Via the MEDTC-List, I received this info about K'zoo:

Forty-sixth International Congress on Medieval Studies
May 12–15, 2011
Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo, Michigan USA
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/

A 'preview' of the program is available here
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/Assets/pdf/congress/Schedule11.pdf

I had a look at that programme. Oh my goodness. How on earth are you supposed to choose which sessions or papers to attend? That conference programme has a freaking two hundred and ten pages! This really, really boggles my mind, which is used to small or medium conferences only. Must be really nice to have such an enormous group of medievalists all together in one spot! (Though I still think it must be awfully hard to choose what to listen to...)


For those of you interested in textile stuff, I will just repost the list of of-interest-sessions that also came via the list. I had planned to go through the pdf myself and list the page numbers with the textile-related sessions, but I'm afraid I will get lost in that document and never find my way out again. Do I need to say that I would love to hear those papers? Alas, K'zoo is far away...

Thursday 7:30 p.m. Session 157 (Schneider 1280)
Vair, Able, Phoenix, and Kitty-Cat: Desire and Reality in Medieval Fur Fashions
Sarah-Grace Heller, Ohio State Univ.

Friday 1:30 p.m.Session 243 )Fetzer 1010)
Dress and Textiles I: Documentary Evidence
Sponsor: DISTAFF (Discussion, Interpretation, and
Study of Textile Arts, Fabrics, and Fashion)
Organizer: Robin Netherton, DISTAFF
Presider: Gale R. Owen-Crocker, Univ. of Manchester
Textiles and Dress in the Household Accounts and
Inventories of Lady Margaret Beaufort (1443–1509)
Susan Powell, Univ. of Salford
Histoires and Misteres: Understanding Medieval Tapestry
Tina Kane, Tina Kane Textile Conservation and Restoration
“Translating” a Queen: The Wardrobe of Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots
Michelle Beer, Univ. of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign
Juana of Portugal’s Farthingale: Rumors of Scandal and Shame
Emma Lehman, Independent Scholar

Friday 3:30 p.m.Session 301 (Fetzer 1010)
Dress and Textiles II: Implications and Interpretations
Sponsor: DISTAFF (Discussion, Interpretation, and
Study of Textile Arts, Fabrics, and Fashion)
Organizer: Robin Netherton, DISTAFF
Presider: Robin Netherton
Lanval’s Lady: An Uncovering
Monica L. Wright, Univ. of Louisiana–Lafayette
Cosmographic Coverings: Textile Language in Alan of Lille’s Plaint of Nature
Jonathan Abresch, Univ. of Toronto
Late Medieval (Chiefly Middle English) Attitudes towards Dagged Clothing
John Block Friedman, Independent Scholar
To Be or Not to Be Medieval: Costuming Maid Marian for Film and Television
Sherron Lux, Library, San Jacinto College–North Campus

Friday 5:45 p.m. Fetzer 1055 Medieval
Dress/Textile Arts Display and Demonstration
Sponsor: DISTAFF (Discussion, Interpretation, and
Study of Textile Arts, Fabrics, and Fashion)
Organizer: Robin Netherton, DISTAFF
Presider: Robin Netherton
A display of reproduction textile and dress
items, handmade using medieval methods and materials. Items
will include textiles, decorative treatments,
garments, and dress accessories. Exhibitors will
demonstrate techniques and be available to
discuss the use of historical evidence in
reproducing artifacts of material culture.

Sunday 8:30 a.m.Session 523 (Fetzer 1005)
Recycling Clothing in Late Medieval Paris
Kathryn J. Kelsey Staples, West Virginia Univ.

Sunday 8:30 a.m.Session 543 (Bernhard 210)
Dress and Textiles III: Techniques
Sponsor: DISTAFF (Discussion, Interpretation, and
Study of Textile Arts, Fabrics, and Fashion)
Organizer: Robin Netherton, DISTAFF
Presider: Robin Netherton
Loopy Clues: Unraveling Errors, Omissions, and Assumptions in Loop Braiding
Instructions
Cindy Myers, Independent Scholar
Early Knitting Techniques and Tools: Clues from Extant Middle Eastern Socks
Jackie Oppelt, Independent Scholar
Cornettes: Variation and Change in a Fourteenth-Century Hairstyle
Barbara Segal, Independent Scholar

Sunday 10:30 a.m. Session 576 (Bernhard 210)
Dress and Textiles IV: Armour, Dress, Textile
Sponsor: DISTAFF (Discussion, Interpretation, and
Study of Textile Arts, Fabrics, and Fashion) and
the Brill Encyclopaedia of Medieval Dress and
Textiles of the British Isles, c. 450-1450
Organizer: Gale R. Owen-Crocker, Univ. of Manchester
Presider: Julian Deahl, Brill Publishing Company
What’s In a Name? Identifying Textiles
Gale R. Owen-Crocker
Textiles and Thomas Becket
Elizabeth Coatsworth, Manchester Metropolitan Univ.
What’s the Pourpoint?
Karen Watts, Royal Armouries
Padded Protection: The Rothwell Jack
Maria Hayward, Univ. of Southampton

It's already been a week since I came back from the OEGUF conference, and I haven't even posted a picture of it yet. So... here's photographic proof that:


... I had something to say (this is me and Karina delivering a commentary to a short film showing different methods of preparing wool for spinning)...


... I went on the excursion to Schwarzenbach to see, among other things like the museum and the "Keltenfest" area, a flock of Racka sheep...


... and a most beautiful sunset...



... and also to the excursion to Asparn an der Zaya...



... and I did engage in Photo Wars with quite a few people.

 


Special thanks to Wulf Hein for the first photo and the shoot of myself in the Photo Wars!

I'm back home with the slight residue of a cold I caught somewhere during the last two weeks (fortunately it was a light one), a brain full of new information, project development for the winter season already started (it was a long drive home, with plenty of time to plan together with Sabine), and - as usual - a nice backlog of work and stuff to be taken care of.

The OEGUF conference was wonderful, though it had a few minor drawbacks: Our room was getting quite stuffy quite soon, there was no conference coffee point (which seriously cut back on the usual coffee socialising), and that in connection with short breaks due to the programme being stuffed very, very full, there was just not enough time to catch everybody I wanted to catch to chat or comment or discuss with. But apart from that, there was lots of laughter, oodles of fun, and a very large amount of presentations that were brand-sparkling new (at least to me) and of a very high quality - archaeologists and craftspeople alike meticulously looking at tiny details and working out things about bell beaker making, salt mining, and music instruments, to name three topics among many. The spinning experiment presentation was very well received too, and I did get quite a few comments about it, including one from a skilled statistician who offered to also take a look at the database and see if he might be able to see something in addition or something different from what I found when staring at all those numbers.

I met with some folks that I had not seen for a longer or shorter time, and it was wonderful to reconnect and see them again; and I also have some new acquaintances among the colleagues. There were two excursions, and during one of them I had the opportunity to make contact with the caretaker of a herd of museum sheep, a special old Hungarian breed - wonderful wool for historical spinning, and amazingly well suited to dye them coptic black, since the wool is already almost black. With all these things together and stuffed into a few days only, it's no wonder that my brain sort of ran on stand-by on Monday and still during part of yesterday, also an indicator that it was a good conference.

Socialising, learning about stuff, getting new and weird ideas, and carrying home material for textile works - have I mentioned already that I love conferences?

I'm packing my paper presentation with nice colourful graphs now (and videos! I've been making screenshot videos to "leaf" through the different spinners), and I'm faced with the typical problem of somebody having stared at one set of data for a long time:

Do I present everything that everybody needs to know, or am I leaving out a too-large chunk at the beginning? Is it possible for others to see the things in the graphs I show that I see, or do I see the things because I have looked at other graphs before that made it clearer? And can I explain the sometimes rather complex graphs well enough so that they are legible and understandable?

We'll all know in a little less than a week. Or at least I will know, and then let you know on the blog. For now... I will go play with colourful graphs a little more. Pasting them into Powerpoint. Hoping that the video-stuff will work during presentation as well.

I'm back after having a wonderful time doing all sorts of things: Going on a summer holiday and spending almost three delightful weeks getting stronger legs in pleasantly cool weather (read: cycling trip in Northern England), with a market right before leaving and a market and workshop right after coming back.

And then I spent a wonderful and very educating week in a place close to Vienna, where I met two dear colleagues for a full week and we did fibre preparation tests and spinning tests for four old-style sheep fleeces. That was a wonderful experience and I learned a huge lot about wool prepping for spinning. To top it all off, I get to spin threads for dyeing tests and a reproduction of one of the famous Hallstatt tablet woven bands - so there's spinning work being done here for the next few weeks. Yes, weeks - I don't spin all day, but rather only an hour or so, it is quite a lot of thread, and since the thread thickness of the 2-ply yarn is only about 0.2 - 0.3 mm, it is slow work as well.

And that's not the only thing being done here at the moment - rather (as usual after some time away) I have a huge to-do list with lots of exciting but time-consuming items on it, one of them finalising the spinning experiment analysis and putting it all into words, graphs and pictures for the upcoming talks about it - one at the Textile Forum, which is also drawing near at an insane speed, and one at the OEGUF conference in October in Vienna. Plus there's some other projects coming up, in different stages of pre-planning. And thanks to the many days away from home, I am feeling energised and happy to tackle all these things again. Heap of work, here I come!

The programme and workshop programme for the Textile Forum 2010 are finally finished, and we are happy to present a very varied and interesting week. Topics for workshops range from Stone-Age Twining Techniques to Norwegian Twined Knitting and from Estonian One-Piece Shoes to Filet Netting - many fascinating possibilities to learn a technique or two that you are not yet familiar with. For the evenings, we have planned a panel discussion about the question "what makes a textile?", plus several very interesting lectures. Inbetween, there is of course plenty of time to talk about textiles and textile techniques with the other participants.

The Forum will take place from 6.-12 September 2010 at the Archeoparc Museum in South Tyrol, Italy. Conference fee for the whole week, including full board and lodgings in a two- to six-bed-bedroom (with shower and toilet ensuite), is 350 Euro; workshops cost 40 Euros (plus in some cases a few Euros for materials).
We still have a few places left, so if you would like to have a thoroughly textile week with us, go to www.textileforum.org to register - or if you know somebody who might be interested, please pass this on!

Somehow those weekends are just swooooshing these times - I can't believe it is already Monday again!

At least my energy level feels quite a bit higher than it was on Friday, so I'll see how much I can get done today. And in case you are actually looking for a little textile content while I am busily pottering away at boring office stuff and doing some proofreading and preparing some stuff for markets, take a look at the instructions behind this link, which goes to Hsifengs livejournal and where she describes how to get at most of the presentations given at the "Costume Colloquium: A Tribute To Janet Arnold" in 2008 in Florence, Italy.

Now that's a wonderful idea, I think!