I'm back from a wonderful trip to Ireland, where it was comparatively cool - and now I'm back to baking in the German late-summer heat. (Way too warm for the season, actually.)

The conference in Belfast was easily and by far the largest archaeology conference I've ever been to, with about 3000 participants altogether (online and on-site combined). I don't know how many people there were in Leeds when I attended it, many years ago, but it felt similarly huge. It's fascinating, and certainly has its pros, but personally I do prefer smaller conferences where I have less decision-making issues (what session will I go to?) and there's a little less noise in the common functions, and fewer people so it's easier to find somebody.

The programme was also very, very tightly packed, which meant that any of the (unavoidable) technical issues that could occur would throw the plan, and meant less time for questions and discussion. But these things aside, it was just wonderful to go there and experience this huge get-together of archeologists!

My own presentation was in the very last panel time slot of the conference, so everyone was already a bit tired (myself included). Nevertheless I think nobody fell asleep on me.

A friend made this photo of me during the presentation. As usual, I had a lot of fun doing the "dance" (I tend to hop around when presenting), and it was so nice to show the results of our membrane thread process reconstruction to other interested people! 

I'm off to the EAA conference in Belfast! Which means that a) today has been a whirlwind of getting things sorted out so everything is ready for me to leave, and b) I will be off the blog for a while.

However, to keep you amused while I am gone, you can check out the brand-new publication now available as pdf about "Fashioning the Viking Age". That was a research project that included reconstructions of Viking Age textile tools and Viking Age garments - and the first two volumes are finished and downloadable for free on the project's web pages. 

And with this, I'm off to conferencey adventures, followed by some family stuff - so I will be back on the blog on September 12.

We've recently seen the  "Ball im Savoy", which is something like a lightweight opera version (Operette) that was written in the 1930s. The version that we enjoyed (vastly!) was gently modernised and shortened, according to the information given by the theatre, and it was fantastic. (The Cologne ensemble did a guest staging at the Luisenburg Wunsiedel, which is a very lovely open-air stage.)

The reason for the cuts, by the way, was given too - some of the text and songs were rather "-istic" in some way. Racist, mysogynist, etcetera, so not really what one would want to have on a stage today, at least not in the theatre equivalent of a feelgood movie.

Afterwards, we looked up some more of it on Youtube... and stumbled across one of the songs that did not make the cut into the version that we saw. The English translation of the title is "when we Turcs kiss".

We listened to this, and we were really confused by the singer's accent. It sounds like the aim is to sound "foreign", but to our ears, it was all the wrong foreign, because he states that he's from Turkey. That's not a Turkish accent!

And that is when we realised... today's German people are all very, very familiar with Turkish accents, because of the influx of Turkish people in the 1950s and 1960s. But this was written and performed in 1932, when things were still quite different. Which explains why the accent is "generic foreign" and not "generic mock-Turkish" as it would be when a modern German imitated the typical accent...

Funny, and slightly weird, isn't it? And also an amazing example about how little things in art change, and how our perceptions and receptions change.

Belfast and the EAA are drawing nearer and nearer - so I'm packing and preparing. There was a bit more spinning of membrane thread today, to have a little more of a sample to show around at the conference, and some more packing and writing of lists and so on. 

 I've also done a little more other spinning - cotton this time, trying to reproduce a cotton yarn used in some non-European fabrics. It was very nice to return to cotton spinning (which I have not done very often), and a bit of a challenge to hit the right thickness (hint: it was not very thick) with the high twist required. It definitely is a rather slow process. Now the thread will go to my colleague, who will take a look at it and see if that would match her requirements, and then we'll see.

There was also some Textile Forum planning stuff (the preliminary programme has been updated, and you can find it here). I'm already very excited about all the workshops, we will be exploring so many aspects of the colour red.

And now it's time to wrap up the day, get some more packing done, and update the lists of things that have to be done before I leave for Northern Ireland. The presentation is already finished and only needs another practise run or two, the materials to show are prepared, and hopefully there will soon be a login for the conference app so that planning which session to attend where will be a little easier... because that, of course, is a challenge with about 40 sessions running in parallel, and a lot of interesting topics to choose from!

I stumbled across a post about knitting cables (1/1 cables, to be exact) in different ways (which was, however, not very substantial), and that brought to mind again the many very detailed and very cool posts on the Techknitter's blog, and on a whim I looked it up again. I had noticed a long while ago that the blog seemed to be on hiatus. 

As many blogs who go off for a while do that to never return, that was sort of what I had expected. So I was very pleasantly surprised that the Technknitter is back! (I also discovered the reason for the hiatus.)

So if you're looking for knitting tricks such as how to make jogless stripes, or how to fix curling scarves, or how to handle several colours at once - go check out the blog. It is a fantastic resource, with really neat solutions for a lot of knitting problems, very well explained and nicely illustrated. Even if it's something I'm pretty sure I will not use in my knitting, I still enjoyed reading the posts about it!

It is abysmally hot and humid here - it feels like a sauna, really. In spite of the heat and humidity, there is some cycling to be done for errands that have to be run, and there's also some apples waiting to be cooked into apple sauce and then canned. So... plenty of hot work ahead! I am already looking forward to my trip to the conference in Belfast, where it will probably be much cooler, due to the sea being close by.

The trick to cycling in this weather is, by the way, to go just fast enough so the airstream is cooling you down, but not so fast that the heat generated by the effort is more than the airstream can cool away. Which is especially hard to impossible if going uphill. Also: Traffic lights, the bane of airstream.

(Fun fact: Even paddling, which is a really slow way of getting forward, will generate some airstream that is actually noticeably cooling. We were joking once, when taking a break on a river, that we should get back to paddling again because of the nice, cool "Fahrtwind"... and then we started paddling and realised that there actually was enough of it to make things much more comfortable.) 

Ötzi has been the centerpoint of a lot of research over the years, and has led to quite a few revisions of our image of his time. Now, recent research on his genome has also revealed that he probably was bald... and had dark skin. Well, there you go - he's always good for a little surprise!

You can read the full article about the genome analysis here.