I perfectly know it's not Friday yet. But oh, how I wish it to be - even though there is lots to do still this week. (Or maybe exactly because of that?)

It's Thursday, though, and a stack of books is waiting for me in the library, a not insignificant number of them about Indigo dyeing. There was that resist-dye experiment last Textile Forum (you might remember), and I am currently writing up the artice about it. Which at some places requires a bit more research into why things happened the way they happened... hence I was ordering in literature.

Oh, and I'm writing up the article now because it is planned for publication in our second Textile Forum Proceedings volume. We are getting a second volume! I am still all feeling fluffy inside about that. Back in, oh, autumn 2008, when Sabine, Roeland and I sat in the pub on the last evening of the EXAR conference and Sabine and I said "we totally need to have a crafts-focused yearly conference for textile people" and "we sort of have the suspicion that if we don't go ahead and organise it, that will never happen" and Roeland said "I can set you up a contact with Eindhoven", neither of us would have thought to one day have a book with proceedings, let alone more than one. So yes, we are very, very happy about that.

So. Not Friday yet. More work. But happy work.

While sitting and sewing, finishing an article, working on a book project and trying to finish knitting a project I want to have on the table, together with a for-sale pattern at LonCon, I have also been doing research about early medieval garments (again). And part of this was done with help of a manuscript with lots and lots of illuminations - the "Stuttgarter Psalter".

It's from the first half of the 9th century, originates from Saint-Germain-des-Près, and currently hangs out in the collection of the library in Stuttgart. Where, praised be digitisation, it has been fully digitised and can now also hang out on your screen, if you follow this link. (Hint: If you should happen to need to download one of the pages at full resolution, zoom in a little bit before you hit "save this image" - that gives you the big one instead of the smaller non-zoomed preview. Smart, smart programmers.)

Should you prefer your manuscripts from the second half of the tenth century in Britain, however, you might want to check out this blog post instead. Or go straight to BL Add MS 49598.

It has finally cooled down far enough that we have some snow hanging out on the lawn and on the streets, and that the temperatures are more winter-like.

While I'm not so easily feeling cold when walking around outside, though, the cooler temperatures mean I get cold easier when sitting at my desk. Which, for me today, means warm socks and a warm sweater and nice, hot tea. And chocolate. Everybody knows that chocolate is a warming food, right?

Links, too. Links make one feel warmer. Possibly. (Though even if they don't, you will get some anyhow.)

Oxbow has a large amount of special offers on their webpage, including quite a few textile-related ones.

If you would rather test your (German language) knowledge of the medieval times, you can try yourself in this quiz from Uni Tübingen. (You're out after the third wrong answer.)

Also German: how to make a brush out of a goose feather, a bit of goat fur, and a wooden stick. Plenty of pictures, though, so you should be able to follow it even without knowing German.

I have received two glorious, lovely and beautiful books recently - both for my personal (work-)library.

I'll start with the older of the two. It's Regula Schorta: Monochrome Seidengewebe des hohen Mittelalters (Berlin 2001). Just like the title hints, it is about solid-coloured silk fabrics from the 11th to about 13th century, with a few other fabrics (patterned, a bit earlier and a bit later) tossed into the mix. The book is mostly black and white with some colour pics, it's written in German, and it has detailed weave descriptions as well as fabric history and detail pics (showing both the front and back in several cases, hooray!). If you are interested in silk fabrics from that time, it's a beautiful book, and if you are lucky (like me) you can get it for much less than the shelf price of the new version in a second-hand bookshop. (ZVAB is both a blessing and a curse if you are looking for old books.)

The book is bilingual, in both English and German, with the catalogue (making up the main part of the book) in English only.It's 572 pp with colour and black-and-white illustrations, list price 78€, and available directly from the publisher or via the bookstore of your choice.
The pictures in this one are what you will probably want it for, if you want it - they are gorgeous, and there is lots of them, ranging from overview photos of each piece to detail pictures showing weave details, threads in close-up and even fibres in microphotos. And the catalogue part is all in colour.

It's fabric porn, folks. Really nice fabric porn. Now please excuse me while I look at some more close-ups...

Yesterday was a day that I took things easy, to accommodate for the weekend spent working (in a thoroughly enjoyable and wonderful way - it was a lovely workshop!).

Some of that taking-it-easy-time was spent rootling around the internet, and I came up with several really cool links.

First of them: Gamers have probably solved a puzzle that scientists had not been able to solve before (using computers). The reason? Humans are (still) much better at spatial reasoning than computers. Not only did they solve it, they also were pretty quick about it! The game is called "fold.it", it's an online game that you can download for free, and there's links to a protein database where you can learn, for example, about Amyloid beta precursor protein - in a way that will not bore your proteins out of your brain.

I've mentioned gender quite a few times on this blog - and I'm not alone. Magistra et Mater blogs about the now available new Handbook from Oxford Uni Press: Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe.

And the last "wow" thing for today: A 2000-year-old seed has been successfully sprouted into a sapling date tree. Isn't that amazing? There's a nice article about it at National Geographics.

I am returned home from a wonderful and lovely time outdoors with friends - time spent paddling in warm, clear waters, swimming, reading, having lovely food (both homecampsite-made and dining out), knitting some socks, looking at the lush greenery, making oodles of bad puns and generally relaxing a lot. It was not only wonderful, but also a much-needed recharge of my batteries.

I spent the first day back going through 300+ emails, and one of those is the reason you get a blogpost today already instead of tomorrow. If you have read German academic books, chances are that you have held one published by de Gruyter in your hands. It's one of those typical academic publishing houses that have a very good reputation, but can be extremely pricey.

De Gruyter has bought up two other academic publishers, namely Akademie Verlag and Oldenbourg Verlag. To celebrate this, they are granting free access to the ebook versions of all the current titles of both publishing houses. The books are in German, but if you read German and need a book from their programmes, this is your opportunity.

Free access is possible until August 31; you find the titles of Akademie Verlag here and those of Oldenbourg here. And if you visit the site, have a laugh at some of the ebook prices they offer - the printed and bound version costs 19.80 €, while the ebook is priced at 198.00 €! (I wonder why... don't they want to sell ebooks too?)

I will admit it: I'm one of those who only look into books for the piccies. Well, old books, that is. While I can read Middle High German well enough to get most texts once they are transcribed and can read some very little Middle English (and thank you, Chaucer, for your tweets!), I have yet to read a manuscript in its original state.

Every time I run across a digitised manuscript library on the internet, I do a little happy dance (yay! More accessible manuscripts, and more manuscripts that will be there for posterity even if something dire happens - remember the archives at Cologne?) and then... I do a search.

I look for the search terms "spindle" and "wool" typically, both in English (if there is an English archive version) and in the archive's native language. Sometimes I'm lucky, other times I'm not.

I was not lucky in the St. Laurentius Digital Manuscript Library from Lund - but if you are looking for pics of nice medieval manuscripts, with pretty initials, you will really like this page. There's 64 digitised manuscripts from the 9th/10th century to the 16th century, and they are worth a look if only for the initials. (At least that's what I think.)

While I'm at links to libraries online: Umeå University has rare old books digitised as well, accessible via their "special collections" page. It was very slow for me, but if you are looking for an old print - you might get lucky there.

Oh, by the way: There is a lot of work still to be done on the Cologne archive material - the city has an info page about the damages and the work being done here (German only, but there's pics).