This was a nice and busy weekend - I finished my test-stitching, both in regard of the stitches and the ground fabrics that needed to be tried out.

And another thing is also done: 


The ink has arrived, and I already bottled it off into nice little flasks that are quite close to some that can be seen on medieval illustrations of scribes.

And the ink... ah, the ink. It's wonderfully black, just the right viscosity to work really well for nice, thin lines on the linen test cloth, and it does what it's supposed to do: Dry up and then stay where it has been put, no bleeding, no creeping, no nothing. So after being annoyed for a bit more than a year by not having proper authentic medieval ink for proper authentic pattern transfers, I finally have ink to do it the medieval way - and ink to sell for all of you who want some, too. Hooray!

I'm still testing the embroidery stuff on different linen fabrics - I have a few new samples now, and there might be the right one among them.

And I know I've said it before, but boy! is medieval embroidery done-to-scale tiny! It really needs good lighting and good hand-eye-coordination - and probably being short-sighted will help a lot as well...
I hope to be able to show you a photograph of a sample piece one of the next days - at the moment, it's just a very short row of very few stitches in grass-green untwisted silk, and not looking like anything remotely spectacular or embroidery-y yet...

I'm still up to my ears in prep work for the embroidery course - I am using this as a wonderful opportunity to tackle all those embroidery-related side projects and side questions that had pestered me for quite a while, but that I never got around to occupy myself with.

And one of those eternal projects was getting the proper ink to do authentic medieval preparatory drawings. There's a nice instruction on how to do it in Cennino Cennini's handbook (the extended version; scroll down to CLXIV to read it), but getting the appropriate ink proved to be a bit harder than I had expected. And now I'm finally in the home straight for the ink project - only a few more days until I have that done and finished. Then I will be one step closer to having all the embroidery preparations covered!

(There's still plenty of steps left until that though, so no danger in my getting out of work to do in that area yet...)

I just realised that I somehow never got around to posting pictures of the chess-playing couple that I made for Hartenstein - so here you go, a few photos...

Closeup of the buttons on the blue dress (worn beneath the short-sleeved pink dress):

The man getting dressed. If you don't put the arms in first, it won't work, so they inevitably look like colourful pancakes with arms in at some point:


Last touchups on the fully dressed lady:

 Travelling to their new home in the car:

And sitting in their new spot at the museum:

I really like how those two turned out, and I'm still totally in love with the idea of showing a couple in a game of chess - showing a medieval pastime, a game, male and female clothing at once, and all that together with an intimate and romantic touch. Now I hope the people at the museum will also like it as much!

I will let you know when they will be officially made part of the museum and on view for the public, which will be very soon probably.

I'm one of those people who have the deep-seated wish to do everything correctly... so among the other things, I'm still working on getting my head wrapped around all the things that I have to be aware of in the future, tax-wise, and there's not every thing really clear for me yet.

However, I found some really interesting stuff around on the net, and even though most of you readers are not from Germany, I'll still share it. There's a totally amazing guide for freelancers called mediafon, and not only does it answer about every question that might come up, it's also written in a way that makes reading up on the stuff fun. And if you know how German law texts are written (probably the same for all law texts in every language), that really is an achievement. So between that and a call to my friendly official in charge, I'll probably be quite ok.

In other news (and I'm sorry again for the non-Germans), you might remember that back in June, I had a film team here and an insane amount of fun working with them. Well, the film is now finally not only cut and edited (has been for a while), but also furnished with an airing date. It will run under the title "Ritter, Gaukler, Heilerinnen (Faszination Mittelalter)" on BR alpha on the 28th of March, 16:00 to 16:30 o'clock. It's not up on their programme preview site yet, but will be in time.

I have actually tackled the paperwork stack yesterday, and I did make quite good progress - not all done yet, but soon I will be through (and that includes sorting stuff for easier tax-paperworks, so that's really fine). However, this year, I will have to brush up on tax stuff and get a little more knowledge in additionally, so I will have a bit more quality time with the paperwork stuff...

Unfortunately, taxes in Germany are a bit of a jungle, and it's not always easy to find your way through. It already starts with the name: There's Umsatzsteuer (literally: turnover tax) and Mehrwertsteuer (literally: value added tax). Which is exactly the same, only that USt. is nowadays the official term, but MWSt. is still used more often. Then there's different VAT rates for foodstuffs, books, and normal wares; if you teach for a school or private school, your honorarium might be exempt from VAT, but at another school it might not be. So to make things easier, there's a possibility to just not do VAT at all, but that is only possible under a certain maximum amount of income. You see? Jungle. Must find my machete. (If you actually want to have a quick and very incomplete first overview about German VAT, look here.)

Why I'm actually telling you about this? Well, my closed season seems to be over, and I will have to do MWSt. in the future. Which is a milestone, really - so I'm not too unhappy about it, just very curious on how it will go from now on.

My new linen threads have finally arrived, and now I have a slightly different assortment than before. Instead of offering sewing thread in two colours (creamy white or fully bleached), I have reduced the colour range to one thread inbetween the two and instead now have two thicknesses of linen sewing thread.


The picture shows both linens and between them a spool of fine silk thread. As you can see, I have also started winding the thread on new spool-like objects, so now your thread rolls can happily lie around in open sight on every historical event - these babies are historically correct material. Plus you can secure your thread in the open end if you carefully crack the roll in one or two spots!

And just so you can get an approximate picture of the thicknesses we are talking about here:


These are, from left to right in the picture: Silk Gütermann 100/3 thread (for thickness comparison), the thin linen thread and then the thicker linen thread. I'm sorry the picture is a little blurry, but you should be able to compare the three thicknesses if you look at the spot right under the cent-coin.

I am very happy with these new threads: Sturdy, very high quality, very smooth and thinner than you usually get. Oh, and I have decided to do one hundred metre spools for now and see if there are requests for smaller portions, too.