It's time for the Textile Forum!

The Textile Forum has started, and I am in Mayen to spend all week doing textile things - looking into early modern knitting, investigating the differences between knitting and nalebinding, and other things like it.

As I will be utterly busy running this conference, there will be no blogging until Wednesday, November 11 - when I will have recovered from the incredible textile archaeology overload the Forum inevitably generates, and will be able to tell you stories of what we did and how things went.

I'm here! (Well. Behind this thing. More or less.)

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!