VG Wort (or money for writing, sort of)

It's Friday (why is it Friday already?), the cat is napping after a long walk outside and a bowl of cat food, I have coffee, and things are coming along. Which is good, as I will spend all of next week with fellow textile people at the European Textile Forum - one week of textile nerdiness and intensive research. Bliss.

Somebody needs to pack my things for that, though. That same somebody also has to take care of a few other things, so she should not get sidetracked with other stuff (again) - even though life is throwing her things such as this lovely review of The Middle Ages Unlocked at Skiffy & Fanty.

Sidetrack lures aside, I have now finally managed to submit my most recent publications to the VG Wort, which means my writing (non-fiction writing, as I lack the whatever you need to write fiction) might earn me a few Euros. How this works? You make a contract with the VG Wort that basically gives them the right to handle your claims to a part of the fees that libraries and copy-machine producers and copyshops have to pay each year for secondary rights.

That wasn't very helpful, was it? Let me try again. Copying and lending books and similar publications means that the author will lose out on income, so there's a fee that has to be paid. This fee goes to the VG Wort, and they split it between their authors due to a specific key. It's all full of legalese and stuff, but the important thing is: it's for authors, and you only have to tell them "yes please I would like some money for my writing thankyou so much" and then hand in the information on what you wrote in time. (The deadline for online reports? Tomorrow.) Then, with a bit of luck, you will get a bit of money to your account a while later. (It's usually not much, but hey - even if it will only buy me a coffee, I do appreciate it!)

If you are writing and publishing things, you might want to look into getting registered with a similar association in your own country. Here's a list of the ones the VG Wort has reciprocal contracts with - chances are high that your place will be among them. It can't hurt to try!

Breaking things, repairing things, twisting templates. And linen dyeing.

I spent the morning going more into the up-and-coming relaunch, and I did manage to do a test migration into WordPress, so there will be some changes to this blog's looks before the year will end.

The new shop design is also coming along nicely. It will be much lighter, and much cleaner, and there will be larger pictures. Overall, I really like it a lot! There's still a few issues to be solved and snags to be taken care of, and changing the old pallia.net site over into Joomla will mean a bit of re-writing of text and menu restructures (read: a good bit of work, including thinking and figuring out the best way for stuff), but I have hopes it will all work out eventually.

Apart from that, I managed to break my xampp programme (the thing required to test-drive a web page on your own computer, under the charming name of "localhost") and to actually fix it again (by deleting a single line of code that had crept in through an aborted installation of WordPress). Whew!

Now, however, I will have to put this project aside for a bit, as the Textile Forum is coming up (I can't believe it is already almost November) and there's still a few things to prepare for it. Packing linen cloth for our next test run regarding linen dyeing, for instance!

Sabine and I have been thinking about the chemistry involved with dyeing linen for a few years now, and we did a first trial run on exploring linen dyeing at last year's forum. One of the possible influences on how well the linen takes the mordant (which is usually not very well at all) is the pH of the mordanting and dyeing liquid, so we set out to test this.

Last year's test results. As you can clearly see, there was not much dye taken up by the linen fabric, regardless of the pH adjustment of the mordanting and dyeing baths.

We'll try different concentrations of alum this time. We've also planned to test a pre-treatment with sulphur fumes, though the required sulphur strips have not arrived yet - I'll keep my fingers crossed that they will come today.

The reason for sulphur pre-treatment? It seems that the metal components of the mordant bind to wool through a connection to the sulphur bonds the wool has. So if it's possible to sulphurise the linen, it might be possible to have a much better mordant uptake, and thus dye uptake. Next week we'll know more!

The Gold Embroidery Kit is in the shop!

Today was a good bit more successful than yesterday. It looks like I finally found the issue with the Joomla! migration to 3.x (there's an extra folder in the libraries that messes up everything, and once that is deleted, all runs smoothly); a quick facebook query resulted in multiple comments that you don't mind having to activate JavaScript to see anything too much; and the template I found does look like it could be a nice solution for my site, both for the main site and the webshop.

And, hopefully, the blog. I'm looking into pulling all things together so blogposts will also be hosted on my own server, taking it out of Google's hands (as blogger is part of Google). My current plan is to leave everything here on the blog, but additionally migrate all the content to my own site, and then blog on there (with a link to the new place here, obviously). My hope is that the migration will solve the wonky search issues that Blogger has (if you have ever tried to find a post on this blog using the search box, you'll know what I mean - search is not really reliable). Plus it would have the benefit of my having to spend time on one site only, and to give my three places a similar design, finally.

I will only do it if I can do a clean migration, though, and I'm currently looking into options for that. The easiest and most straight-forward one that I found will not migrate comments or tags, though, so it's completely out (that was CMS2CMS, in case you want to know).

And now for something more textile-related - I have finally put the gold embroidery kit into the shop!

The core of the kit - motif drawn on cloth and mounted in frame, plant-dyed silk, gold thread and embroidery needles so you can get started right away!

 It is available here. The kit contains everything to get started right away, down to the embroidery needles (you'll need your own pair of scissors or shears, but that's it), and ample instructions - a sheet with specific instructions for the motif plus my book about gold embroidery.

I made a few photos of nice, colourful yarns as well, but I haven't yet figured out how to put the scarf kit into the shop. See, there was this co-production with Margit from Alte Künste, where we developed a lengthwise-striped scarf together, to be sold in a kit. Margit picked yarns, and I took care of the pattern - easy enough to remember it, interesting enough to keep you from dozing off while knitting.

The first batch of scarf kits is sitting here, ready to go get knitted, and we have twelve different colours for the skeins:

 

For each kit, you get to pick three skeins in colours of your choice (that's 150 g of wool alltogether). I'm trying to figure out how to make this selection process as smoothly working as possible, but the system is resisting a bit, so it might come down to you having to list your yarn choices in the comment when ordering. I'll give it another try tonight!

Sidetracked.

Today was sort of scheduled to get back on track with the website redesign and relaunch. (Short version: I'm running the webshop on Joomla, and I need to do a thorough update on the shop software - which needs some preparation, and also a new template, so I'm looking into that.) Unfortunately, all kinds of things did not go as planned... as in there were server errors, and a version that had been running smoothly before did not run anymore at all.

So. I'm still looking for a design solution that will work properly for a blog function, the webshop and my general site; the templates I've found until now don't really cut the mustard, but I am running out of patience with looking for the perfect solution. Instead, I want this thing over and dealt with.

And just like every time I'm working on something like that, it is amazing how much time gets eaten up by trying to get something running. Even if it ran before... or maybe I should say especially if it ran before.

Tomorrow: Another try. With nicer outcomes (hopefully). Today, though, for calming my nerves and for making you smile, have a picture of a sleepy cat:

Links! Screenshots! Celebration!

Somehow Friday's Patreon-related thoughts ate so much of my brain capacity that I totally forgot to give you the Beast blog tour links. So here you go - the rest of our blog tour:

Q&A at A Literary Vacation
A post about spinning at The Freelance History Writer
and the last in the series at Edward the Second.

It was a lovely tour, and we had lots of fun. So much fun, in Gillian's case, that she did another blog tour on the side, so you get bonus posts from her -

the first one in Felicity Pulman's blog, here, where she answers questions about the Beast, and her writing.
She also has a post over at SF Signal, where she talks about writing both fiction and non-fiction.
Not related to the Middle Ages, but also an interesting post is this one at SFFWorld, where Gillian writes about local stories going international. And finally a fourth one at the Skiffy and Fanty Show.

And that wraps up our US release blog tour! Thank you again to everyone who hosted us, and thanks to you for bearing along with us and reading our posts. We hope you had fun!


So now, after the tour, we actually get to celebrate, because - amazon.uk:

and amazon.com:

and amazon.com kindle store:

See? We're in the Top 100, several times, in both electronic version and print version. Woot!

(Note that we have no clue whatsoever on how this relates to actual sales numbers. Amazon has so many books in its listing that a single sale might mean a huge jump in the sales rank, so we're basically still in the dark on how many books are selling. Personally, I'll celebrate even more if the sales are going through smaller bookstores and not the Big River One, or through our publishing house directly, as I'm not really a fan of The A. However, just like it's a good place to read book reviews, it's also a good place to get a rough idea how a book is doing, sales-wise. And that means being in the top 100 of these categories is definitely something worth celebrating, which we are now doing at our respective ends of the world... with chocolate.)

Thinking about the future.

The last few months have been... let's call them hectic. At the moment, I'm trying to figure out how they could have gotten so hectic, and trying to make sure things will be more under control in the future. There's also been developments business-wise - the online shop is growing (and a big thank you to everybody who has ordered from there - I hope you have a lot of fun, and are happy, with the things you bought); I've been doing a few workshops, and I've been doing the blog tours, and I have started shifting my appearances from Living History fairs more to wool markets and other kinds of fairs.

So there's been quite a bit of change, and quite a bit of kinds of work that have taken away time from this blog, and from research. There are a few projects that have gotten shoved to the back for ages now, even though they are things I'd love to work on (such as the never-ending project of getting my thesis translated into English, or researching all kinds of smaller and not-so-small questions, or a totally crazy knitting pattern that has been in development for months now), but I just can't find the time, it seems.

I'd like that to change. I'd like to be able to sit down and make a video tutorial for how to make hair nets, or how to spin with a hand-spindle. I'd like to sit down and research female headcloths in the twelfth century, and possible reconstructions for them. But, as I have learned with the embroidery book, these things take a lot of time, and mean quite a bit of an investment of money in some cases, which has to come back in before I can tackle the next project. It's also not such a big deal to work on something for a while hoping that it will eventually bring in a little income, but if projects like that come along again and again, it can sap your energy away bit by bit. And that is, to be frank, happening to me as well. If I spend three weeks of work time on planning, making and cutting a video tutorial (and that is a relatively realistic estimate), then burn it on a DVD and offer it via the shop, but I'm only selling ten or twelve of the discs... it just eats away on me, regardless of how good I think the results are, and regardless of how much fun I had making it.

So... I was thinking of how to get you more content, and how to make it possible for me to create these things, and Patreon popped into my head. Again. (In case you have never heard of Patreon before, it's sort of like an ongoing kickstarter where you can pledge recurring small payments to an artist or a creator of some kind to support their work.) Getting support like that would make it possible for me to start spending more time on research, and sharing that research with my supporters. I'm not entirely sure yet whether that would work at all, or about what to offer, and still very much thinking about this whole thing, so if you have any input at all, please use the comments - would you consider joining in?  Or do you like the idea, but would prefer some other way instead of Patreon? What would you like to see - tutorials about textile crafts? My thesis translated, bit by bit? Things exclusively published for patrons, or would you prefer to support things that are then free for everyone to see?

Just to make things clear - I'm not planning to stop this blog, and I'm not planning to stick it behind a paywall. I would, though, absolutely consider adding extra content only available to supporters - such as the occasional video, copies of my academic articles, or even installments of the book translation. I'd also be happy to take suggestions from the supporters about topics to research.

So... do let me know what you think, per comments, or per email, or with whatever means you prefer!

Cool things in links.

First link of the day: the blogtour goes on, this time at nerdalicious!

More reading? There's an ethesis available about the "Usage and meaning of early medieval textiles". 

There's an academic article about the origins of cosplay (behind a paywall, sadly).

There seems to be an US series called "Homeland". I've just heard about it, because there seems to be a lot of islamophobia hanging out in that thing, and the makers of the show have sort of showed off their stupidity and provided a platform for criticism in their show at the same time. Essentially, they hired people to spray Arabic graffiti on the walls of their set - and those people sprayed things like "This show does not represent the views of the artists". Or (another of my favourites) "Homeland is a watermelon" (which indicates it's either a sham or at least not to be taken seriously). Which, if you ask me, is absolutely, utterly brilliant.
 
To round off nice and feel-good things in this list, here's an article about human beings being inherently good. (Which is nice, I think... being stoutly optimistic in the core of my soul.)

Birds of prey, blogtour links, and other stuff.

Somehow my email inbox keeps exploding over and over again. Just when I'm thinking that it's back under control again... well.

Other work also keeps exploding, and I'm starting to wonder how so many things could pile up. (Well, I do have a rough idea. It has something to do with saying "yes" to a few things, which are all well and nice and surely worth the time and work, but they have somehow ganged up on me and decided to descend all at once.) Organising the Textile Forum is one of the things (the programme needs updating again, and we have to finalise the plans for this years' small experiment); I have an article to write (which is due end of October), and there's stuff to put away and things to photograph for the shop.

There's also the task of re-designing the website and getting a new layout for the shop that urgently needs doing. Progress on that is... um... slow. (I have some help, however, so at least I'm not feeling all alone and overwhelmed with this.)

In news more interesting than my perpetually too-full list of things to do, the British Library has a very nice post about hawking on their blog.

There's a very nice comic thingie on Veritable Hokum about colours.

Our blogpost from the Beast blog tour on Monday is online at Lady Jane Grey Reference Guide.

Finally, has anyone heard of Mass Mosaic yet? It seems to be a new platform to exchange, sell or get stuff.

More blog tour, and other stuff.

First things first - If you're as addicted to the British Library illuminated manuscripts database as I am, you might have noticed it is currently not working (as in there are no piccies to be seen). Don't despair, though - the tech staff at the BL is aware of the issue, and they are working to fix it.

In blog tour news, here is the link to yesterday's post: And Death will Have His Day.

In other other news, in case you are looking for a textile-related challenge, there is one up at Neulakko: The Herjolfsnaes Challenge.

Notorious PhD is having fun (or not-fun) with medieval family naming conventions.

Doug's Archaeology has a series of lightning presentations on how to engage the public.

And the cat is lying on my right forearm, making typing slightly difficult.

More blog tour links!

While I was having a nicely relaxed weekend, our blogtour has been rolling on - so here you go:

Friday's Post: Our first interview of the tour at Supremacy and Survival
Saturday's Post: Post about Folklife at Under the Tudor Rose
Sunday's Post: Author Interview at the Medieval Archive

Gillian has been doing some extra blog appearances, too - for instance in Donna Maree Hanson's blog, here, and in the Castle Bookshop blog, here.

That should you set up with some reading, right?

Our Blog Tour has started!

I'm happy to announce the first post of our blog tour, over at the Travelling History blog. Gillian and I went through our photo archives for this one, and we hope you'll enjoy the pictures.

Our book was also mentioned in an article in the Western Telegraph, along with several other books about the Middle Ages.

Let's stay book-related - there's an open access ebook about words and language called Medieval Hackers. If you're interested in language and history of words and wording, give it a look.

And still staying with books, though from a slightly different angle, I found this article about the Kubler-Ross Model of Grief Associated with Editing and Rewriting utterly hilarious. And oh so true! I remember that time my phd thesis draft got completely pulled apart, resulting in a huge re-write and some re-ordering. I was devastated, and annoyed, and then even more annoyed (but differently) when I realised that all the criticism was, indeed, valid points and the book could be so much better if I did those edits. Similar things happened in other areas - I've done layouting and thought that my choice of fonts was fine, until someone came along and told me "I'd rather recommend that". Well, what shall I say? He was utterly right.

The good thing about getting edits, and getting over it - after the first few times of running through the phases, it gets easier and easier to take that deep breath and think "well, I'll just try the recommended edit on for size, I can always change it back if it's not better than it is now". (Not surprisingly, it usually was better after the change my editors suggested. I'm a lucky one to have had these editors!)

Beast News, Books for Free, and Game Reviews.

In Beast News, our blogtour is supposed to start today, but with the time shifts, it might not be my today (so you'll be getting the link tomorrow, if all goes well). We do have our first two reviews at Amazon, though, to our great delight, and three more over at Goodreads!

(Reviews really help selling books, so if you like a book and would like to help the authors sell more of it, you can do so by writing and posting a review. Amazon is an obvious place for this, as lots of people check there for reviews even if they buy in brick-and-mortar or at different online shops; goodreads is another good place, but anywhere on the internet will help your favourite author to do better.)

More book-related stuff? Here you go. The book from Jutta Zander-Seidel, "Textiler Hausrat" has been digitised and is available for free at ART-Dok, together with several other titles by Zander-Seidel. (Hat tip to Nicole Kipar from kipar.org, which is a blog you might want to follow as well.)

And now I have some non-work-related stuff for you. Games! Games we played at Essen! Not all of them, mind you - just a few.

Before you read my comments, you should probably know that I tend to be quite critical of games. We've been doing this go-to-Essen-thing for years now, playing oodles of games, and we (that is me and my friends who usually roam the halls together with me and the Most Patient Husband of Them All) have developed quite a good sense for what games we prefer. So we'll often take just a look at a game and go "meh", not necessarily because it is a bad game, but not a type we like. (Those preferences are different for each of our group, but they overlap for a good part, which makes roaming together so pleasant.)

There's so many games out there, and so many new ones coming out each year, that you can either set apart a huge amount of space for all those games you get, or you restrict the amount you're getting. We try to go for option 2, so if we buy a game, it has to really please us and offer a good amount of replayability. We tend to gravitate towards games that are (relatively) quick to explain but still want some brains when playing; with a luck factor involved (so no hardcore strategical/tactical games). We also have a thing for cooperative games and racing games. And now that you know how to put my comments into context, here we go!

We started out with a round of Marvel Dice Masters - which was fun. It's a light game, lots of dice, though some of the rules were not completely clear. We already have several copies of King of Tokyo in our circle of friends, so we really don't need this game. I'd play it again though, happily.

The Witcher. I don't know the video game, but I can tell you that the boardgame is repetitive and boring. Boring and repetitive. Oh, did I mention repetitive? So many tasks to fulfill. Joyless combat. Everyone playing for themselves. We broke off after (or in, I don't remember) the second round of this. Boooooring. (You see the timer attached to the stand? We'd have had 31 more minutes to waste on this game - everyone gets an hour to testplay. Which tells you we spent 29 minutes on this. Which was more than enough.)

This game was called Bastion (as the English rulebook on the table tells you), it was a cooperative game, and we didn't expect much from it. The coloured cubes are the resources you need to collect in order to battle monsters that approach your city gates - you spend one of any colour to get three of the colour marked on the board. Once there are cubes on the segment, you can remove all of them (up to three) by placing a cube on the inner wall, and you can clear all the cubes off the inner wall by hopping inside. A monster you smashed gives you a bonus for smashing another monster, or for movement. The monsters always jump to the next free spot, and when the monster deck is used up, they leapfrog forwards; the very last monster jumps directly to the city gate and you have to smash it there at once. There's not too much luck involved, it is easy to explain and it does require you to think and plan ahead with your mates - we really liked it! Bastion would make a very nice gateway game, and it looks like you can up the difficulty quite a bit with stronger monster cards (that are included).

Crazy Time. You have a stack of cards and flip them over; each of them shows a clock face with a time. You count the time upwards, starting with "one", next player flips a card and says "two", next one flips and says "three"... unless there's a time machine, when you have to count backwards. Or there's a new rule that gets introduced. Fun twist? One of the players does not know the new rule and has to guess it (or gets lots of cards for making mistakes!). Original rules let the winner of a round choose who does not get to see the rules cards; I'd recommend as house rule:  winner of the round does not get to see the rules cards (for a bit of a rubber-band effect). Lovely little game. Quick to explain, quick to get started with, but a really nasty brain teaser.

This was another co-op: Space Cadets - Away Mission. Lots of plastic minis, lots of tiles, different scenarios, different aliens, space in the flavour of 1960s sci-fi. Oh, and girly-glittery dice. We really enjoyed this. Actually, we enjoyed this so much that we bought it. (Our excuse? Well, apart from you don't need an excuse to buy a game you really love apart from "we really loved this", our excuse is that we did not have any space-themed co-op games yet. Also, the minis include brain-in-a-jar figures, and everyone knows you can always use more brains.)

And this is... Lanterns. You place one of your three tiles and each of the four players gets a lantern card in the colour facing them. If you place matching colours, you also get bonus cards. On your next turn, you can exchange colour combinations for tiles with victory points. It's a relatively light game, with an interesting concept - however, luck obviously plays a big part. (Frieder suffered from always just missing the higher value numbers on the victory point tiles, for instance.) We played the "short fair version" with about half the available tiles and already found it too long. Add some players in there that tend towards analysis-paralysis (huh, if I place that tile like this, he gets a green and player 3 gets a yellow and then they have a full set but if I place it like this I don't get a bonus... hm... let me look at my other two tiles... if I place this one like this, ah, or maybe here, or...) and you're in for a really, really tedious game. No thanks.

And that's it for today. If you enjoyed that, let me know - I have a few more games I could tell you about...

Recovering.

Today was work interspersed with liberal amounts of tea, cookies, and naps. Naps are a wonderful thing (and cats are very helpful with napping, always giving a perfect example of how it's done).

Who, me? As if I'd ever take an extra nap. Ever.

With the US release of The Middle Ages Unlocked coming up, Gillian and I will do another blog tour, so the past days have included writing for this. The first posts are already sent off to their hosts. We got a few more interviews this time around, which is lovely - we really did enjoy answering the questions! Watch this space for the tour announcements.

I also stumbled across a website called biblehub when writing one of my posts - you might be interested about what the Bible has to say about spinning, too. I wouldn't necessarily believe all the things the Standard Bible Encyclopaedia has to say, though!

Meanwhile, as a remainder of our last blog tour and to get you into the mood for the next one, here's a post about medieval textiles at the History Vault.

If you read German, here's a highly amusing post about the replacement for a lost knife. (If you don't read German, the piccies are still nice to look at, in case you enjoy looking at medieval knife reconstructions.)

Assorted Links for You.

In spite of all my efforts, I did catch some con crud, and today my head is woozy and I'm not good for too much. So it's a day for drinking lots of tea and resting, and for blogging links that have been waiting for ages to be blogged.

Here you go!

Magistra et Mater has a very interesting post up (has had it for a while) about how men dominate women.

You can find old city plans from Austrian cities here at the Österreichischer Städteatlas.

And for those of you in the States and looking for something to do in the next few days, there's an exhibition running until the 18th: Treasures and Talismans: Rings from the Griffin Collection at the MET.

Finally for something completely different: an Imperial Speeder Bike going on a flight.

Back from a wonderful weekend.

These past few days were wonderful, and very relaxing, and much-needed. I got to spend time with friends, and eat lots of lovely food, and play many, many games, as the big game fair in Essen took place on the weekend.

As usual, we went there and ambled through the halls full of people and games. The fair at Essen is the world's biggest boardgame fair, and they had about 800 new games this year, released at the fair. There's tables with games set up that you can look at, there's usually someone there who explains the rules to you, and then you can give the game a try and play a round or two or even the entire game in some cases to see how you like it.

We spend a long weekend there, with three and a half days at the fair, plus more gaming in the evening, and we usually play (or test for a few rounds) about 30 games. As usual, some of them were nice but not mind-boggling, some were fun, some were really, really bad (mind-bogglingly bad in one case) and some were so much fun that a copy had to travel home with us.

Today was busy with doing things for the shop (all in the background for now, though) and preparing for the next blog tour together with Gillian - the US release of the Beast is coming up!

I'm taking a breather.

The last few weeks were incredibly busy, and I'm proud and happy that they ended with several successful projects or several things sorted out (new book about gold embroidery! new scarf knitting kit! new special colours on thin lace-weight two-ply wool yarn! new gold embroidery starter kit! fair in Weikersheim!). That was exhausting, though, and I'm in need of a little break now.

I've planned several months ago to take the rest of this week off - it was already obvious it would be a very busy time just beforehand, and I'd need some time to relax and get my mind off work-related things. I had also planned to do some blog posts beforehand, though, and to post them on schedule... and I realised yesterday night that this plan will have to quietly slink away and pretend it never even existed.

For you, that will mean blog silence until next week, and I'll be gentle with myself and declare the blog silent until Tuesday. Meanwhile, there's a lovely story over at the Toast - maybe you'll enjoy that until I'm back...

Oops.

You're getting the promised blog post, even though you're getting it very, very late... today was completely gobbled up by lugging stuff out of the car (with plenty of help from the most patient husband of them all) and getting the book-keeping up to date, including sending off the taxes for the past quarter.

That on top of the post-fair exhaustion, and the blog post almost got forgotten!

Sabine and me behind our sales table in the former carriage shed.

The fair, by the way, was in an extremely lovely place, with brilliant weather on both Friday and Saturday. The baroque gardens showed themselves at their very best, the castle staff had prepared special guided tours with more textile information than they give usually, and we had lots and lots of very interested visitors. Sunday was rainy, unfortunately, and thus more towards the drab and grey side of autumn, but it did clear up in the afternoon.

I had a lovely time at Weikersheim, and I've already heard that they are planning to do this again. Not next year (that is already booked with events), but probably in 2017, and if my schedule will permit it, I'll definitely be there again.
 

Nadelkunst!

I'm packing up today and leaving to set up everything for the Nadelkunst, and I'm all excited about it.

If you're going there, you can find me in the "Remise". If you're not going there and only read this blog, I'll be back and writing for you on Tuesday, when I will be able to tell you more about how the fair went and how beautiful the castle in Weikersheim really is...