I was properly busy yesterday and added more pictures to the shop as well as a few new items. Among them, brand-spanking-new: six-holed weaving tablets (made of parchment) and very variable slate frames.

You can check out the new goodies here - and I hope you like them!

Today is a day for taking care of odds and ends - all those small annoying things that need doing. Like checking for updates for my programmes, or fixing small oopsies on websites, or updating some things in the shop, or answering mails and phone calls. It's amazing how many of these small tasks keep coming up - some garden gnome or something like that to take care of stuff would be really helpful!

While I am working on diminishing the annoying-small-tasks list, maybe you would like to check out the programme for the next conference of the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA), which will take place in Helsinki August 29-September 1? You can find their homepage here, and the call for papers will be open until end of March.

Really. They are. I mean I totally love my diamonds - they are always plane, they never need trueing, they do not need to be soaked before use, they don't even need lubricant, and they come with their non-slip feet or non-slip mat. Plus they are quite abrasive, even with small grain... so what's not to love?

For those of you who are confused: I am talking about diamond whetstones. And for those of you who ponder buying a whetstone for sharpening kitchen knives or other tools: I can totally recommend a diamond stone. They are a bit pricier than normal stone stones, but they last forever, they never develop a ditch, and they are easy to clean.

This post was brought to you by the person who finally finished sharpening a new tool (that came very, very unsharpened) and can now start to work on those 6-hole weaving tablets  that are supposed to go into the shop soon...

Today is the day we will be visiting LEA (or at least LEA's building site) - the Laboratory for Experimental Archaeology that is being built in Mayen and where the Textile Forum 2012 will take place.

Sabine and I are both very much looking forward to this - we have seen plans and pictures, but it's always totally different to be there in person. I know that a lot of thought and effort went into this project, so I am very thrilled to see it come into reality!

I have finally updated the homepage at www.pallia.net - and for those of you in Germany (or at least reading German) who are interested in getting all the news from pallia, you can now sign up to a newsletter that will make sure you get all the interesting announcements.

Since most of my news-announcing is done via this blog, and this blog is English, the Germans who are not really at home with a foreign language always got to be a little disadvantaged. And while I will go on with this blog as usual, there's now a German language way to get the updates - including those not too interesting for an international audience.

Signing up is, of course, easy: Just go to www.pallia.net, and you can sign up right on the front page of the (German language) site. The newsletter will be used to announce workshop dates and the occasional larger shop update or places and dates where you can find me (and the market stall, probably).

If you are looking for a convenient way to search for Open Access archaeological journals, there is a database where you can search by geographic area, subject area, peer review and whether or not it's still publishing: Just go to Open Access Archaeology Journal Search.

In other news, I am slowly catching up with all the backlog that ran up here, and that really feels good! (Though there's more than enough work for the rest of this year hiding in corners here and there...)

The deliciously white and fluffy layer of snow that covered everything yesterday is gone overnight. I miss it - it really looked totally beautiful, and there's been way too little snow this winter.

In other news (probably more interesting for you), the Call for Papers for the Textile Forum is out via the newsletter as well (which means that the new newsletter list does work), and I'm still working on the thread thickness analysis. The system works, and now it's more or less only (hah!) a question of getting the data read in, formatted, and evaluated. Which means more work on that stuff - but work that will eventually yield more interesting data, and I am very, very curious to see if it will be possible to trace yarn unevenness back to influence of fibre/fibre preparation, spindle or if it's more or less a personal thing depending on the spinner again.

Apart from this, I'm wrapping up the last things I really want to finish before going on a break for the holidays - and as every year, I am looking forward so much to spending time with family and friends. Only a few days left! It's already the twenty-first!