ensues. Wish me luck. (Also, I am having lots of coffee and chocolate. Always helps.)