My browser has been acting up for a few hours - which meant no procrastinating by surfing the web.

It also meant that, while I took advantage of this no-procrastinating thing and did all the stuff without browsering on my list, all the work-related things actually done through browsering got stuck in the queue.

Now that everything is working smoothly again (including me!), here are a few links you will hopefully enjoy.

21 more or less amusing things from academic publishing.

Boardgames in the V&A Images collection.

Instead of fat, sugar is becoming the new dietary arch-villain - there's a long article in the Guardian about sugar and the researchers Robert Lustig and John Yudkin. It's not only interesting if you are into nutrition, but also gives a nice (or, rather, not-so-nice) insight into what can happen if one scientist has a hypothesis that is contradicting a lot of other folks' beliefs.

The next few events are drawing nearer - the European Textile Forum and the Nobilitas-Akademie, so I'm rather busy preparing for these. While the cat, helpful as ever, is sleeping in her cat bed beside my desk, making small adorable sleepy cat noises... that are more an incentive to cuddle her or curl up for a nap than to be as busy as I should be. Oh well.

Since I'm working on the presentation for the Akademie right now, I'm looking at embroidery-related stuff... and I have stumbled across a very early Italian pattern book that is freely available on the net: Alessandro Paganino's book "Il Burato". The book was published in 1518 and contains lots of patterns, plus the famous picture on how to transfer patterns to the fabric.

While you're at the website of the Textile Research Centre in Leiden, to get that pdf, do have a bit more of a look around - there is a lot of content, embroidery- and other textile craft-related, that is really worth exploring!

 

Here you go, actual archaeology-related content:

The next Experimental Archaeology Conference (the tenth!) will take place in Leiden, Netherlands, Thursday, 20 April, 2017 to Saturday, 22 April, 2017. The Call for Papers is currently up, so if you'd like to submit something or just want more information, you can go here.

This is not your cup of tea? Or your loaf of cheese? Well, maybe this is: A bronze age ceramic pot found in Denmark contains residue of animal fat that might be from an attempt to make cheese.

Still not interesting? Maybe I can get you with this, then - Means of Exchange: Dealing with Silver in the Viking Age is the current free e-book of the month from Aarhus University.

I've finished my test run with the e-spinner, and the result is 745 m of two-ply yarn.

The things I learned... they are many.

I am a sucker for slow colour gradients in yarns. Always have been - so I had a lot of fun spinning, and I was delighted with the result:


What I'm not as fond of, though, is when the slow colour gradient doesn't match up properly. Which was, unfortunately, the case from about the middle of the two batches. Where there should have been a lot of bright, clear yellow, there was a lot of overlap between yellow and orange instead, and the other colours followed suit.


I'm especially not fond of the mix of very light and rather dark, like the mix of purple and salmon on the very right end of the bobbin. But there was nothing to do but persevere, and finish the plying.

I'm not the queen of plying, by the way. I can spin alright, but I'm not plying often enough to have a lot of practice, so there are more places than I like that are badly plied.

The bobbin was finished in spite of my unhappiness with the colour match:


and at least at the end, the colours did match up better again. I guess I'll find out how it looks when I figure out what to do with 745 m of fine two-ply yarn. Knitting, probably. (Suggestions for patterns are welcome.)

Next step was measuring out the length - that means skeining. Next thing I learned was a two-fer: The plying differences did not even out even though I had a long stretch of the yarn between bobbin and skeiner; and my skeiner is not up to the strain a large amount of wool places on its arms... so I definitely need a new one now, and have to repair the old one. Good thing my length measurement is done via a separate tool and not through counting turns on the skeiner!

Once the measuring was done, I soaked the skein in water, and now it hangs for drying. There are, as mentioned, ample spots where the plying work is not perfect. There are also quite a few places where I could have done a better job spinning. But since the aim of the whole project was to gain experience with the new tool and to get a speed benchmark, that I can live with... especially as I found out that I can spin rather quickly. So now I can calculate for spinning medieval-style yarns on the e-spinner for reconstruction projects. Plus I have some nice colourful yarn to play with. Hooray!

Remember, back in January, when I wrote about my weight issues in a long, rambling post? When I started losing weight back then, I set a goal weight number as the finishing line.

It took a good while to reach that number. I was planning to be finished in summer, and though I broke through the border to normal weight according to BMI charts in mid July, the last few kilos to the goal weight I'd set took much, much longer than expected, due to a number of things (among them two weeks of vacation, where I did not eat at a deficit). Basically, I've been more or less finished, as in "weight and body fat percentage are in a healthy area now", for... a good two months? So I've started to gradually eat more again, to prepare for maintenance mode and figure out how much I actually need now to stay where I am... still very slowly going down, waiting for the magical number to appear.

This morning, I have seen that number. I am now officially done with the weight loss, and entering maintenance mode, so to say. This little fact has not made it to my brain just yet - I've been juuust slightly above the goal number for four weeks now (water retention is nasty!), and it still has to sink in that it is now there.

And now, I guess, it is time for the obligatory before-and-after-pics. So on the left, you see how I looked last winter, before I got going. On the right, you see how I look now, and what I did on Tuesday evening - a friend has infected us with the Boulder Virus a while ago, and we're now going up the walls about once a week. (Yes, I know, they are not proper before-and-after pics, where you have the same posture and the same clothes and stuff. But I guess you will get the gist.)


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
So. I did it. It was really simple: count all calories (including every little bit of food and every drink), eat less than you burn, get enough protein, do a bit of sports to keep as much of the muscle mass as possible, and that's it.  Simple doesn't mean easy, though, and it was hard sometimes - but it was worth every little bit of effort! Life is much, much better now that I have lost the excess weight. Also... I have a wardrobe full of new clothes (the old ones didn't fit anymore, apart from a few very old ones that were always tight before).  I have a new hobby (climbing or bouldering are just not as much fun with too much weight to hoist up)... and I even made a new friend in connection with the book that helped me so much - Fettlogik überwinden.

And I'm very, very happy about all this!

 

Archaeologists are the only group of scientists who actually destroy their sources when they do research. Really, we do - because you can only dig a site once, and then... it's gone. That is the main reason why we try to leave things in the ground unless a dig becomes really necessary - if it has kept well in its place for a couple of hundred years, it will keep for another fifty or so, and with all the progress in imaging technology, conservation technology and other technology, we'll be able to get much more information out of the site in a few more years than right now.

The fact remains, though, that archaeologists are a destructive bunch of folks. Sometimes even if we cannot dig. Case in point? See the blog "A Life in Fragments", where Matt writes about his studies on the destruction of Bronze Age metalwork.

Less destructive: The Winter Issue of Fornvännen is out (thank you Aardvarchaeology for listing the contents up so nicely!) and it's online, for free. Articles are partly in Swedish and partly in English.

Things I've been up to:

Working on the European Textile Forum programme. (Should be a step further soon, and I'm really looking forward to getting the updated programme online.)

Doing my homework from the last fair - which includes things like re-organising stuff in the transport boxes, correcting the numbers in my inventory list, and similar (usually not very exciting, but necessary) shenanigans.

Wrestling with The Gnome. Well, wrestling is too hard a word - it's been going rather smoothly. I used the excuse that I need to get to know my new tool to finally start spinning rainbow-coloured wool I bought ages ago:


That is half the wool; the top was symmetrically dyed, so I unraveled it, split it in the middle, and now I'm spinning the two bits individually to hopefully get a wonderful rainbow-coloured two-ply in the end, with long colour runs. I have no idea yet what I will make with it, though. It will be about 150 g of yarn when all is done, so it should be enough for a good-sized shawl - but whether I really need another shawl is another question.

Anyway, it spins up nicely:


and quickly:


I can see a bit more spinning in my future, though - that is about one quarter of the first braid done. Lots more to go!