Life is looking good - the taxes are all done and sent off in time, the cat is enjoying her fine-weather observation place at the window (she's still not allowed out, but will be soon), I will be able to start building my new spinning wheel on the weekend, and it has finally rained yesterday. And this time, it wasn't just a bit of rain and then heat again, no - proper ground-drenching rain, much needed by nature all around here.

And to top off all those good things, Sabine and I had a conspirative phone call yesterday and planned the programme for the Textile Forum in September. This time around, we had offers for some presentations that are about new or rarely covered and quite complex topics, so we will reserve some more time for each of them - plus we managed to sort things into something like theme days, and we are really happy with how things are working out. The programme is not all finished yet, but we hope to finalise it soon, and then we'll post it to the Forum homepage and send it round in a newsletter. Things are happening, and they are exciting!

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.

 As promised, some pictures. First of all, a tulip from our garden - most of them are done with their blooming now, but a few last ones - the black ones, mostly - are still holding their own.


And this is the current market stall setup, with the new banner in place. This is how the stall looked at Freienfels, and I'm very happy with it!


And finally... Madonna, hanging out on the living room carpet...

Summer season always starts with Freienfels for me, and probably always will - even if events like the IRM come before it. May 1 has been a fixture in my yearly planning for so long now.

This year, Freienfels was wonderful again. We had a terriffic time in our "WG" (that's short for "Wohngemeinschaft", people that share a flat) with relaxed but funny evenings and I got to know a few more wonderfully nice people. There was a lot of lovely and yummy food, among it plenty of Harry's Schokokringel from the Feldbeckerey - not authentically medieval with all the chocolate in them, but totally addictive - and Lotte in our WG went on a baking spree and made strawberry buns to die for.
The weather was also playing along, it was nice and sunny with only a few little showers - including one with impeccably bad timing on the last morning, just before packing the tents back into the car. So my free day yesterday contained a little work after all - spreading the tent fabric in the sun to let it dry and then pack up the two tents.

And today I have to finish unpacking and rearranging my stuff into the new, bigger basket for my goods that I bought at Freienfels. The old basket was getting too small, so it was high time for an upgrade. But first coffee and breakfast and paying of bills that came in during the last week...

Yesterday afternoon, when I set out to bake a cake, I realised I was really, really tired - things that are so normal that they should not need any brain capacity at all were sort of... eluding me. Like the proper sequence to put in eggs and flour (hint: eggs first), that the baking powder should actually be added (almost forgot that), that it's really smart to first stir the starch for custard with a little liquid, and only then mix this paste into the boiling milk (hint: straining lumpy custard is possible, but not fun) and other brainless stuff like that.

In spite of all my botches, the cake turned out really nice and now serves as my breakfast. Well, a small part of it only, obviously. (I have this... thing... for baking cakes that can feed a company of hungry cake-eaters. I have some normal-sized ones in my repertoire, but most of my cakes contain instructions like "3 jars of cherries" or "2 kg of rhubarb" or "2.5 kg bananas". Just lifting the baking sheet and carrying the cake around earns you the right to eat some, because we all know that weightlifting persons need a lot of extra calories, right?)

Apart from this, I have the article to finish (it needs some closing words, then one last go-over, tweaking the bibliography and adding in the pics), some mails to write, some money to wire away, and then it's time to pack for Freienfels so we can start early tomorrow morning.

I am using the time until the Copenhagen conference starts to do my pre-season-start inventory work, which also includes cleaning out and re-filling the many boxes I use to protect and store the wares that I lug along, and other work like dunking my baskets in water to clean and revitalise them.

And I'm very happy to announce that I can do this while sitting in a room with the newly finished Flowery Newness!

This was quite pleasant to work and did not take overly long, thanks to the appliqué technique. The motif is taken from a 15th century manuscript margin decoration; the manuscript is probably from South Germany and is a Book of Hours. You can see the inspiration page in the British Library online thingie, here.

For those interested in the technique: It's wool on wool, plant dyes (with exception of the stems, which are fake onion-dyed chemical dye), edges caught with beeswax and sewn on with plant-dyed silk thread. I had to use a substitute for the gilt leather strip that would usually have surrounded the edges; the substitute is a gilt thread (which should really be called a rope, compared to proper historical gold thread).

This flowery banner will adorn my sales table in Freienfels - and I think it's quite the eye-catcher!