So, as announced, more sorting out of links.

e-codices is aiming to make all the medieval manuscripts in Switzerland available as digitised images - more than 2000 documents are already online.

An annotated list of manuscripts with images regarding clothing can be found on the Wienische Handwerksliute site. Annotations and list are in German.

Die Hausbücher der Nürnberger Zwölfbrüderstiftung are also available online, with possibilities of searching for items or jobs. There is even an English search helper.

The National Library of the Netherlands has an Illuminated Manuscripts database, in English and searchable.

The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge has an online Explorer where you can search the collections. Their online exhibitions are also worth a look!

Individual manuscripts are also available in the Cambridge University Library, among them a copy of the Gutenberg Bible, a 13th century Life of Edward the Confessor and a tenth-century Gospel book.

More individual manuscripts are in the Digital Collection of the Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart.

It's time to throw some unsorted links at you again. Most of the stuff is in German - sorry for those of you who don't read it, but they are just too interesting to pass them up.

Anke Domaske is making fibres from milk that is leftover and spoiled - a brilliant example of upcycling, to put it that way. The fibres are versatile, and are getting used in a variety of ways already. (Article in German.)

Archäologentage 2018 are taking place April 12-15, and the topic is Migration. More information can be found here (info material in German and French).

Christa Schwab has tried to find out a good mixture for making a vegetarian sausage after a medieval recipe. You can read more about what she did, and how it worked, over at her blog (in German, but with pictures).

More food-related stuff - remains of Iron-Age feasting, or at least eating, have been found at the Cairns broch, Orkney, Scotland.

Not recent, but still interesting: an article about traditional Icelandic embroidery, via Medievalists.net.

It looks like there might be a cure for the Varroa mite problem that is threatening the European Honey Bees - I do hope that this will be a full success. (Article is in German.)

Sometimes, your colleagues have surprising hobbies - one of my archaeology colleagues, for instance, writes music and sings. In this case, an eulogy on a house from 1534 that was recently demolished. It's in English, too.

Also in English: Some new research on one of the tablet-woven bands from Hallstatt (Halltex 152) by Maikki Karisto, together with Mervi Pasanen and Karina Grömer. Mervi's blogpost includes the new pattern draft.

Textilis has a study of knitting sheaths from North Yorkshire.

And that's it for today - finally a few less tabs open in the brower!

Looking for more yarnwinder pictures didn't only end in my having way, way too many tabs in the browser open (I will deal with that, hopefully, tomorrow), it also meant I had a look at my bookmark list for picture databases. Uuuuuh.

The Internet has done a wonderful job at making images from manuscripts available. It hasn't done such a good job in making them easy to find, though, and they are not always very well tagged either.

So there's a huge number of sites that make images available. And me in my messy way? I have bookmarked quite a few of them (all those I stumbled over through the years, and thought might be useful), but they are not always very well tagged either, and some of them are obsolete, and some disappeared, and some moved, and some are in the list several times.

It would be a good idea, or so I thought, to go through them and actually get them into shipshape. Right? Well. At least I got started on that this morning, and you're going to profit from my sorting efforts, in a (probably lengthy) sidetrack to the Niddy-Noddy Thing. So here you go, the first few links, sorted out and commented upon.

An overview of a number of medieval bestiaries, together with introductory texts, can be found at The Medieval Bestiary. Even better: You get a list of beasts and information about them, their allegories, sources for the things found in the medieval bestiaries, and a gallery with images of these individual beasties, so if you are looking for information about how a specific animal was seen and portrayed in medieval times, this place is a perfect start for your search.
Sadly, both the site and the blog linked to it have last been updated in 2011. It's still a very good resource to have, though.

The Morgan Library & Museum offer three treasure troves: A collection of Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, the fully searchable CORSAIR Collection catalogue, and digital facsimiles of manuscripts. They can all be accessed via this site, together with the drawings online and music manuscript catalogue.

Searchable topics of the illustrations of the Maciejowski Bible can be found both on this website and this one. The full digitised bible is available online as well, at the Morgan Library website, with a good bit of additional information about the manuscript.

You can search the catalogue of Western manuscripts from the Bodleian Libraries plus some Oxford colleges at this site here. The site seems not to be geared towards image search, though. For that, other sites exist - here you can browse Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts from the Bodleian.

And that's the first batch done. To my dismay, there's an awfully large stack of links left to go through... so you can expect some more to come.

 

The cat, bless her little furry behind, has the luxury of hanging out on the couch, or on her cat beds, and sleeping as much as she likes... which she has liked to do a lot these past days, when it was rather cold here. Again. Seems like winter is making a last-ditch, all-out effort to do things properly, including snow and so on.

Well, spring can't be long now... though it's still not clear whether I will get on top of things well enough to avoid a mad rush before the first fair of the year, which is on April 7 and 8. Not very long to go, is it?

Sometimes, things tend to cascade into other tings to do. Today is a prime example of that happening. Things I did today?

Restocking my spinning kits was one of the tasks due. The wool bits were already stacked on the table (I did that when taking stock of my fibre supply a few days ago), so all that remained was... well. Printing out instructions, for one, which cascaded into going over the text and tweaking it a bit, and then having to tweak some more, and then the actual printing, which half-way done required me to change toner cartridge. Thank godness we had one on hand, ordered ahead of time, or I'd have gotten stopped dead right then and there. Then it was getting the proper weight-range whorls out of the unsorted supply, which meant getting out the scales, weighing them, and putting them onto spindle sticks. I also found that I'd run out of the sealable bags I use upstairs, so that meant a trip into the basement for some more, and I also brought back some more boxes which then had to get stamped with my address to make them ready for use.

Then it's the assembly line: Fold instructions (2 sheets of paper each), stick them into a bag, add three samples of wool, add a spindle, add a business card, press out air, seal the bag. Repeat until you run out of one of the ingredients, and then either get more of that one, or put the rest away and stop altogether.

Restocking something also means adjusting numbers in the shop system, which means I usually take a look at other stuff in there and check if everything is still correct... and that usually leads to litle tweaks and checks here and there.

Which, as we all know, tends to eat up time... so here I am, with still plenty of things on the to-do list for today, and the afternoon almost gone. But at least things are printed, new tweaks are made, some other things have made it onto the ever-growing to-do list, and I'm a little closer to being ready for the start of wool fair season.

There's still so much niddy-noddy stuff right in front of my nose, tantalizing, but, alas, other things have to happen before this. Soon, though. Soon.

One of the leads to more depictions of yarnwinders (from two people, independently, the Internet is a small place after all) was to the North Porch portal of Chartres cathedral. There are, among many other things, scenes from the active life as opposed to the contemplative life, and the active life shows women at textile work.

I had a little rootle around to find out a tiny bit more about the portal, and the sculptures, including their date, and quickly found that Chartres has a lot of info online. For instance, there's a very cool overview about the programme on the portals by Alison Stones, done in collaboration with the Uni of Pittsburgh, and which you can find here. The Uni of Pittsburgh also has a searchable database with images from Chartres, accessible here.

So if you feel like looking at some sculptures and some stained glass - enjoy!

As usually when I've been away for a few days, there is plenty of things stacking up that need to be de-stacked and processed and done and so on. So I'm trying to get back on track, whittling the mails down to the usual stack sitting in the inbox (where everything sits that still needs some action), plus all the usual suspects of ton the to-do list.

Also there's a private lesson to be given this afternoon, which I'm looking forward to - but which I also have to prepare. So instead of something dep and interesting and whatnot, you are getting a picture of the Bernuthsfeld man's reconstruction legwrap, during the process of giving it the holes and patch that it has on the original:



It's actually not that easy to fake usewear traces. Holes are rather easy, but as soon as you are trying to have different usewear patterns, it really does get more complicated.