Here's a stack of things you might find helpful...

Dark Patterns - this is a library of tricks that some websites use to trick you into buying things or doing stuff you normally wouldn't (such as subscribing to a newsletter or service). It explains the different techniques and lists examples from websites doing it. I was surprised to find audible.com on one of the lists...

There's a new book out, called Agent-based Modeling and Simulation in Archaeology (editors G. Wurzer/ K. Kowarik/ H. Reschreiter). The book was published in the Springer Verlag, with the typical high price point, as Archaeologik rightly criticises (link to German review. You can find English reviews here and here). Still - it might prove to be a helpful tool for archaeologists trying to model things (not in the clothing sense, obviously).

The EXARC Journal issue 2014/2 is now free to read online.

There's a startnext project running called "Schaf und Schäfer" (sheep and shepherd) with the aim of buying wool from shepherds in Northern Germany for a fair price, and getting it washed and spun in the region. You can support the project and get a stack of knitting yarns, too (though there's not much of the yarn reward tiers left).

Aisling has posted another list of tablet-woven bands on her blog: bands from Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages (in German).

Not as helpful as these links might be:


The little cat, picking my laptop as her pillow-of-choice. She also manages to choose different positions where she places her paw on the touchpad... which is just as non-helpful.

I have a stack of links to throw at you again - but before that, here's proof that our garden knows which month we have:


These are called Maiglöckchen in German - which literally translates to "May Bells". The German language seems to like flower names with a time of year in them - we not only have "Easter Bells" (daffodils) and "May Bells", but also "Whitsun Roses" (peonies).

Cathy from Loose Threads has something else: a list of tutorials. I haven't looked at any of them yet, but they range from medieval things to Victorian, and you might just find something that amuses you - or might prove helpful.

Erik Kwakkel at the medievalbooks blog has a fascinating post about medieval scripts, including a picture of a scribe's advertisement sheet.

Aisling has a list of tablet-woven bands from the Anglo-Saxon and Viking period found in Great Britain and Ireland.

Rainer Schreg has some thoughts about the Vienna Statement about the threat to cultural heritage in the Near East and North Africa. If you want more about that topic and don't mind a gruesome read, check out Heritage for Peace's newsletter about damage to heritage sites in Syria.

To end with a lighter note: There's a new Jane Austen film, "Love and Friendship", coming to theatres tomorrow. It's a screenplay adaptation of "Lady Susan" (a short epistolary novel). Here's an interview with filmmaker Whit Stillman. If you'd like to pass the time until then with more Austen film adaptations, you might want to check out this list.

 
 

Routledge is granting free access to their archaeology journals (everything after 1997) from today until April 17. The list of free journals (43 altogether) includes Medieval Archaeology, Journal of European Archaeology, and the Journal of the British Archaeological Association, so if you are interested in archaeology, it's definitely worth a look.

Access is possible via this page on Routledge - enjoy!

Textile terminology, as many of you will probably know, can be a never-ending headache. Especially when you are looking at texts in a foreign language. Consequently, there have been a few attempts at making glossaries or catalogues; sometimes, there is a small multi-language glossary or dictionary in the appendix to a book or article. Burnham's "Warp and Weft" also states the terms for different weaves in several languages.

However, there's a whole book with textile terminology that I had never heard about before: “Nordisk textilteknisk terminologi- Förindustriell vävnadsproduktion”, written by  Elisabeth Strömberg, Agnes Geijer, Margrethe Hald and Martha Hoffman and published in 1967. The title of the book translates to “Nordic textile technical terminology - pre-industrial fabric  production”. The book consists of Swedish term definitions, with synonyms in Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Finnish, English, French and German. The edition was revised by Geijer and Hoffmann in 1979. The Icelandic and Finnish terms were compiled by Elsa E. Guðjónsson.

So there's a whole book out there - and it gets even better. Amica and Maria from historicaltextiles.org have brought together KulturNav, a website where museums and other organisations can have shared lists of things hosted; the Textile Museum in Borås, who agreed to manage the dataset from the book, and friendly help from fellow nerds to convert the whole book into a database.

And now it's done - the Terminology is online and available, for free, via KulturNav. You can find the whole back story, and some instructions on how to use the database, on the Historical Textiles blog, including instructions on how to contribute should you find something is missing, or would like to suggest a change.

This is a wonderful thing - and my thanks to everybody involved who made this possible!

Let me start this week by giving you two links to spend lots of time looking at stuff!

Firstly, Doug has posted a number of videos from Scotland's Community Heritage Conference in 2015. Topics range from community projects and landscape projects to surveying, and there's even a "minute of madness" short video.

Non-moving pictures, but lots of them, and lovely ones of sewing work are in Sarah A Bendall's post about her reconstruction of the Elizabeth I effigy bodies - cutting and sewing. If you like to look at hand-sewing, or are interested in early modern stays, or both, you should not miss that post!

The Internet is full of helpful things, and I have a few more resources for you today. Hooray free helpful things!

First of all, the Book of Kells is online, in all its digitised splendour and glory, free for you to look at! Here's the official announcement from the Trinity College Dublin, and here's the direct link to the digital book.

Aarhus Uni Press' free e-book of the month is Re-Mapping Exile (edited by Michael Böss, Irene Gilsenan Nordin and Britta Olinder); it's a collection of essays about aspects of exile in Irish writing.

And finally my discovery of yesterday: The Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte is available online, for free, under the title of RDK Labor. It works like a wiki in that you can also submit articles, and it's a huge resource of information on German art history.

On a completely different note, it's snowing outside, and - very fittingly - the snowdrops are blooming:

You're getting a late blogpost today because I had slow internet today, and it even ate a half-written post... but you are getting one, and it is one with free stuff! (Very fitting for the season...)

First of all, as a reminder - free ebook in Aarhus Uni Press this month is Woven into the Earth. Go download it if you haven't done so yet, and tell your friends who are interested in archaeological textiles. This is a wonderful book, and it is definitely good to have.

You already downloaded it? You would like more books? Here you go.

On a completely different, and very much non-archaeological note - there is a free e-book about working with MS Word, "Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals" by Jack M. Lyon. A few years ago, the author's newsletter "Editorium" helped me a lot when prodding my thesis text into shape, as well as later when I had typesetting to do. If you're working with Word (as so many people in the social/historical/archaeological sciences do), you might want to give it a look.

And now on to the juicy bits.

I had the opportunity to visit Estonia for a few days, and I didn't only meet lovely fellow textile people and fellow archaeologists and got to see exciting finds in several museums and a good number of the Estonian textile finds, I also brought home some books (about, who would have guessed it, Estonian textile finds). Two of them are about the finds from Siksälä, which is a burial site used continuously from the 11th to the 15th century - the Estonian Iron Age and Middle Ages. Siksälä has yielded exceptionally rich finds, including textiles wonderfully decorated with bronze spirals. There's a publication in two parts, a text part and a catalogue part; both are in Estonian*, but anyone can look at the pictures and construction drawings. And if I say anyone, I do mean it - both the first volume and the second volume are available online, free of charge, thanks to the University of Tartu.

Another absolutely amazing Estonian find is the craft box from Lohavere (which should be written with a little ~ sitting on top of the o), which comes from the hillfort of the same name, dated to the 12th and early 13th century. If you know the Mästermyr find and have always dreamt of something similar, but related to textiles? Here it is. The craft box, made from birch bark, contained textile remains, prefabricated and half-finished products, bronze ornaments and tools, some of them neatly stored in smaller boxes or little pouches. It is an absolutely fascinating find and gives so much information about how the spiral decorations were worked... and it, too, is published in a little book, and that, too, is available online free of charge.

These finds absolutely deserve to be better-known - so feel free to spread the word, and of course enjoy the publications of these gorgeous finds!

*Estonian is a language belonging to the Finno-Ugric group, and more or less related to Finnish. A few fun facts: Estonian has fourteen cases. Yes, fourteen - because there are no words to signal direction (like "into" or "from"), and a case is used instead. More fun facts? Estonian has no genders, so there's no problem with being politically correct. Because there were a lot of Germans in Estonia in the Middle Ages (Hanseatic League was a reason for that, for instance) there are quite a few German words still around, which makes not understanding most of the rest even more peculiar. Final fun fact for today: as I'm easily amused, it diverted me no end that the greeting "Tere" sounds much like the southern German colloquial "Dere" (which is very short for "Habe die Ehre", I have the honour). If you're intrigued now, here are a few useful Estonian phrases, and here is a very interesting pdf with facts about Estonian.