I'm back home from a whirlwind two weeks - first a little journey to South Tyrol where I got to meet the people from the Archaeoparc and do some wool prep and spinning sessions together with them, and then it was back home to repack and go to Cambridge for more spinning - this time including cotton, and involving the replicas of some Colombian spindles that were used about 600 or 700 years ago. One of the questions was which spinning technique might have worked with them - but in addition to this, we were also exchanging spinning and fibre preparation knowledge with two lovely indigenous women from northern Colombia. There were a few eye-opening moments for everybody, and there was oh, so much fun and laughter.

There was also some table accessories collateral damage. It turns out you can use extra straws very well to explain and demonstrate some cotton fibre properties, and some harm was done to a few paper napkins (which found themselves torn into strips and used to show twist effects, or solve questions about twist issues that turned up at one point).

These were by far not the first napkins* that I've seen repurposed for explaining textile stuff. I've seen them used to make impromptu threads or bast strips, to be torn into garment shape to explain draping, or to be torn into bits to show how garment construction works. They have proven so useful and versatile over the years that I am actually considering now to make one or two of them part of my teaching kit. Just in case, you know.

There was also a lot of splicing in some ways, and some stitching (the traditional bags are made in a variant of nalbinding and fitted with a braided strap). I have understood a lot more about cotton spinning now, and am much, much better at turning spindles into my previous non-favourite counter-clockwise direction. (Still not good at this clockwise and counterclockwise direction thing, though.

Now it's back to all the things that have assembled here to make me go back to the desk and catch up. I also need to go on a diet, we were fed very well and I have a hard time not eating all the delicious food that you get in Britain, but not in Germany... so it feels like I've eaten half the island now. 

I do hope though that there will be some sort of follow-up thing of this workshop at some time - not because of the food, but because of the amazing experience of meeting other textile people and seeing so many different approaches to one thing, and being able to learn from each other. It really was fantastic.

* I actually associate hearing "would you hand me that napkin, please" from any textile people so much with that poor napkin now being either drawn on or ripped up in some way that I was sort of shocked when I heard that phrase, handed a napkin over, and then found out it was to be used as a tissue. 

I am off to do things - which means that I will be off the blog until March 16. Until then, I will leave you with these harbingers of spring:

...and hope that you will have a good time and enjoy some lovely weather! 

I've gotten the information that there's a new open access book out, about - natural dyes! The book is the result of an EU project to help revive natural dyeing, but is mainly geared towards educational and artistic users. 

You can download the pdf for free from this website. I hope you enjoy it (and thank you Mari for the information!)

I spent today in an online conference, which was fabulous, but a little short on break time - so my brain feels rather mushy now. Nothing a little bit of fresh air and some food won't fix, hopefully, as there's the weekend packing to be done...

Tomorrow is another conference day, with the same rather enthusiastic schedule, and tired or not right now, I am already looking forward to it a lot!

I've stumbled across links to two alternative search engines recently. One of them is Marginalia Search,  which, sadly, does not refer to marginalia in medieval manuscripts, but rather to the margins of the Internet. 

The other is called WiBy and dubs itself "the search engine for the classic internet". You know, the Internet as it used to be when it was geocities and lots of personal websites, or at least that's the vibe I got from it.

It does indeed seem to me like searching the 'Net gets harder these days, with more and more AI-generated stuff flooding everything. Only a few days ago, I got to see a "crochet pattern" showing cat's faces. It looked lovely, and quite life-like, but more like needle-lace than crochet, and though the "pattern" looked hand-written, the whole thing was, you guessed it, AI. All this added to the fact that some terms are harder to find things anyway than others, and unfortunately textiles have a lot of these terms... well.

So I've taken a look at the two alternatives, and I think they're not my solution. They are both giving out links to sites that might not be up on top of the Duck's list (I usually use duckduckgo as search engine), but nothing that looked really interesting to me and that I hadn't seen before. There might be more amusing or enlightening outcomes for other searches than "hand spinning" and "medieval textiles", but those are the two that I tested. 

No glorious alternative for me, thus. Which means I will stick to the duck for now, with the addition of searching via academic portals and the Google Scholar page - which is, actually, quite good, much as I try to limit my use of Google stuff.

 Sometimes, when you're researching something, it seems like there are funny gaps in what we know, or what we have, or both. For instance, there seems to be a funny gap for textiles from around the year 1000. There's also a funny gap regarding spindle whorls that date to the High Middle Ages. (Granted, there's a funny gap regarding spindle whorls, period, at least if you are looking for publications with a focus on them... but that is an entirely different story. Just like the fact that it might just be perception, as you never have enough information about the current focus topic, no matter what it is.)

I have Slavic whorls that are decently published, Early Medieval ones, Viking period ones (Birka, we are grateful for you), and there's collections of Late Medieval and Early Modern ones, but the High Middle Ages? Meh. 

Or at least I haven't found much. There's the occasional mention of one being found somewhere, but they are rarely published properly, with the weight, measurements, and a drawing. 

So in case you have good examples, or know of good publications with them... I'm all ear.

Thanks to my lovely textile colleague Sarah Goslee, I've been pointed to the DOAB - the Directory of Open Access Books. And yes, it does contain quite a number of textile-related books!

You will probably have to filter down if you only search for "textile", as there's a lot about modern speciality textiles and modern textile manufacture in the list, but fortunately an "archeology" filter exists, as do several others.

You can find the main directory at https://www.doabooks.org/en. I hope it will be helpful for you!