Here I am, slowly unpacking all the lovely stuff brought home from NESAT. Extra slowly, as most of my worktime yesterday and today is eaten up by doing the tax paperwork. Which is due at the end of this month - anyone hear that "whoosh" sound the approaching deadline makes? (I had wanted to do the tax stuff before NESAT, but with all the other things happening, that had not worked out, so I had planned on spending the start of this work week on it. Progress is according to plan, more or less, so all things are good.)

Anyway, let's return to unpacking, and I will give you a glimpse of the things I brought home from the conference. First of all, stuff from the conference bag - there was the book of abstracts, and the usual info material (a map and information about the city, and about Prague as preparation for our excursion), plus a nice little pen, a pocket programme (glorious idea!) and, woven in the university:


a cloth bookmark with the NESAT emblem, hanging out on the abstract booklet here.

With a bookmark, it is obvious that at least one book has to be bought, right? I made it two:


The one on the left is in Czech, but with a good English summary, and it has lots and lots of photographs of the finds from Prague... which include garment details (buttonholes, for instance). The second one, Chrystel's PhD thesis, contains a lot of meticulous research about early medieval finds from the Netherlands, and those include several hats and headdresses, which makes me really happy, and I'm looking forward to having a nice cup of tea and a read of this thesis.

Now... buying books at a conference is rather normal. It's also not entirely unexpected to find something nice in the conference bag, in addition to the usual things. What came as an utter surprise to me and all the other speakers, though: We, as well as those chairing one of the sessions (which means you are the one introducing the speakers and making sure they finish on time, plus, if necessary, keeping the discussion from getting too short, too long, or too hot), all got a present.

One woven in the university. After a find from the second half of the twelfth century... a piece of samite with gold thread pattern. (Made, in this case, from artificial gold thread and viscose, and not one hundred percent the size of the original, but very close.)

So I now have this:


and I am endlessly delighted with it! It will get a nice spot on one of the walls here, looking utterly beautiful!

I'm back home from NESAT - and it was utterly, utterly glorious.

This was my fourth NESAT conference. The first three had all been splendid, breathless experiences full of interesting papers and posters and with many, many lovely people and brilliant weather and good food and nice surprises, and I was hoping for something in that range - and I'm happy to tell you that NESAT XIII was no exception at all to what seems to be the rule for this conference. Time just flew past, with a (modern) loom presentation and posters and reconstructions to look at in the breaks. There was traditional Czech food, there was coffee galore, there were intense discussions about textiles and many, many other exciting news of what people had done or were planning to do. One of these things that made me totally geek out? The CTR in Copenhagen is working with Motion Capture technology to record and analyse textile techniques, and they are planning to link this up with neurological scans, to see which brain areas are firing when you are, for instance, spinning on a hand spindle. Isn't that awesome?

To give you an inkling of how packed that programme was - we had 48 papers over the course of three days, there was a festive lecture, there was poster presentation time, there was a festive evening. On the fourth day, we had an excursion where we got to visit three exhibitions (one specially made for us in the textiles depot, one in the Hrad, and one in a beautiful museum in the city).

I managed to only buy two books - one about the Early Medieval finds from the Netherlands, and one about Czech finds. I also brought home a bit of Czech chocolate - and almost a sunburn from the one and three quarters day in Prague that I spent with four other conference participants, having an inordinate amount of fun (and coffee). We also managed to walk more than 21 km on the excursion day altogether, which means we slept really, really well that night!

Now, my coffee, water, and exhaustion levels are all slowly settling back towards a normal range. The place for the next NESAT, in three years' time, has also been settled: it will be in Finland... so I now have three years to save up and two-or-so years to come up with something exciting to offer for a paper. Because, you know... after NESAT is before NESAT!

My bags are packed, tickets are bought and printed out and sit where I will not accidentally leave them, I have pens and paper and something to read and something to knit, and - the most important thing - my paper is done and polished and hopefully I will manage not to talk about too many extra things on the spur of the moment and in all the excitement and run over time. (It's amazing, by the way, how much prep time a 20 minute presentation can take. I think it's about the same amount of time as a one hour presentation, as you need to compress so much into so small a timeframe that every slide needs to be polished and scrutinised and polished again. And then sometimes cut after all...)

On Monday, it's off to NESAT, and I can't even begin to describe how excited I am. It's so nice to get together with so many other textile archaeologists, meeting again and chatting and catching up and learning oh so many new things. With one of these glorious conferences only every three years, there's also quite a lot to catch up on, and it's always a rather long wait for the next one.

So I'll be spending the next week in nerd heaven, and for me, the conference will even start earlier, as I'll be travelling together with three more colleagues going there. Hooray!

For you, though, this means no blog posts during next week - I'll be back blogging the Monday after, though. See you then!

It's neither medieval, nor the classical meaning of "straw to gold", but it's still utterly fascinating and really, really interesting: There's an exhibition called "Stroh zu Gold" in Schloß Moritzburg, showing more than 200 examples of the art of straw plaiting and other straw craft, among them a straw wallpaper from the 18th century.

Plaiting with grass (or similar things) is one of the earliest textile techniques that we can trace, and probably how all this stuff with fuzzy things started out in the first place. So this is something I find incredibly cool - and the good news is that the special exhibition will run until 31.10. this year, and it is open daily.

You can find out more about it (and see some pictures) here. (The page is only available in German.)

There's a German proverb saying "Alles neu macht der Mai" (May makes everything new), and it looks like that is the case at least in some parts - because today I stumbled across the new, just-gone-online-a-few-days-ago version of the beloved image database IMAREAL.

Go check it out. It's new, it's shiny, it has more features and the usual breathtaking amount of pictures!

 

There are a few workshop opportunities coming up in autumn - one of them is the spinning workshop that I'll be giving in Bielefeld at the Ravelry meeting. Courses are online now, and can be booked via the website bielefeldspinnt.de.

There's another workshop event, though, that I am very excited about - a while ago, I was contacted regarding a meet-up with workshop opportunities, and after a bit of calendar wrangling, Anja and I were able to fix a date, she managed to find a beautiful spot to run the event (it's in a youth hostel in a castle, how fitting), and now we're happy to announce that there will be a weekend of workshops on October 20 - 22:


I'm especially excited about the tablet weaving workshop, which is a concept I've been brooding about for quite a while.

If you're interested, all booking is handled by Anja, who is organising the whole thing (and I'm very grateful she does this, it is lovely to not be on that end for a change). If you have questions regarding the workshops, you can either ask Anja or me!

I'm still not finished with my homework from the fair, I have to cut down on the time I need for my NESAT presentation (aaaargh it is way, way too long still, there are about 7 minutes to cut from it), and there are still a few website issues to solve... though I hope I have most of them done now.

The shop should be running smoothly again now, and I have finally changed the slightly weird ordering for the linen bands (in units of 10 cm) to "normal" ordering per metre, with the possibility to enter decimal numbers, so you can now get, for instance, 1.6 metres. (As always, if you have feedback, or find something that does not work as expected, please do let me know. I'm really thankful for that - I try to test things, but it is so easy not to catch glitches, especially with all these different browsers and screen formats these days.)

I've also finally added an option on how customers would like to be addressed - formally or informally. This is more of an issue in German language, where there's the informal "Du" with first name and the formal "Sie" with last name. In Living History circles, it's rather usual to use the informal address, but not everybody ordering in my shop is a LH person, and you can annoy people either way when addressing them in the wrong way (or the unexpected way). It's easy for me when someone goes "Hallo Frau Kania" in their mail, or "Hallo Katrin" - then I'll just pick the same style. Many enquiries, however, have no such hint, and I know even less which way to pick when I have a question regarding an order.

So if you have a customer account, you can now pick whether you want formal or informal address, and I finally have a way to tell what people expect from me. Yay! (Provided it gets filled out - because it's non-obligatory so as not to annoy people.)

Now there's just a few smaller issues to solve, like the backup only working under php 5.x instead of the 7.x which I'd prefer to switch to. Probably due to some other thing throwing stuff into the gears, though I have not found the culprit yet.

I also had an issue with this blog today - I suddenly lacked all admin rights, which was rather annoying. (Imagine entering your blog space and finding you have no access to anything...) Fortunately (haha) I already had this issue once before, so I sort of knew what to do, and a quick google and a bit of mucking around in the phpMyAdmin database later, here I am, blogging happily at last, if a little later than intended...

And now for some dinner. And then for some deep thinking on how to slim down my presentation. Twenty minutes, folks. Twenty minutes is just sooooo short...