We are back home from a wonderful weekend at Cave Gladium, where I was lucky from beginning to end - wonderful sunny weather (even a bit too hot sometimes), what must have been the best place for a stall on the whole market (right on the "main street" between food area/toilets and the "Hurenweibl"*), incredibly nice colleagues and neighbors all around, and gazillions of people coming by for a question, a chat or a peek into my dissertation manuscript. The latter were so many and so frequent that we put a straw mattress on the ground behind my table and declared it "reader's corner".

And of course there were the requisite food stalls offering a wide variety of things (but I've seen no potato goods), a stage for music (far enough from the stall not to disturb us), there were oriental dried fruits like figs, dates with walnut and nuts, and the"Teezelt", a kind of oriental café that you get on about every larger medieval market in Germany to buy mokka with spices, mint or black tea and sweets to go with your beverage. And I just love to go there for a mokka after closing shop at dusk (because nobody can see my fine threads anyway once it starts getting dark). And a thing seldom seen: One wandering musician walking through the whole festival area playing pipe and tabor - the classical medieval one-man-band!

Taking all together, the Cave is a wild mixture of stalls selling tourist wares, stalls showing and selling wares for Living History, visitors, LH people and costumed people, and everything with a very relaxed and friendly atmosphere. And the Cave is big, no, huge even. I'd say if the Cave organisers take a little care during the next years that the tourist ware stalls don't take over, this festival will soon be as big and as important as Freienfels and Tannenberg, both events for the LH scene but open to tourists.


* The "Hurenweibl" at Cave Gladium is a tavern for LH folks only; there's a guard at the entrance allowing only historically dressed people to pass. (Cave Gladium also sports a "no-tourists-area", a meadow reached only over a little bridge with a guard posted before it as well.)
A Hurenweibel was the officer in charge of the Tross (the camp followers) of the Landsknecht armies. A lot of the tourists are a bit nonplussed by this tavern name or start laughing because "Hure" is the German word for "whore", and "Weib" today is still another word for wife, but in many German regions, its meaning has slipped somewhat from neutral or positive in former times to slightly derogatory. So people not knowing that "Weibl" is an old form of "Webel" as in "Feldwebel" often are misled by the tavern name.

I have finished my head-over-heels rush to meet all my deadlines (and it looks as if I can make it, hooray) and now I'm off to Furth im Wald, for three days of relaxing medieval market atmosphere at Cave Gladium.

Regrettably, there have not been enough registrations for the workshops, so those will not take place. (I'm not sure yet whether it was bad luck, not enough advertising/information or whether there is generally no interest to have a learning experience during a Living History/medieval market event.) Instead, I am planning to sit beside my table full of the new goods to sell and chat with people, relax, maybe sew a little bit and generally enjoy myself.

If you are in the region, the Cave is surely worth a visit - and if you are undecided yet whether you want to see the Drachenstich, this year is your last chance to see the experienced old dragon - because next year, the new dragon will take over!

There's still much to do before the weekend - I have some writing to finish, and of course packing for the Cave has to be done. I could need a second self right now to take care of some things - or at least "an Stiftn" (colloquial not for "a pencil", as German-reading folks might think now, but for an apprentice) to do the time-consuming but no-brainer parts of work. Like portioning off the wool for the spinning experiment, a task for me once I'm back from Cave and holidays. The wool and the bags for the wool are already here and waiting to get together - put wool on the scales, take wool from the scales, put wool into bag, repeat 200+ times. The upside to work like that? I get to sit in the comfy, well-lighted living room, on the sofa, listening to good music or an audio-book of my choice. And I'm actually looking forward to the task because of that!

Somehow, things always take longer than planned. Or at least not shorter. So with last week's unexpected (and utterly unwanted) illness and thus a good two days' non-productive time, I am a good bit behind schedule again. Because there is the Cave coming up as well as two weeks of holidays (that are fortunately already booked, so I can't weasel out and not take it) and inbetween, there is rather a lot to do and with deadlines as well, and with communication impaired by general holiday time, I'm feeling a lot behind schedule.

Which also means that the things without deadline - such as making an online storefront, which lies half-finished on my computer - are left behind to wait until there is less craziness abounding. So for all of you who are waiting for the collection of all market stall items, I'm sorry for the prolonged wait, but there is no possibility at all for me to squeeze it in between things. I hope to get it up before Eindhoven, but at the moment I'm not too optimistic that will work. If this takes all too long for you, the tag "market stall" will give you all the posts that include tools and threads for sale. Please don't hesitate to contact me via comments or via e-mail if you want to order something, and I will inform you about the prices and check out shipping costs for you.

After a nice week-end, I'm fit for blogging again, but not too inspired as to a topic today. So instead of me thinking too much and straining my brain, here's a link for those of you who don't know it yet:

The Middle High German Database (mhdbdb, standing for Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdatenbank) - a database where you can search middle high german texts for word occurrences

and its sister database, the IMAREAL picture database, where you can search pictures for things and persons.

Enjoy!

Tomorrow I will go to Bad Staffelstein to collect the exhibits again and bring them back home, since the two-week exhibition is over. So if you are in the area, today's your last chance to see it!

I'm still busy with "normal life", containing a lot of spooling threads - but this time, they are coloured! In a joint venture with Sabine from the Wollschmiede, we are trying to bring back really fine, historically dyed silk threads for embroidery, weaving or whatever you can think of.

I have been wondering for some time why there are no such threads available on the market. Well, our current experience is: These thin silks are hard to prepare for dyeing, hard to dye, and even hard to portion off from the hank. On the other hand, they are really beautiful: Fine, glossy silks in awesome colours...

After the exhibition vernissage and before Cave Gladium, I now actually feel as if I had a little room for breathing and taking care of all the things left to moulder - like my book-keeping, or giving a semblance of order to my study, or sorting things. Yesterday was quite successful in terms of my to-do list, so I'm feeling more or less on schedule. That's nice!

So today, I'll take care of some of the stacks lying around here, putting things back into order and maybe clearing my totally cluttered desk a bit. This afternoon, I can at last collect my "cookie cutters" for making the spindle whorls for the Textilforum, and after that, I'll have some relaxed time for doing some textile work just for my own amusement, with no set goal or deadline.

On Monday, then, it's time to list all the things to be done, set new deadlines (in addition to the real ones, I do make "fake deadlines" for my own planning) and define priorities, get some book-keeping done and then rush back into business as usual. Including some new hitherto undisclosed ideas for the market stall...