It is a truth universally acknowledged, that when things come to happen, they do it in masses.

Ahead of me are three-and-a-half very full weeks, where I'm mostly away from home, doing things - giving workshops, holding presentations, doing museum inventory work, and, to balance out the work, having a few days off with the Most Patient of All Husbands inbetween. (I'm quite sure they will be needed...)

It's wonderful and exhilarating to be off and about and among people once more, though I admit I'm also a little anxious about this. There's still a pandemic happening, even though it is getting easier to ignore it all the time. I have masks, though (really well-fitting for a change, I'm quite amazed) and have just tested negative (something the Spinntreffen organisers were asking for, to self-test before going there), and I hope that I will have a sufficiently effective combination of being sensible and being lucky.

At the moment, I'm in the last bits of prep for the Spinntreffen of the Handspinngilde this weekend, and that means packing the car, printing out lists, and finishing putting together the workshop tools and materials. So once this post is done, I will hop out into the garden and cut some willow and hazel rods to serve as bow looms.

If you're interested in my presentation for the Hansemuseum Lübeck and the FGHO, it will be streamed live on YouTube on October 11, starting at 18:00. There's also still tickets available for those of you who prefer to be right in the room with me in Lübeck.

I will be back on the blog on October 24, when all my away missions are done and I'm back home - and I hope you will have a good time until then!

Holiday travels are wonderful - seeing new places, meeting new people, eating new and different foods, talking different languages (or at least trying to). Then you arrive home again, eventually, bringing with you... well, what do you bring with you from holiday trips? Memories, of course - which may or may not fade over time. I'm not a diary person, but when we are on holidays, I write a little travel diary. That is something my mum always did, and because memories may fade, or it could be handy to look up where one stayed a few years ago, or some highlight of a trip, I also made this a habit. 

Then, of course, there's photographs. When I was a teenager and in my early twenties, I really enjoyed taking pictures during holidays, but somehow, that enjoyment got less and less over the years. Maybe it has something to do with me taking the camera mostly for work purposes, more and more so as time progressed. Mostly, though, the reason is that when I'm taking photos, some part of my brain gets obsessed with looking at things only in "will that make a good picture"-mode, and that distracts me from actually enjoying things, or looking at stuff just so. Fortunately, the Most Patient Husband of Them All does not have a similarly weird brain, and he takes a picture here and there and now and then, so we go home with a few images for our collection and to keep memories alive and to show them to friends and family.

Sometimes there's also something that we buy to take home with us. I have blind-baking ceramic "beans" that we bought on one of our England journeys years ago, and when I take them out to use them, I remember that trip. 

There's only so much you need for a household, though, and only so much stuff you want to buy and lug home from travelling. So my most favourite type of holiday souvenir is... a recipe.

I'm fond of good food, and I very much enjoy eating "foreign" things when abroad, and trying stuff that is a regional speciality. And sometimes, something is delicious enough for me to look up the recipe (or several of them, since, you know, Internet recipe search) and integrate it into our portfolio of things to cook here. Which means that I both get new ideas on what to cook or bake, and I have something reminding me of glorious times in other places, and it's something that does not need storage space (apart from the bit of space in my cook book).

Cinnamon rolls remind me of trips to the North - Scandinavia or Finland. Scones are, of course, England and Ireland. Just like pies, which I make way too rarely. There's Sächsische Quarkkeulchen, from our hiking through the Sachsenforst, there's Crostata reminding me of the Embroidery School in Muro Leccese this spring, and most recently there's Pressgurka, from our stop in Sweden on the way back home this summer.

Definitely my favourite kind of holiday souvenir, these recipes!

I'm back from a lovely, long summer break - it was definitely very summery and quite, quite hot. In fact, it was hotter than I'd have needed... 

We spent some time with friends, and went on holidays to Finland to see the midnight sun. If you're used to nights being dark, even at the height of summer, it feels surreal to be in a place where it just doesn't get dark at all. We made good use of the night light - and had naps in the afternoon to make up for that, too.

Finland is a really beautiful country, with a lot of forest and an incredible amount of lakes. Our plan was to do some lake exploration via canoe, so we had a rental canoe for a few days, a map of a part of the lake district... and, unfortunately, a lot of (head)wind. So much wind that we had to change our plans regarding the tour and shorten it a bit. After all, we were on holidays and not on a torture-yourself-mission...

It was nice to paddle, though we had underestimated two things: the size of the lakes and the amount of summer cottages on their shores (and on the islands in the lakes). Having paddled the German Mecklenburger Seenplatte, I was subconsciously expecting something similar only larger - and yes, the Finnish lake district is much larger, but the lakes themselves also are much, much larger. That means a lot of open water to paddle through. Now that, in decent weather and by itself, is technically not a problem - but it felt like we were not getting ahead at all, because the perspective on those large lakes, when you are paddling towards something in the far-ish distance, just does not change much. We usually paddle at about 4 km per hour if on flat water with no significant wind influence, which is not so fast that you can see things change quickly... hence it felt, sometimes, like standing at one point and paddling forever. It got better, at least for me, towards the end of our tour, since you sort of learn that it just feels like you're in one spot but you are actually moving, but the general effect was still there.

The second underestimated thing really were the cottages. I knew that in Finland, having a summer cottage is totally a thing and about every family has at least one - but I never made the next step in thinking about this: All these cottages have to be somewhere. That's just logical, right? Well, one premium spot to put a summer cottage is, obviously, in a nice, quiet, secluded(ish) place on the shore of a lake... which meant that there were some stretches on our trip where you could not land your canoe unless you wanted to do so on somebody's more-or-less front lawn.

So basically, you were in nature, with very few other humans to be seen, but with traces of human habitation and civilisation everywhere (in form of the cottages, mostly). There was very little in terms of infrastructure though - no cafés or shops like you'd find at every stone throw in Mecklenburg. We had brought our own food, and water logistics stuff (a filter and a UV water sterilisation pen, because you don't want to catch a nasty stomach bug especially while on holidays), and that was quite necessary. We also had our trusty little tent and put that up on our own tiny private islands for several nights, which was a lot of fun and felt really special for us. (In Finland, you can put your tent up about everywhere, though common decency demands not to do that on someone else's front lawn. In Germany, there's a general prohibition against so-called "wild camping"; you can ask the owners of land if you may put up your tent there, or use designated spaces which you can find in limited numbers in some areas, but you're not allowed to just pitch it anywhere else. In many areas, that means you need to find the next commercial campsite... which will be populated with other people and cost you money, but - on the upside - will provide you with sanitary installations and typically a little shop, café, and the possibility to get fresh baked goods in the morning. However, all that means that just going "ah, here's a nice spot, let's use that" is not something we're used to.)

Our method of travel - trains and ferries - also worked very well. Going all the way up north that way did take a good bit of time altogether, but most of our travelling was done at night, with overnight ferries and night trains, and that was very, very pleasant. We had planned the journeys basically so that we would travel in the night and then spend the day in the town before moving on through the night again. It means declaring the journey a part of the holidays, and that was what we did, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I can highly recommend this! Finnish night trains are also quite nice and comfy, and you can even have a 2 person cabin with your own toilet and shower. So you spend a nice day wandering a city, doing a bit of sight-seeing, then go to the train station in the evening, board your train and have a relaxing hot shower while racing through the Finnish landscape before crawling into bed - and then you wake up the next morning somewhere else. Ah, it's just wonderful.

(If you're planning travel like this, and you use a train to get to your night travelling thingie, make sure you leave enough of a time gap before your night train or ferry leaves, just in case your previous transport is delayed for some reason. It will make the overall travel time a bit longer, but reduces stress immensely - and you can always go for a little stroll to stretch your legs if you are on time, and have a coffee or something to eat a few metres away from the train station.)

And now it's time to get back to good old work! There's a few projects to finish, and other things coming up, such as the embroidery demonstration in Brandenburg. First, though: Sending off all the orders that arrived during the summer break. 

(This post, weirdly, did not have its correct date when I posted it, but one in June. Don't ask me how that happened.)

Sorry for the blog silence on Friday - I had planned to do a quick blogpost in the morning, and then fair prep took over my brain, and that was that. 

Fair prep was, little surprising, taking longer than usual. Well, fair prep always takes longer than planned or intended, and there's usually something that does not get done because it gets forgotten, or there's just not enough time anymore - but not having done this for more than two years, everything was very rusty and everything took even longer than the normal longer than usual. 

No really important things got forgotten, though, everything fit into the car, and actually standing at a market stall again with real people stopping by to chat and look at things and buy whatever they needed was a wonderful change to everything online only. 

I also got to hang out again with Margit from Alte Künste, as we shared fair space as usual. 

On Sunday evening, it was the usual more-or-less chaotic packing, stuffing everything into the car, and now I'm sitting on the train on my way to Vienna for a bit of vocational training, an opportunity that I got thanks to EuroWeb. Which is absolutely wonderful and glorious, and I'm so looking forward to that, even if the timing is not perfect. (Prepping for the training workshop had to take place in parallel with the fair prep, and when I came home yesterday night, the bag for going to Vienna was already packed, so there was only the washbag to transfer over.)

The next few days, I'll get to discuss theoretical frameworks and terminology frameworks for visual identities with colleagues - that will certainly be a very interesting thing to do. It will also mean you're getting blog silence again - I'll be back here and writing on Monday, May 2.

Have a lovely week (I'm sure I will!)

I'm back from the Vienna trip, and it was wonderful - giving a presentation in front of actual living, breathing human beings just is different from giving an online-only presentation. Though I am certainly delighted that the presentation was hybrid, that made it possible for a good number of other people to join in.

There were questions afterwards, and then there was the "Post-Kolloquium" which is the official moniker for "have a meal and some drinks together". It's been forever since I've been at a social like that and that, too, was wonderful.

On the next day, I got to meet up with some colleagues to have a look at a spectacular Bronze Age gold textile, or what's left of it, which is only the gold threads. Interesting debates were had about it, and I got to play a little with some of the testing textiles and give some input, and then there was time for a museum visit before we met up again for dinner.

Some more sightseeing was added in before we went home (the Most Patient Husband went along for the ride), there was bouldering at a Viennese gym (which sort of counts as sightseeing as well), way too much coffee, lots of delicious foods of all kinds, and a lot of rides on diverse public transport vehicles. I'm especially enamored with the Viennese Underground, as there are some sections where it goes overground, with very nice views, and even nicer stations designed by Otto Wagner, a famous architect. These stations are part of the cultural heritage and still in use, so you get to ride modern trains to historical buildings, built in a style that I like very much.

Using public transport this weekend had an added benefit: the vehicles are all heated. It got very cold in Vienna over the weekend, especially on Saturday and Sunday - there was even snow, and not just a few flakes, but enough for it to stay on rooftops and trees. Brrrr!

Now it's back to the desk for the more mundane everyday tasks... though there is the next presentation to prepare, for a workshop coming up towards the end of April. 

I'm still feeling a bit queasy about travelling, and meeting up with a lot of people within a short period of time; it's so different from the pandemically mostly secluded life that we have here, and that I've gotten so (maybe too) used to in the last two years. So I hope we haven't caught anything on our trip, and we plan to get a test today and in a few days again. 

As a side note regarding the pandemic: Rules in Austria are similar to those in Germany, which means that you will be allowed to take off your mask when in a restaurant and seated at the table. Which means that for the presentation, in the larger room with more air volume and lots of space for each person, everyone wore a mask... while those going to the post-colloqium were then seated at a small table, with little space between individuals, and in a much smaller room, not wearing a mask. I do get the rules, and I completely understand how these situations occur, but it's still sort of weird and makes the rules seem sort of haphazard...