Sorry, but no photos yet - the camera battery pack needs recharging.

However, I have different good news: The book is scheduled for the actual print run this week! Hooray!

I won't attempt to blog much more than that today, because just thinking of the book going real-ink-on-real-paper... well. Let's say I'm not thinking of much else today.

I had a wonderful cup of celebratory coffee yesterday, to celebrate being finished with the galley proofs. So today, I will use the wonderful early-spring weather to carry the packet to the post office and send it off - next step toward publication: done.

I may have been sighing a lot over how much text there is, and about reading it all again (and again), but I also feel that it is absolutely wonderful to work together with a publishing house on this. I read the stuff, I mark the little typos that had skilfully managed not to get noticed by anyone, I write my comments about picture sizes and picture placement and single letters with special Czech or Polish accents that were taken from a different font and gaps a little too small or a little too large between words and special characters or between lines; then I send it off to somewhere else and magic! All the marked-up things are taken care of! By SOMEBODY ELSE!

Having done the layout for the thesis submission version myself, I can very much appreciate how much work goes into these things - because once you change something in the front of the book, the change might well ricochet further on, maybe to the end of the chapter or even to the end of the part or, if things go really badly, all to the end of the book. And re-checking and re-layouting some 500 pages and change  - believe me, that is not what you'd like to do on a sunny afternoon or a rainy one. So I try to be a good layout-wise author and when I need to make a change, I try to do the wording so there's only change in that one paragraph or on that one page. Wasn't possible in one case in the first run, though, and that really ricocheted for the rest of the chapter.
And when I tried to do my best not to make ugly work-intensive changes, I send it off, lean back, have a celebratory coffee (or two) and am very, very happy that I am not alone in this. Hooray for publishing houses and the wonderful people who work there!

After the wonderful planning session in South Tyrol, it's back to the usual, and nose back onto the grindstone. I'm on the last bits of proofreading, having been very diligently reading about all day during the last two days, and I hope to finish today or, at the latest, tomorrow. Thankfully there are more pictures in the catalogue part than in the front bits, which makes reading ten pages go much, much faster.

On the other fronts, there has been some movement as well: The market stall sewing is progressing, and occasionally I even snatch a few minutes for knitting on the current design and planning for the next one. Once the more pressing matters - stall and proof-reading - are done, I hope to get one or two patterns out for test-knitting.

Did I ever feel unsure about being able to fill my time as freelancer?

Here I am, in reading land, working my way through the thesis again. This is the second proofread in preparation of print, and I do hope that nothing untoward will happen with the text when those last corrections and layouting tweaks are done - it would be heavenly if the next step would be for me to happily say "Yes, that's all print-ready, I found nothing more!"

However, I am glad to report that this time around, reading goes much, much faster, since I don't double-check things anymore. And maybe I was utterly out of proofing practice, too. I'm not so sure that I can finish all within the week, but at the moment I'm already a very good way into the stack of printed paper (and I hope that it will go a little faster in the catalogue part, too - with all the pics taking up real estate on the pages).

In other news: I have made the newspaper - there is a little snippet about me in the arts & entertainment section of the regional paper, the "Erlanger Nachrichten". Newspaper articles - or journalistic articles in general - are always an exciting thing in two ways. For one thing, it is of course exciting to be able to tell or show more people about what you do, and maybe why it is so great/important/wonderful, but the second part of the excitement is that you can never be sure if the article will actually sound like you tried to sound.
Well, in this case, I am more than happy with the little piece. I love the writer's voice, and I think he did a wonderful job in writing it. The article is online, and you can have a look at it here. If you don't read German, there's at least a photo for you.

In other other news: I'm still bitten by the knitting bug, I now have more knitting needles thanks to my parents (and splendid ones, too) and I have a new brainfart that is being translated into knitting. With an allover stitch pattern, lots of delicious maths*, beautiful curves and an almost-totally-invisible decrease that mesh together perfectly, I am totally excited about this. The knitting is coming along nicely, the pattern is a tingling mixture of relaxing and interesting, and I hope to have it up for testknitting soon. For those really obsessed with symmetry, there will even be a "perfect symmetry" option. (Which I am not using for the prototype, by the way: For once I actually decided to not do everything at once and in the hardest possible way.)

*Maybe I should mention right here that knitting the finished pattern will not include maths. Just counting. Easy counting.

An hour or two after I had blogged yesterday about the galley proofs being on their way here, the postman came and delivered.

So today is reading day! I am arming myself with a pot of tea and a red and blue pen and reading my way through the book (again). Fortunately, this time I need to focus less on finding all typos and on checking all footnotes, since that was all done last round - so I can just read to catch any bad remaining errors and to check if there are any layouting problems left. Which feels like a much, much easier job.

And I think I will be overwhelmed with happiness once this baby is out in the shops!

An hour or two after I had blogged yesterday, I received an e-mail from the layout lady at the publishing house telling me that the proofs are in the post, on their way to my place. So there's the second round of proofing coming up for today or, at latest, tomorrow.

In other news, the conference proceedings book from NESAT X is out, and date and main topic for NESAT XI have been announced - it will take place in Esslingen in 2011, focus will be methods in textile archaeology, and the poster session especially welcomes experimental archaeology topics. More info and registration form can be found on the official website www.nesat.org.

With the new year now firmly in the saddle, dates for the summer season are slowly lining up on my calendar. And it already becomes clear that 2010 is The Year of Unfortunate Date Collisions, with lots of things falling together - like almost all official holidays with Saturdays or Sundays, and a few of my private fixed date events with work events (and should you wonder: work will win).

There are already a few work dates I am very, very much looking forward to. I am planning to go to Cave Gladium again in 2010 - that will be August 9 to August 14. Since I later heard from some folks that they would have loved to attend a workshop, but didn't hear about it in time, this year I am planning to have the 'shops during the week (to leave the weekend for shopping and all the other weekend stuff) and get it much more public much earlier.
There will be more workshopping and a talk/lecture in Austria, too - I am going to the Spectaculum in Friesach, end of July/start of August. You can read more about the programme here on the official pages. The workshop will teach participants the basics of medieval sewing - differences between fabrics, materials, stitches and seams. Because seam types, stitches and fabric type were purposefully matched for the desired results, this is something like "medieval sewing 101", giving the groundworks for sewing and tailoring medieval style. I love this workshop topic because the lowly hand-seam is underestimated so much today - and lining all the possible stitches, seams and hems up in two sampler cloths - one wool, one linen - shows so much of the possibilities.

And speaking of dates: The book is being layouted at the publishing house, and I am waiting for new work (second proofing) any day. Once the packet is here, I promise I will do my very best to be totally quick in reading, proofing and sending back/responding. Very much fitting the situation and the question that usually pops up at some point - "why does that all take so freakingly long?", INTERN (who does write herself all-caps) has put up a nice blog post summing it up here.