Textile Forum, for me, is like a party and a family reunion and a conference and a fair and a week of crazy textile stuff all rolled up into one. It's the one week in my year that's making me run in circles a huge lot beforehand, packing up loads of stuff, losing lots and lots of sleep over fretting if all will go well (and the occasional late-night doing of stuff), and writing more lists than for anything else in my year.

It's also the week making me absurdly happy because it's bringing textile folks together, and there is so much networking and learning and sharing taking place. I'm part of this, and that is a wonderful feeling for which I gladly pay the price in sleep and coffee over-consumption.

Finally, it's the week that is making me really, really tired - so there will be no blogging from tomorrow on until I've recovered from the Textile Forum, which, according to experience, takes me about a week as well... which means I'll be back on the blog on Monday, November 19.

See you then - and happy textile and non-textile shenanigans until then!

I'm currently busy preparing for the European Textile Forum - which mainly means writing lists, writing even more lists, and dragging things into heaps according to the lists to minimise the risk of my forgetting some crucial tool or material.

Also - last-minute ordering of things I've run out of, or that will be necessary. We will be doing another run of the Pompeii dyeing experiment (looking at the influence of metal kettles on the dyeing outcome), as we've found somebody willing to do an analysis of the mordanting and dyeing liquids to see how much metal ions are in them, so I've harvested birch leaves (currently residing in the freezer), and I will need to make sure we have enough yarn, fabric, and alum for the dyeing experiment.

And on top of all this, I should actually be sitting down, finalising my bits of presentation. Which includes having my tablet weaving test band set up so I can use it at the Forum. Fortunately, the warp is already done, so I only need to get some initial wefts in. I have a few additional plans for that test warp, though (and you will hear about this soon), and if I can in some way manage, I want to do the associated weaving before the Forum too.

Can someone hand me an extra day, maybe, please? Or two?

To my and Heather's great delight, we are in the very, very last stage of getting Ancient Textiles, Modern Science 2 all done and set - the last proofs have arrived, and it's only a matter of giving the book a very last read, catching the very last typos, before it's all good to go to print.

Yay! Getting this book done was a string of pitfalls and delays, due to all kinds of things - crashing computers and illnesses only being two of them. So I'm really happy to get this to a close, and consequently proof-reading is what I am doing now!

If you want to have a look at what the book will contain, it's already listed on the Oxbow website, and you can even pre-order at a special price!

 

After the conference is before the conference, or so it is said... I think. Well, it's true, after all, and planning for the next European Textile Forum has started - we do have a date fixed for the conference, which will be November 5-11, 2018. There is no focus topic fixed yet, though (suggestions are welcome).

We're also thinking about making a few changes to the conference structure to make it easier for people to attend. As we'd much prefer making things better by knowing exactly what to do, we've drawn up a survey to get a better idea of what you like and don't like, and what you would prefer to see unchanged. If you are interested in the conference, you can help us a lot by going here and filling out the survey. We want to get people together to network - both from the academic and from the practical side. Connecting craft experience with academic research is immensely helpful for both sides, and we'd like to do an even better job at this in the future.

While drawing up the survey, I've also finally managed to give the website a long-due overhaul. It now has a nicer, cleaner design; there's a section with result summaries added, with the first ones already in, and hopefully more to come in the nearer future, and it is now a secure site, using https.

So. Some work done, more to come - and I'm very curious to find out what the survey results will be. The first ones are already in, with some very helpful remarks to think about!

Here, stuff is progressing. Coffee is being drunk.
I'm still hard at work on the Forum webpages, getting them into a nicer order and stuff on them easier to access. Putting more stuff in there, too - which means I might need to up my contract with my provider a notch, to have more space for the stuff.

I'm also trying to finalise a little survey about the Forum to see where we might be heading. I love the format of having one full week, and the combination of a lecture and some practical part, but it might pose too much of an initial hurdle to those not already straddling the line between theoretical or academic work and crafts practice and experience. I also have the suspicion that a full week is too long for quite a few people - so Sabine and I have talked it over, and Michael and I have, and we might do a bit of a change, this year or next, depending on how it goes.

The survey is not quite finished yet, but I hope to get it done and out and tested later today, and then it will be time for a newsletter and spreading it out, hopefully gaining a lot of insights. Ideally, I'll also get the site done and polished before it goes out, but I think I might not, and I'd rather have more time for the survey than less - so it all depends on how productive I'll be today. And possibly early tomorrow. So... I should get back on it, right?

I definitely need more hours in a day. Or more nights that miraculously turn out to be working nights, yet still deliver rest. Or something like that.

Yesterday, for instance, was totally gobbled up by work on the Textile Forum site (and no, it's not visible yet, I am working on a local copy of the page to make it into a nicer and more functional thing).

So somehow, all the small things that need to be done teamed up with the bigger things and ate the day. Again. It's not the first time this has happened to me, but I had only wanted to spend the morning on that page work, and do something else the rest of the day. Like planning for a possible kickstarter campaign (which is thoroughly scary), and doing some more archaeology-related writing, and some translating.

Sigh. At least I did manage to snap a photo of the nicely blooming hellebore out in the garden, which I can now share with you:

The stacks on my desk have shrunk a bit (at least enough so that I don't get an instantaneous flight reflex when entering the room), the cat is happily draped over my forearm again, putting her paw on my touchpad at the most inopportune moments, and most of the stuff that I dragged half across the country is back in its proper place on the storage shelf.

Not that I'm out of things to do, mind you - there's more sorting to do, the stack of emails is still towering, and of course after the season is before the next one. Which means there's planning for events, planning for markets, and planning for the next Textile Forum.

Especially the latter is interesting, as we're considering making a few changes to the programme structure, and to the conference as a whole. The aim of these changes will be to become more accessible to participants who can't spend a whole week at a conference. Of course, we want to get it right, so I'm currently working on a little survey to send around. There are also plans to slightly re-structure the website and to add some more things as information about past experiments, tests, trial runs and topics. It's all very exciting, and I hope the survey will give us a good amount of feedback on which to act, so that our little conference can saunter on into the future, doing an even better job at connecting people from the practical side of historical crafts to researchers looking at the actual pieces.

Like everything, making a survey turns out to be a time-eater, though. And even if I'm tempted to go on straight away working on it... I've already done enough survey drafting for today - I need to get a few other things done.

Such as putting the remainder of the goods into their place. And finally finishing an article that is due...