To my and Heather's great delight, we are in the very, very last stage of getting Ancient Textiles, Modern Science 2 all done and set - the last proofs have arrived, and it's only a matter of giving the book a very last read, catching the very last typos, before it's all good to go to print.

Yay! Getting this book done was a string of pitfalls and delays, due to all kinds of things - crashing computers and illnesses only being two of them. So I'm really happy to get this to a close, and consequently proof-reading is what I am doing now!

If you want to have a look at what the book will contain, it's already listed on the Oxbow website, and you can even pre-order at a special price!

 

It's the season of people looking for ideas - things to give to others, things to wish for. So in case you're one of the many, many folks on search of good ideas, here are three things - all of them related to tablet weaving, and all of them guaranteed not to catch dust:

If you're interested in tablet weaving, especially in the brocaded kind, you have probably heard about the book "Ecclesiastical Pomp and Aristocratic Circumstance". It's a nice collection of tablet-woven bands, even though there's not a lot of images of the original pieces in the book. It appears that this has gone out of print, but it's now available as a pdf download from Nancy Spies' Etsy shop. At 12 USD, it's also quite affordable!

The same thing has happened to Anna Neuper's Modelbuch, also originally published as a paper book, also out of print and now available as pdf. In this case, you have to invest 5 USD.

Louise Ström has written a booklet about how to do tablet-woven patterns without a pattern draft. The motifs are fairly traditional Scandinavian ones, where you have variations in each pattern section, resulting in a band with non-repeating (though similar) motifs. This, too, is available as a pdf download via Etsy and will cost you about 18 USD.

Disclaimer: I do own the paper version of Pomp & Circumstance, but know neither of the two other books. They have ended up on my list, though...

Oh, and by the way - it's Blogiversary today! Nine years of blogging!

The 2017 issue of the Archaeological Textiles Review is out, and as usual, it contains a number of interesting articles. You can read the table of contents here, and you can order it via the webshop, where you buy a membership for the Friends of ATR and get sent the print copy of the Review.

In case you haven't stumbled across them yet, the back issues (starting with issue 57 from 2015) can be downloaded for free from the ATR website. Which is a totally great thing!

If you're a numbers person (as in somebody who easily remembers numbers, lucky you) and a textile archaeology nerd in addition to that, the two numbers in the blog title might ring a bell for you.

If not, let me bring you up to speed: York Archaeological Trust has been publishing a lot of very nice, very helpful shiny books about various aspects and find groups of all the digs done there - and York has a lot of history, and has had a lot of digs, and consequently there's oodles to research, and to tell. York also boasts a number of textile finds and textile tool finds, which is a delightful thing.

To make all this good stuff even better, they've decided, once they run out of the printed copies of their books, to make them freely available as pdf online. I've posted about this at least once before, but that was a good while ago. Back then, I had downloaded those of interest to me, though the really, really yummy ones - about textile production and textile finds - were still available in print and thus not as pdfs.

Just recently, though, I searched for something else, and the engine threw me a link to one of these two books on the YAT website. Off I went - and to my great delight, both 17/5 Textile, Raw Fibre and Cordage from Coppergate 16-22 and 17/11 Textile Production at 16-22 Coppergate are available now. (Direct links to the pdfs - but do go and visit their page listing the rest of the volumes of Archaeology of York, there's many more.)

Here's a stack of things you might find amusing or interesting - or at least I hope so:

There is a woven and embroidered Game Of Thrones tapestry, modeled after the famous Bayeux original. While the base design was made on Jacquard looms, details have been added by embroidery, as this article explains. What an interesting project - and it does show that the Bayeux tapestry is still a force to be reckoned with, influencing modern day textile art and pop culture!
The tapestry is on display at the Ulster Museum, if you are in the area and want to have a look at it yourself.

More textile stuff - there's a free ebook about textile terminology available! You can download the pdf version of Textile Terminologies from the Orient to the Mediterranean and Europe, 1000 BC to 1000 AD here. It contains papers from a conference about textile terminology, which is a really interesting and a really big topic - and one that still has lots of unsolved problems.

Even more textile stuff, though much more modern: Speed hooks for rag rug hooking - a really interesting tool shown in this video.

And now for something completely different: Better lettering for comic book/graphic novel letterers. If you like to read graphic novels, or typesetting, or both, these might be interesting for you!

Birka is a rather well-known find place for quite a few textiles, including tablet-woven bands, and a frequently cited resource. The publications are not the newest, and in this case, it's in our favour - they are old enough to be offered as pdf files, for free, on the site of Historiska.se, the Swedish history museum.

You can find the Birka publications here, and if you have a bit of time, also check out their English homepage - which even features a test where you can find out which character from the Norse mythology you might be. (It tells me I'm Skadi... and something about me not minding deadlines, because I'm already done when they approach. Ah, if only.)

Here I am, slowly unpacking all the lovely stuff brought home from NESAT. Extra slowly, as most of my worktime yesterday and today is eaten up by doing the tax paperwork. Which is due at the end of this month - anyone hear that "whoosh" sound the approaching deadline makes? (I had wanted to do the tax stuff before NESAT, but with all the other things happening, that had not worked out, so I had planned on spending the start of this work week on it. Progress is according to plan, more or less, so all things are good.)

Anyway, let's return to unpacking, and I will give you a glimpse of the things I brought home from the conference. First of all, stuff from the conference bag - there was the book of abstracts, and the usual info material (a map and information about the city, and about Prague as preparation for our excursion), plus a nice little pen, a pocket programme (glorious idea!) and, woven in the university:


a cloth bookmark with the NESAT emblem, hanging out on the abstract booklet here.

With a bookmark, it is obvious that at least one book has to be bought, right? I made it two:


The one on the left is in Czech, but with a good English summary, and it has lots and lots of photographs of the finds from Prague... which include garment details (buttonholes, for instance). The second one, Chrystel's PhD thesis, contains a lot of meticulous research about early medieval finds from the Netherlands, and those include several hats and headdresses, which makes me really happy, and I'm looking forward to having a nice cup of tea and a read of this thesis.

Now... buying books at a conference is rather normal. It's also not entirely unexpected to find something nice in the conference bag, in addition to the usual things. What came as an utter surprise to me and all the other speakers, though: We, as well as those chairing one of the sessions (which means you are the one introducing the speakers and making sure they finish on time, plus, if necessary, keeping the discussion from getting too short, too long, or too hot), all got a present.

One woven in the university. After a find from the second half of the twelfth century... a piece of samite with gold thread pattern. (Made, in this case, from artificial gold thread and viscose, and not one hundred percent the size of the original, but very close.)

So I now have this:


and I am endlessly delighted with it! It will get a nice spot on one of the walls here, looking utterly beautiful!