I am using the time until the Copenhagen conference starts to do my pre-season-start inventory work, which also includes cleaning out and re-filling the many boxes I use to protect and store the wares that I lug along, and other work like dunking my baskets in water to clean and revitalise them.

And I'm very happy to announce that I can do this while sitting in a room with the newly finished Flowery Newness!

This was quite pleasant to work and did not take overly long, thanks to the appliqué technique. The motif is taken from a 15th century manuscript margin decoration; the manuscript is probably from South Germany and is a Book of Hours. You can see the inspiration page in the British Library online thingie, here.

For those interested in the technique: It's wool on wool, plant dyes (with exception of the stems, which are fake onion-dyed chemical dye), edges caught with beeswax and sewn on with plant-dyed silk thread. I had to use a substitute for the gilt leather strip that would usually have surrounded the edges; the substitute is a gilt thread (which should really be called a rope, compared to proper historical gold thread).

This flowery banner will adorn my sales table in Freienfels - and I think it's quite the eye-catcher!

First of all, if you are interested in hearing about textiles and economy, don't forget that the conference in Copenhagen starts tomorrow at 9 in the morning (GMT +1). All the links to participate via remote connection are up, and I think folks in Copenhagen are looking forward to having a remote audience too! This is certainly something that makes me feel all futuristic.

In other news, the flowery newness is not yet finished; there's still some (but considerably less) work to do - mostly the last embellishments plus the edges of the thing.

And finally, I have been looking for an alternative to amazon again (why? they are too mighty, and they know it), since they gobbled up the bookdepository online shop in 2011, prompting quite a few concerned reactions. I have now heard that at least for Germany, buch.de seems to be a good alternative - free shipping for books (in the country, at least), a decent selection of English books, and their prices are only slightly higher than those of bookdepository or amazon. I can live with slightly higher prices if the rest is fine - plus they even offer several different payment methods with no added costs, like paying after getting an invoice.

Work in progress, with real progress: My new eyecatcher for the market stall table. It's colourful, it's nice, it's not very small but small enough to fit on the table, and it has something to do with flowers. Plus, and that's a big plus, I have managed to pick a technique that does not take ages to do, for a change in my usual procedures.
The bad news for you: I have decided not to post a picture of the work-in-progress of the new sales table embellishment (one needs something new nice to look at once in a while, right?) but only show a picture of it once it's finished. The good news for you, then, is that I have some hope that I may be able to finish it today... there's not too much work left on it.

First, however, I will have to bring the car away to get the windshield repaired - the glass still has its huge crater from when a stone hit it on the way to the IRM in Borg. And after that, the day even promises to be a very nice day, with good weather - which always means I can sit in the sun while working. Hooray!

It's that time of year (and the weather) when pollen of the early blooming trees are out in force, and accordingly it's the time of year when I sneeze much more often than I find funny. Still, it could be worse (and I've had worse hayfever), so I'm quite content.

Apart from my nose iching and me waking up people with sneezing, things are fine here, and rolling on as usual. Which means I have more than enough things to do, some of them with deadlines... including re-stocking the inventory for season's start in Freienfels. Which is on my list for today, and I'm looking forward to winding some more yarn spools and combing some more wool. And if luck is on my side, I can even do the combing outside in the garden, sneezing or not!

I'm back from  a lovely easter break - we spent the weekend with my family, which included long late breakfasts, nice meals, dyeing eggs on Saturday, lovely coffee and cake in the afternoons, and almost all the family there for coffee on Monday (which made us seventeen persons).

One thing that we did not do this year, though, was a little Easter stroll outside. It was really cold and not very tempting to go for a walk, it even snowed a little bit on Sunday. True April weather - and the temperatures did show that Easter was not really late in the year this time. It's not quite as cold here, but just as grey and overcast.

Which means that now I will start doing all the stuff that needs to be done not sitting in the warm sunshine in the wintergarden, but at my regular place at my desk... and since Freienfels and thus the real start of the season will be quite, quite soon, there is plenty of stuff to do, like portion and spool some more of the gold thread, do an inventory of the rest of the wares, and get the books up to date. And once this is done, taxes have to be filed, just like every year...

There's not much new to tell - as could have been expected, I did not finish off that long list of small things to take care of yesterday. I'm also waiting for a call from a car repair shop, since the last drive included a nasty stone impact that left a crater in the windscreen glass. At least my backup is finished (it took most of yesterday) and I can start migrating to the larger hard disk. Yay space!

Apart from that, I am thinking hard about how to fine-tune my display of goods for the markets and events. I have a few ideas, but I have not decided completely yet... luckily, there's still a bit more than two weeks left before the next event. Which will be Freienfels - and I am looking forward to going there, meeting old (and new) friends, and having a good time as usual!

I really enjoyed the day off yesterday - spent mostly sitting in the sun, enjoying the warm, balmy spring air, and reading. And now it's back to all those things that wait for me to do them - including a full backup of my current data on the computer, and then migrating the contents of the computer to a new (and much larger) internal disk drive.

And all this because I am running out of space, and I started to shift some files to external disk drives - until a while ago I realised that there are pictures missing from the internal drive. Pictures that I knew must be there, and that seem to be (hopefully all of them) on a backup drive from quite a while ago. I have no clue how that could have happened, but it's not filling me with delight, quite the contrary. So I did what everyone with not enough space on the disk does: I ordered a new, bigger one. Once this is all finished, I will have an internal terabyte (Yay! Space!) which, judging by my current migration process to bigger disks, should last at least two years... or quite a bit more.

These were the news from pallia's IT department. Stay tuned for news from the Customer Service department and the Research Facilities... they are due soon.