It is well past time for me to get a new leaflet with information about what I do and offer, so I've spent some time going through pictures and writing some texts. Well, drafts, at least. Both of it is... not so easy.

Pictures-wise, I obviously want to use newer ones - from mid of 2016 or later, which cuts down on the number available quite a bit.

And texts... whew. I rarely feel like I'm good at writing my own ad copy, and I've frequently found that something I find to be very clear is not so clear to some other people. I also know I have a stack of older drafts somewhere around here which I just need to find again so I can have a look if they are any good; most times I find it easier to work with drafts when they have aged at least a bit.

So the big question is: Will I get pics, texts, and the time to put them together into a pleasing whole before the season starts?

I think I've been asked recently whether I knew boredom... and the answer is, of course, a resounding "no". Whenever I think I'm sort of getting on top of things that have to be done, new stuff pops up.

Like small shenanigans in the webshop that need to be taken care of, and hunting down suitable pictures for some new advertising material. I've also been busy in getting some more information onto the Textile Forum website (the dye penetration summary is now a bit longer, and a bit more detailed), with still more to come. Kickstarter planning is also going on in the background. So... busy around here, even if there's not much physical stuff to show for this at the end of the day.

On the list for today: Taking some more photos for the shop, finishing the pallia Newsletter, and hopefully find time for some more Textile Forum work, too. There's still a good stack of experiment data that could use some analysis and research. (I keep being amazed by how much work in the aftermath an experiment will generate. You'd think that after all the careful planning and preliminary reserach, and then the actual running of the experiment, that would be most of the work... but no, most of the actual work is yet to come. Sigh. One day, I will actually be smart enough to factor that in better.)

Here, stuff is progressing. Coffee is being drunk.
I'm still hard at work on the Forum webpages, getting them into a nicer order and stuff on them easier to access. Putting more stuff in there, too - which means I might need to up my contract with my provider a notch, to have more space for the stuff.

I'm also trying to finalise a little survey about the Forum to see where we might be heading. I love the format of having one full week, and the combination of a lecture and some practical part, but it might pose too much of an initial hurdle to those not already straddling the line between theoretical or academic work and crafts practice and experience. I also have the suspicion that a full week is too long for quite a few people - so Sabine and I have talked it over, and Michael and I have, and we might do a bit of a change, this year or next, depending on how it goes.

The survey is not quite finished yet, but I hope to get it done and out and tested later today, and then it will be time for a newsletter and spreading it out, hopefully gaining a lot of insights. Ideally, I'll also get the site done and polished before it goes out, but I think I might not, and I'd rather have more time for the survey than less - so it all depends on how productive I'll be today. And possibly early tomorrow. So... I should get back on it, right?

Talk Like A Pirate Day is drawing nearer again (September 19!), and that is a good reason to pull out the Pirate Robert hats again and take some more photos - especially since the hat pattern is going to be featured in an article soon (and I'm utterly excited about that!).

Some things, though, are notoriously hard to take good photos of. Gold embroidery, or gold brocading, for instance - the glittering gold has a tendency to mess with the exposure time calibration of cameras, and this tends to result in really bad pictures.

While knitted hats are usually not suffering from exposure time problems due to gold thread, small cables also have a tendency to look really obvious in real life, just to suddenly and quietly disappear into invisibility on a photograph. Human eyes and human brains are just really, really good at seeing 3D and making the most even of small differences of light and shade.

So I was very happy about having two nice little photo lights, and a good tripod, and some time for fiddling. And some more time for fiddling. Then some more. There were also some, um, alternative supports for the two photo lights so that I could adjust them juuust so - a few millimetres, or a few degrees of the head angle, already made a huge difference in the outcome.

[caption id="attachment_3367" align="alignnone" width="816"] Lamps, a styrofoam head with the hat, a camera on a tripod. And some motivational coffee (not shown).


In the end, though, I did get a few decent pictures - so I'd say the fiddling was well worth it!

While I was away having fun, things were going on back home. Garden things, mostly - the lawn growing like crazy, just like the willow fence. But also nicer, more edible ones:


The beef tomatoes (a variety I've had not much success with these past years) actually resulted in one plant with a decent yield. The seeds will be taken today, and I hope that there will be more of the same huge things in the future (note the rather large peanut included for something like a scale...)

Also, the peach tree is actually growing peaches this year, and most of them are still there, and growing. They will be ripe enough for harvest in a few days, I think - the first one has already fallen down, and it was still rather firm but already edible.


The other usual accumulated stuff? I'm still catching up on the last bits of it. Some of it was easy, like deleting a gazillion of emails from various social platforms and clearing out the junk folder; some were, as usual, quick to deal with through a short reply, and some need more work, so they are still sitting there, making the inbox a bit fatter than I like to have it.

There was also a rather large post-office run:


for which the Beach Rolly (originally bought for its primary* original purpose, which is canoe portaging) proved to be very helpful. Yay for multi-purpose tools!

*It actually has three original purposes as intended by the manufacturer: canoe portaging, hauling other stuff as a sack barrow, and serving as a comfy seat with backrest. It has seen use in all three of these, though the canoe portaging time is by far the smallest amount of the use-hours. Being used as a seat? By far the largest. It really is comfy!

After a few small hiccups, it has finally worked, and I'm all psyched to announce that now, finally, my whole site is now running under the SSL protocol, as evidenced by the friendly green lock you should be able to see in your browser address bar.

This blog, by the way, was the main cause of the hiccups, and took most of the migration work - everything else was settled with three checkboxes checked, so just a very few mouse clicks. The blog, however, had to have URLs changed, and there was a remaining issue kindly and quickly fixed by support (thank goodness for IT support people, magicians with keyboards). So for now, everything is running, except one of the Wordpress plugins is not playing nice with SSL, it seems. So for you now no longer get a fancy lightbox to look at pictures.

While blog reading might not be enough of a security issue to warrant a few hours of work doing the switchover, the shop surely is. As of now, I've not offered payment methods that require me to save payment data, or you to submit your data to my server, due to not having SSL. But now, to my great delight, everything will be transmitted safely and securely encrypted... and this also means that eventually, I might be able to implement direct paying possibilities. That's something for the medium future, though, as credit card options or direct bank transfer needs some good research into options and costs before I can actually consider any of these.

For now, I'm happy that everything seems to run smoothly again - and shall celebrate for a bit. Yay!

In case you couldn't see the blog these days - I'm trying to switch the site over to SSl, and as usual, not everything is going all smoothly all the time. So - some figuring out on how to get this switch done is on  the agenda.

Other agenda things: Write up the article for the NESAT publication. There was some Bernuthsfeld work done today (there's always a few more details that need to be looked for); there was some knitting-related stuff (Margit is writing up a pattern for socks, and we're planning to offer a few of the patterns she is showing as testknits). Emails with requests were handled - in short, it was one of these days where lots of small things happen, but in the end, it feels like nothing much was done. (Which is not true, but can be really irritating at times.)

So... a fairly typical Monday, I'd say. And now I hope this blog post will be nice and visible, and the comment section will behave, too (I've been told it has been acting up, but I haven't found out why yet).