This morning, I was wondering what to do - should I try and do an April Fool post? There are others who are doing it so much better, though.

And then I thought that I'll just be normal and boring and do a totally normal post. Maybe about Textile Forum stuff. Maybe I could just announce the registration being open, and post a Call for Papers... that would be a nice blog post.

However, that means writing the CfP first, and getting the website up to date, and since I had to run some errands inbetween... it was obvious that I would not get it done until early afternoon. So I took a deep breath and thought to myself that since I have been blogging late quite often during the end phase of the Beast, you'll all be used to the occasional late one, and it should be fine if I post it by early afternoon.

It's the end of mid-afternoon now, and unfortunately the CfP is still not finished. Well, the CfP is finished, but I realised that with our newer concept of pairing up a paper with a practical session, I have to fix up the registration form to change it from a radio button set to checkboxes, and that would best be done by making an entirely new form to hopefully tackle some other issues, and that in turn might take another hour or two... so you are getting this blogpost instead, about how plans go kawumph in the afternoon when sudden realisations about the need for updates hit them hard.

Tomorrow, though. You shall have the CfP tomorrow.

It's early spring, and what better time of the year than to start planning for November? We have found a date for our next European Textile Forum, and we are hoping to finish plans this week far enough so we can send out the official Call for Papers and update our website. If you are on the mailing list, you'll get anote when we have done that. (If you are not yet on the list, but would like to be - go here to subscribe.)


I'll disclose our year's focus topic for you here right now, though. It will be "Nonwoven Textiles", which includes nalebinding, braiding, felting, netting and of course knitting. So we're excited to hear what papers and presentations will be offered as soon as the CfP will be out. If you are interested in attending and presenting, you could start thinking about something right away... while we'll be planning the actual thing.

Sabine and I are beyond delight that our crazy idea from back in 2008 has developed into a conference that is going strong, and we are looking forward to having another week with fellow textile researchers, crafters, conservators spent talking, thinking, reconstructing and researching. It's a good bit of work every year to plan and prepare that conference - but when that week comes, it is stuffed with wonder and learning, and every time we lean back and say that putting in that work? It is so, so much worth it!

Today it's time for me to rejoice - my article about the Spinning Experiment (yes, that one back from 2009) has been published in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences. Here's the link.

It's not open access, since that requires the author (yes, the author) to pay a stupid amount of money which I can't afford (and even if I did, I would not since I am a strong believer in the Rule, or Yog's Law). I'd much prefer if it were free, or open access, or offered at an affordable price - but as things are, I am very happy to have the article out there, and published in a journal where it will be seen (and hopefully read) by a lot of people.

(If you would like to read the article, you may have access to it from a library computer if the library subscribes to the journal.)

There I am, sitting back at my desk, the cat sleeping peacefully in her bed beside the desk, reams of papers spread over it (as usual), and a long to-do list waiting to be reduced to a more manageable size.

But I also have the Contraption with a silk warp on it (the Forum saw me finish the woolen band that was on it before). My lovely colleage, after years of softly prodding me, finally got me to dye something by myself, so now I have "smurf hair" - indigo-dyed wool that sort of happened to fall into the dye vat after our experiment was done. (How could that have happened? However would a bunch of textile people, confronted with a still healthy indigo vat, ever think of randomly tossing fibery things into the vat? I cannot imagine.)
There's also some blue-dyed linen thread (and I'm planning to look into that a little more, in the future). And a cuddly toy bat* (which is in want of a little scarf, I think - possibly a blue one). There's the distaff with hemp and the in-hand spindle that I finally found some time to work during the Forum. There's a rather crazy fingerlooped braid with a cross-shaped cross-section.

There's some more books, too - my own book is back in stock at my store, and the Forum proceedings book is also available now.

For today, though, I will try to resist the call of the smurf hair (spin me! spin me!) and instead get busy with more writing work. Because that's on top of my list... for now.


* The area around the lab is one of, if not the one, biggest living quarters for bats in Europe. Several thousands of bats live there, and when night falls, you can do bat-watching. Somehow, the bat became the inofficial mascot of this year's Forum... which, accordingly, led to a bat-buying binge.

I have returned back home - back to bad weather (today it's raining hard), back to my comfy desk, and (of course) a large stack of stuff to deal with, such as the accumulation of mail both electronic and physical.
The next days will thus be dedicated to getting back up to date (and speed). You, however, will probably want to know how the Forum went... and I can tell you: it was fantastic.

There was a really nice bandwidth of papers, and our new format of paper and corresponding practical unit has met with much approval and made our Forum the most productive one that we had yet. We will definitely stay with this format!
We had a go at loopbraiding, reconstructing late antique underwear, and there was some weaving being done; our resist dyeing experiment took place (with results that are partly making me happy and partly making me wish we'd had some more time beforehand for testing things), and embroidered tunics from late antiquity were looked at and the technique reconstructed. The lab made it possible for us, in addition to the planned practical units, to have an impromptu experiment take place, researching the different outcomes of pressing fabrics into clay pots.

The forum was one full week stacked to the brim with ideas, tries, techniques and textiles. It made me very, very tired but also extremely happy - and even though the papertrail of this year's event has not been cleared yet, I am already looking forward to the next one!

Yes, again. This time it's not due to me having gone off to have fun somewhere else and having no time to blog, it's because - oh.

This time it's due to me having gone off to have fun at the Textile Forum. Though it's working fun, this time, and I will have no time to blog because of that. If you want to come and make sure that I will be both working and having fun doing it (the best kind of work), you can stop by and join us for a day - we have day passes. The conference day will start with a paper presentation at 10 in the morning, and day passes are 15 € each.

After the Forum, there will be a few days to finish off our experiment documentation and plan ahead for the times to come, and then I'll be at the Wissenschaftsmarkt in Mainz. You will find me in the tent "Umwelt und Info" together with some colleagues, showing the possible imitation methods for byzantine textiles. The Wissenschaftsmarkt is on the weekend September 14/15, so if you are in the region, make sure to stop by - it's said to be a big thing!

So your regular scheduled blogging will return on September 18, which leaves me a bit of time to recover. Have a good time until then!

I have a hard time believing how time flies by - it seems just like yesterday that we left for our paddling holiday, and now it's weeks later and the Forum is almost upon us.

Time to take care of the last bits and pieces, which include the last bits of fine-tuning for the experiment that we have planned for this year. It's about Late Antique resist-dyed textiles... and among the things left to do is making a template for the application of the resist pastes we are planning to use. The materials, though, have not all arrived yet, a package seems to have gone astray. Which again proves Rule #1 for Experimental Archaeology: Things always take longer than you expect.*

That, and going through the whole thing together with Sabine who will take care of the actual dyeing process. We will dye using indigo - I'm really looking forward to that, I always love when fabric suddenly becomes blue!


* Rule #2, by the way, is Something that you need is always missing. Maybe I should do a whole post about the Rules...