Since the Dyeing Experiment at the Forum went so well, Heather Hopkins and I are considering to present it in Cardiff in January next year. Which means a trip to Cardiff - I've never been to Wales before, and being quite fond of Dr Who and Torchwood, this is even more of a reason to go there.

Today, though, the first (and actually most important) thing on my list is to wrap up the bookkeeping for the quarter and send off the VAT forms to the tax folks. Work I love... not, but sadly, it's necessary. (Good thing about it? Having to send off the forms forces me to keep the books up to date and well sorted.)

And while I'm sweating about little numbers black and red, you might enjoy this:

There is a digital charter archive sponsored by the DFG, online. I don't know how good the English translation of the page really is, but the charters are not English anyways... the database seems to be searchable, and they are working on expanding it with more items. Go see the "Virtuelles deutsches Urkundennetzwerk" if that sounds interesting to you.

Since I was speaking of Cardiff: The call for papers for the Experimental Archaeology Conference is still running, so if you want to participate, you have until November. More info is on their blogsite (I'd say website, but it runs on blog software).

Going to Cardiff = travel. Travel = interesting topic. Archaeologik has posted a picture of a medieval arterial road without firm surface, and I think it looks spectacular.

And finally, making access to unavailable and out-of-stock books possible seems to slowly spread - which is a totally wonderful thing! The book that I last heard about is this one:

I'm at the Textile Forum this week, and thus there will be no blogging. Since I will be away from home for a few more days after that, blog as normal will resume on September 25.

Meanwhile:

The Textile Forum is from today to Sunday, September 16; the programme is here. Day passes are available, so please drop by to meet other textile persons!

On the weekend after that, there's the official opening of LEA, where I will be showing wool preparation and spinning techniques.

There are still some places left for the embroidery workshop in Erlangen on the 27th of October and the 28th of October 2012. Here's the link for more information and booking.

And finally, Maney Publishing offers free access to its Journal of the Month, the European Journal of Archaeology, until October 15. All articles from the last three years are available.

Enjoy!

It's getting cooler and slightly autumny outside; the sunlight has a different, more golden colour in the afternoons, and it is actually nice again to stand in the sun and having it warm oneself. It's still quite dry here, and during the day it gets warm enough (or even hot), but summer is definitely coming to an end.

The Forum, on the other hand, is about to start. We are looking forward to an interesting week with lots of discussion and practical stuff about historical textile techniques, and if you can and want to come to Mayen for a day or more, day passes are available and you will be very welcome!

As for me, I will finish the last preparations and start packing for the event today. Hooray! It's almost starting!

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!