In case you are in or around London in September (and not at the Textile Forum instead), there's a conference coming up called "Fashioning the Early Modern". It takes place on 14-15 September 2012 in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

'Fashioning the Early Modern: Creativity and Innovation in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800' is a HERA funded project, and this conference will be the final one of the project.

The two-day "Fashioning the Early Modern: Creativity and Innovation in 1500-1800 Europe" conference will be organised around three themes: Innovation, Dissemination and Reputation. The following key profile speakers have been invited to speak: Lesley Miller (Victoria and Albert Museum), John Styles (University of Hertfordshire) and Evelyn Welch (University of Queen Mary, University of London).


It's still possible to register for participation. For a conference programme and for online registration (per day, regular fee £25.00, concessions available), go to:
http://www.vam.ac.uk/whatson/event/1818/fashioning-the-early-modern-creativity-and-innovation-in-europe-2990/

You have of course heard about the Lengberg Underwear finds - Beatrix Nutz is still very active publishing them, and a new article in French is in "Histoire et Images Medievales" published this month.

Meanwhile, others are putting their own experience together with the new finds, such as Isis Sturtevagen, who has a very interesting article about medieval underwear on her blog.

In non-bra news, the first Call for Papers for the 2013 UK Experimental Archaeology Conference to be held at Cardiff University and St Fagans National History Museum, Cardiff, on 11 – 12 January 2013, is out. Information and the usual other stuff ; ) can be found at the conference blog/website.

And finally, and something totally different: There's a new archaeological dissertation blog online, about “Sámi circular offering sites – a comparative archaeological analysis”. It is a PhD project in archaeology by Marte Spangen, Stockholm University.
I think it's very nice that more and more PhD folks blog about their work!

So... now for the catching up. (More or less, that is.)

There's a MeDaTS meeting (the autumn meeting) in October, as usual in the British Museum, and the topic is "Well Worn Weeds: Underclothes, Linens and Vegetable fibres worn next to the body". It's on Saturday, 27th October 2012, and you can see more details including conference fee and contact data here. Now, if I were in London...

The CfP for the International Conference “Theory and method in the prehistoric archaeology of Central Europe” is already past, and there's bound to be a programme up soon. The event is 24^th–26^th October 2012 in Mikulov (Czech Republic), the sessions are already fixed and described on the website, and registration for participants is open.

Meanwhile, we are finishing the last behind-the-scenes detail planning for the Textile Forum, I have an article to finish off and a presentation to structure (and it is giving me a hard time, unfortunately). And the cat may have asthma. And to top it all off, Facebook is making me get timeline. Gah. Which means I will have to hunt for a cover photo... just what I needed, another excuse for procrastinating.

There is a bunch of emails with interesting content in my inbox, and it's time for me to finally post all that stuff here.

First of all, the knitted 16th century cap collection of the Museum of London is now online. The
73 caps, coifs, cap fragments, linings and earpieces have been newly photographed, with captions containing contextual and technical information. All the pieces will have their full captions in the next two weeks.

The caps and their parts are of a large group of material excavated from sites around London by
workmen in the early 20th century. They represent an insight into everyday urban clothing and a high level of technical skill in their knitted, fulled and napped construction. Caps of this style are in collections across Europe and North America and are the focus of a lot of research interest, so we are pleased to make a large group available to the wider research community.

To browse the caps, go to the Collections Online site and enter ‘cap’ in the Keyword field with the date range 1500-1600 in the search fields.

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If you are in the mood for a conference in the winter, here's a call for papers: ‘Crafting-in-the-World: the temporal and spatial dynamics of craft and its practitioners’. It is a proposed session for the 34th Annual Meeting of the Theoretical Archaeology Group, which will be held at the University of Liverpool, United Kingdom, from the 17th-19th of December 2012. You can view the conference website at: http://www.liv.ac.uk/sace/livetag/index.htm and get more info there. 

Crafting-in-the-World: the temporal and spatial dynamics of craft and its practitioners.
Whilst the last two decades have witnessed a prolific interest in craft studies, which have increasingly acknowledged the sociality of craft, the role of choice, and the importance of the body in the development and transmission of craft traditions, there remains an uncomfortable dichotomy between the temporal and spatial understandings of craft practice. The abundance of existing research has traditionally focused on either describing production processes or attempted to theorise how the finished products of craft acquire meaning. The separation of object from process has resulted in the products of craft looming un-tethered to practice, devoid of spatial and temporal understandings of craft practice.
In addition and despite claims to the contrary to this, there has been little coherent collaboration between academic specialisms, which has only served to heighten the fragmented nature of craft study and impeded our understanding of the subject as a whole. In an attempt to address these issues this session will encourage multidisciplinary engagement with the topic of craft, focusing on the temporal and spatial embeddedness of craft activities; what we term Crafting-in-the-World.
We are seeking contributions that will discuss the acts and arenas of production and the reunification of products with their formative processes to embrace a holistic approach to the study of innovation, production, and consumption. To complement this we invite papers that examine the intrinsic relationship between practice and space, exploring the ways in which practice is manifested in the landscape through time, looking at both the physical remains of production and the expression of crafting traditions. Contributions addressing experimental work are particularly welcome.

Papers for the session could address the following themes:
•       Reconciling continuity and change: redundancy, innovation and change (every innovation involves loss and gain); re-contextualisation of innovations; why some things change and others don’t (i.e., there is no such thing as progress).
•       Spatial articulation of craft: technological ‘features’ as architecture; space shaping practices and practices shaping space; compartmentalization of space and time geographies.
•       Tangled web of technological practice: communities of practice; Complementing, referencing, incorporating aspects of other crafts; mobile crafts (i.e., itinerant crafts people).
 
If you wish to submit to the session, please email Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist vor Spambots geschützt! Zur Anzeige muss JavaScript eingeschaltet sein. by the 27th of June with the following:
 •       Paper title (maximum of 20 words)
 •       Paper abstract (150 words max)
 •       Your name, affiliation and contact details.

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There's a  new magazine (or e-zine) out called Kritische Archäologie (Critical Archaeology), and it seems to be at least partly in English. The whole first issue can be seen on their website.

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And finally, there's another online database of stuff: OPAL, Lower Saxonia's portal of artefacts. I have not (yet) found much textile stuff there, but it's worth a browse nevertheless.

That's it for today - hopefully you have found something that interests you!

The date for the 7th Experimental Archaeology Conference has now been set - it will take place on Friday 11th-Saturday 12th January 2013.
The 7th Conference will be hosted jointly by Cardiff University and St Fagans National History Museum, Wales. This year’s conference is also supported by EXARC.
The first day of this conference will be held at Cardiff University and will focus on papers and discussion. The second day will be hosted by St Fagans, and will offer more papers as well as the chance to explore one of Britain’s oldest open-air museums.


This sounds lovely - Cardiff! St Fagan's! (Cardiff, especially - I've been hooked to Dr Who for quite some time now, and Torchwood. Though the conference also sounds really nice.)


The call for papers will probably come out in July, and the conference especially welcomes papers regarding the connection between experiential and experimental archaeology. Hmmm... now I should maybe do some scheming...

If you are interested in learning more about the linen bras and underwear from Schloß Lengberg in Austria, you might consider to attend the Autumn MeDaTS meeting in London on October 27, where Beatrix Nutz will be speaking.

In this conference we want to explore ways in which we can approach craftspeople behind objects and find complexes in the archaeological record. How have craftspeople left marks on things, places, and times? What roles did they play within their communities, and can we trace their social status through the archaeological record? What methodologies are available to identify people behind material remains? How are craftspeople linked across geographical and temporal planes, how is knowledge and skill reproduced and transformed?
To this end, we aim to bring together a diverse group of scholars to discuss the nexus craft – people – archaeology across a range of materials (such as lithics, ceramics, metal, textiles, etc.), periods, and regions, incorporating evidence from prehistoric and early historic societies across Europe and the Mediterranean.

You can read more about the conference on their blog; CfP is also still open with a deadline of June 15. 

And finally, don't forget about our own Textile Forum in September - we still have some places left. A conference programme will come out shortly, but I can already promise interesting things like a sprang workshop.

First of all, if you are interested in hearing about textiles and economy, don't forget that the conference in Copenhagen starts tomorrow at 9 in the morning (GMT +1). All the links to participate via remote connection are up, and I think folks in Copenhagen are looking forward to having a remote audience too! This is certainly something that makes me feel all futuristic.

In other news, the flowery newness is not yet finished; there's still some (but considerably less) work to do - mostly the last embellishments plus the edges of the thing.

And finally, I have been looking for an alternative to amazon again (why? they are too mighty, and they know it), since they gobbled up the bookdepository online shop in 2011, prompting quite a few concerned reactions. I have now heard that at least for Germany, buch.de seems to be a good alternative - free shipping for books (in the country, at least), a decent selection of English books, and their prices are only slightly higher than those of bookdepository or amazon. I can live with slightly higher prices if the rest is fine - plus they even offer several different payment methods with no added costs, like paying after getting an invoice.