The time has come - the Call for Papers and the registration form for our next Textile Forum are online. As usual, you can find them at www.textileforum.org.

This year, our conference will take place from 3-9 November, and our focus topic is "Plant Fibres: Materials, Techniques, Problems". We've touched on plant fibres now and then in the previous Forums, but there's usually much more been said and done on wool and silk, so we would like to have this as the focus topic for a change.

Just like we did last year, we're planning to make it a combination of papers and practical sessions, and we're looking forward to the suggestions and proposals coming in.

If you're interested in the Forum, or know someone who might be interested, please pass on the Call for Papers - we're happy to see it spread out!

The conference for Dyes in History and Archaeology will be taking place in Glasgow, Scotland, on October 30 and 31 2014. It's number 33 in the series, and the call for papers is currently open. Abstracts have to be submitted by May 30. There's a website, but it's not including the current CfP. If you are interested, send me an email or leave your email address in the comments, and I can forward you the contact data and template.

And a second CfP that reached me with the request to spread widely, so I will just paste it here:



Call for Papers, Annals of Leisure Research, Special Issue: THE DRESS ISSUE

Guest Editor:Prof Alison L Goodrum, Department of Apparel, Manchester Metropolitan University, England

According to Entwistle (2000: 6) “all people dress the body in some way, be it through clothing, tattooing, cosmetics or other forms of body painting. To put it another way, no culture leaves the body unadorned but adds to, embellishes, enhances or decorates the body”.  In this scholarly definition, even Nudists and Naturists, although eschewing material items of clothing, are dressed, be this in the form of, say, a splash of perfume, a slick of moisturiser, a necklace or a goatee beard.  This Special Issue takes this expansive definition of dress and explores its application to, and significance within, Leisure Studies.

The links between dress and leisure are multiple, longstanding, and range across time and space.  In the 1920s, for example, French couturière, Coco Chanel, gave utilitarian jersey fabric a high fashion ‘spin’, endorsing its easy-to-wear qualities as a motif for modern living.  And, today, stretchiness and comfort remain as important material properties in both active- and leisurewear.  While certain leisure pursuits call for ‘dressing down’ and the wearing of decidedly non-specialist dress, other leisure activities demand modes of dress that are strictly policed and/or technically sophisticated.  On a cultural note, sports-based communities such as ‘Bikers’, ‘Skaters’ and ‘Surfies’ identify themselves tribally through esoteric sartorial markers (favouring a particular brand of clothing, for example).

The current resurgence of handcrafting, knitting and home dressmaking as a cross-generational, fashionable, and often gender-distinctive, pastime, presents yet a further link between leisure and dress: one that relates to making-as-hobby.  The vernacular in dress is pertinent, too, to sporting spectatorship. For example, fans may use make-shift props, face-paints and fancy dress costuming to display support for individual players or teams. More generally, sports fans comprise an eager and profitable cohort of consumers keen to purchase goods relating to their interests such as replica kits and commemorative garments and merchandise.

Shopping for fashionable dress and accessories is itself, for some, an all-consuming pastime or passion.  The practice of shopping has altered radically over the past decade with internet and TV shopping offering alternative routes to market and, with them, shifts in the consumer experience.  Other alternative sites and spaces for the consumption of dress include the car boot sale, thrift store, flea market and swap shop. These informal, often festive or festival-like spaces, move the consumption of dress from formalised retail industry into the realm of entertainment.

The Special Issue seeks, then, to capture, and to map, the diversity and dynamism of the many links between dress and leisure. The discipline of Leisure Studies has engaged with these links but has tended to do so in a haphazard way, touching on dress as an adjunct to, or spin-off from, larger projects. The proposed Issue will marshal together original research papers on dress and leisure, an underexplored, and perhaps under-considered, area in Leisure Studies. The outcome will be a publication that repositions dress as a central, and significant, subject in, and for, leisure, whilst simultaneously promoting leisure as a rich topic, too, for scholars from such disciplines as fashion theory and dress history.  We welcome paper submissions that address any of the following (and related) topics on dress and aspects of leisure (as well as relevant others):

·         Style tribes and leisure/sporting subcultures and fandom
·         Performance-, active-wear and technical design in/for leisure and sport
·         Histories of leisure and dress
·         Spaces and sites of/for leisure and the performance of dress
·         Buying, shopping and consumption of dress as leisure, pleasure and/or anxiety
·         Leisure, sport and the dressed and/or undressed body
·         Collecting dress, shoes, accessories and bodily adornment/s
·         Craft, making and the (domestic) production of dress as a leisure pursuit
·         Leisure, dress and non-conformity/subversion

Important Dates for Authors:

Submission of Abstracts: Please send proposed paper title and an abstract of no more than 250 words to the guest editor, Alison Goodrum (Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist vor Spambots geschützt! Zur Anzeige muss JavaScript eingeschaltet sein.) no later than 21^st July 2014. We will advise the outcome no later than 4^th August 2014.

Submission of Full Paper: 2^nd March 2015 (further details to be advised upon confirmation of abstract acceptance).
Publication: First issue of 2016 (approximately January)

It's time for a little textile conference stuff - exciting things are coming up!


First of all, NESAT. The next one is taking place in Hallstatt, and the preliminary programme is online. Also, the proceedings from last NESAT are now out and available from Verlag Marie Leidorf.As usual, you should also be able to get them via your book dealer of choice.

The CTR Copenhagen also has a few conference announcements on their website, including a conference about traditional textile crafts early in 2014.

If you have been in thorough contact with textile crafts, especially tablet weaving, chances are high that you have read at least one book by Peter Collingwood. Sadly, he died a few years ago (here's an obituary). The Early Textiles Study Group, where he was a member until his death, now has a CfP out for a conference about Crafting Textiles from the Bronze Age to AD 1600: A tribute to Peter Collingwood. The conference will take place in London 10 to 11 October 2014, the CfP is open until January 31, 2014. Here is the conference website, in case you would like to be part of this.

It's winter time, the time for planning, or so it seems. Also the time for registering at conferences. For example the Experimental Archaeology conference in Oxford:

Dear Colleagues,

 

Registrations are now open for the 8^th UK Experimental Archaeology Conference that will take place in Oxford on 10 & 11 January 2014.

 

The registration fee is £55 for both days if you register before 1 December 2013. For more details and if you would like to have a look at the provisional program, feel free to visit our website: http://experimentalarchaeology.org.uk/

 

To register, follow this link:

http://www.oxforduniversitystores.co.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=2&deptid=115&catid=66&prodid=200

 

It doesn't look like I will be able to make it there this year, but the last one I was at was really nice.

I've also been sent a CfP per email, with the request to forward it - so if you are interesting in the following, email me and I will forward it to you:

Breda's Museum in the Netherlands is organizing an international conference on Costume and Textile Preservation in Museum, Theatre and Fashion. This is part of a meeting of the Costume Design Group (CDG) of OISTAT <www.oistat.org>. In the first place this is a call for papers for the international conference in Breda, but interested attendants may want to choose for the complete CDG activities or just for the conference in Breda.

The preliminary programme includes a lot of visits to workshops and exhibitions, so it sounds really fascinating. Now if only I were a conservator....

Brought to you, via myself, from Beatrix Nutz of the Lengberg Bra Fame:

The Department of Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology, Leopold-Franzens-University Innsbruck, together with the Urban Archaeology Hall in collaboration with the Seminar of Pre- and Protohistoric Archaeology of the Georg-August-University Göttingen cordially invite to the third Postgraduate Conference on Medieval Archaeology (PCMA) in Austria.
This meeting will be held from March 28-30, 2014 in Hasegg Castle in the historic town Hall in Tirol.

There is no conference fee beyond the expenses for visiting museums, exhibitions, and staying at Tirol. Deadline for registration, with or without paper, is January 15, 2014. You can find more information about the event on their webpage, which also lists the contact addresses to send your abstract and title.

Sadly, I'm too old for this stuff (being no postgrad anymore), but it does sound nice and interesting - and one of its aims is to build bridges between archaeologists in the East and the West, and that is always a brilliant idea.

The event is based on an international, interdisciplinary and intercultural format meant to spark a lively and informative dialogue among speakers and participants from a variety of backgrounds, professions and points of view. The three day event will not only feature an impressive selection of high profile presenters, but also all inclusive behind-the-scenes visits and excursions to exclusive places and sites pertinent to the interests of all who attend.

They are looking for papers from all kinds of backgrounds,  and the CfP is open until August 22 2013. Technically, there is a website, but there is no info whatsoever there apart from three rather unrelated links; so if you are interested, it's probably best to contact info(at)costume-textile.com directly.

The international digital heritage congress will take place from October 28 to November 1, 2013, in Marseille, France. More info, as usual and expected, on their website.

And finally, don't forget about the European Textile Forum - we still have some very few spaces left!

It's still raining outside, and by now, everyone and their dog and its fleas are hoping that the weather will improve soon. It would be okay weather for March, but not for the start of June! And all the rain has led to real problems around here, with floods coming to visit people in their houses.

Luckily, neither we nor our parents and family live in houses really close to water, or endangered by flooding. In case you have not seen pictures of the flooded places yet, here are a few.

It's supposed to dry up tomorrow, however, and then slowly become a bit warmer for the rest of the week. High time! And I guess that once the sun comes out and it's warmer, all the plants that have not died during the endless rain will go for an incredible growth spurt...

Now that I'm finished whining about the weather, here are some links for you. Cathy writes about the Lengberg Linens again; if you don't know her blog or have not been there for a while, don't stop reading after that article - there's more interesting stuff there.

While you are checking out blogs for their links - here's another one to take a look: pearl's blog (including links to the free online archives of Fennoscandia Archaeologia, Baltic Archaeology, and Czech Archaeologia historia).

Finally, if you're looking for an excuse to go visit Oxford in January 2014, the next Experimental Archaeolog Conference might be just what you need. The Call for Papers is already open and will remain so until July 31.