I am back home again, and it is so nice. While I love travelling, after a while, I miss all kinds of things - our friends, having not to live out of a bag all the time, knowing just where everything is, my own bed...probably a sign that I am becoming old.

I had, however, a wonderful time both in Tannenberg (in spite of one very rainy day) and in Aarhus, where I got to meet friends again, give a lecture about textiles in archaeology to a group of very interested students, and spent some quality relaxation time in open-air museums with beautiful gardens and lovingly restored rooms.

Now the summer season is officially over, and I can start settling down to all the winter work and winter projects. But first of all? I think I need a cup of coffee and a few minutes to make some room on my desk. Somebody put museum leaflets from Denmark all over it...

It's start of October, and as usual I am on the last market/event of the season, in Tannenberg. I'll be taking my spinning project and of course the market stall will be open.
Otherwise, I am looking forward to some quiet time with friends that I don't see too often during the year, and hopefully some relaxed hanging out in the autumn sun, as the last weeks were quite exciting but also... quite exhausting.

After Tannenberg, I'm on my way to give a lecture at Aarhus University, so there's some more traveling for me to do. The blog will thus resume its regular function on Monday, October 14.

Until then, have a nice time and enjoy the (hopefully golden) autumn!

As my last post probably showed you, I am one of the folks who consider gender issues and think about gender.

If you are getting involved into textile stuff, it's probably unavoidable. There's so much gender preconception still attached to handling fibre, cloth, and textile tools that most of those who do it are... female. And that stretches out into modern jobs regarding textile, both new and old. Most textile conservators? Women. Most ancient textile researchers? Women. Most modern textile crafters? Women.

We still live in a gender-biased world. I am one of the lucky ones who had a course of study where women were neither the majority nor the minority. Even better, on the digs where I were, it was accepted that while the women on the dig might not fill the wheelbarrow completely full, they and their work was just as good and just the same as the menfolk's. You just walk a few more times with the wheelbarrow, and that's it. (And a lot of the menfolk did not want their wheelbarrow filled to the brim. Those things are really hard to push when you fill them up as much as can be!)

I have, however, had my fair share of gender-bias in other circumstances. In bicycle stores, for instance, when the guy doubted what I was saying, or did not want to listen. When selling my old car. The usual, you know?

Now, gender differences are there, and I am not going to deny that. However, they are more fluid than often assumed, and they can change with our culture. (Here's a recent article about that.) The little differences between people - whether they come from their DNA, their upbringing, their culture, personal preferences, talents, or gender - make life the colourful and interesting thing it is. However, when one of those things means that your work will be neglected or belittled, it quickly becomes bad. When it means that you are having it that little bit harder in your life because of something you had no influence over, that is bad. When it means that it may not even be possible to change something by complaining about something bad that happened to you, that is really bad.

And sometimes, sexism hides. Benevolent sexism is what this article calls it - I'd have called it a backhanded compliment, but the effect is the same: It makes you feel good while secretly lowering your self-esteem. Bad. Really bad.

So... I guess if I had a wish in regard to that topic, I'd wish for this: Next time, if you are taken back about the gender, race, ethnicity or whatnot of someone because you did not expect that - don't blurt it out. Think about it. About your preconceptions, your expectations. And then say something that is a real compliment, not a backhanded one. Because it helps nobody to dampen someone's potential by an -ism, any -ism.

Thanks.

I am currently preparing that one-hour lecture about archaeological textiles... and one of the things I want to mention is, of course, textiles and gender.
For that, I was planning to include a few pictures of men spinning - and I also knew where to get them from... I thought. Unfortunately, the database of Corsair is being re-structured at the moment, and while it's possible to get at most pictures, you cannot get at all of them. There is a MS in the library that has two pictures of men spinning with spindle and distaff (MS 358, fols. 20v and 40r), and just that one seems to be inaccessible. Well, I'll make do with a few other pics.

However, the search of spinning pics made me wonder. Have you found any special spinning pictures as in "not the usual"? Such as top-whorl spindles, men spinning, uncommon ways to hold a spindle, and so on? (I'm not going for the "hit the guy with your distaff" variation here, though they can be really amusing.)

If so, please share them - I'd be very interested to see some more of the spectrum that is shown on medieval illustrations. You could post them on your blog and add a link to the comments, or if you prefer, send them to me by email (katrin at pallia dot net) and I will post them here. (Just for stating the obvious: Please include the usual data where the pic comes from, for copyright reasons as well as for letting others know where to find it.)

... that you would not expect. Well, me, at least.

Newest case in point? Old Bailey Proceedings.

Old Bailey is the central criminal court in Britain, and has been active since the 16th century. The court proceedings from 1674 onward are published, and they are also digitised and put online as a fully searchable repository.

You can go to the project website here, where you can learn more about what is digitised and how to use the search functions. And then, of course, browse through the records... Use for non-commercial purposes is free of charge, by the way, too.

This is one of the reasons why I love the internet. So much.

I have been invited to give a one-hour lecture about archaeological textiles (soon, oh-so-soon), and I have all the freedom you can imagine in choosing the focus topic. Which is nice... but also not helping, as there are so many things that are important, or can be seen as important, or are so closely interconnected to each other that one could talk hours about them.

So the question I've been asking myself is: What is most important? What is the thing to tell people (students with no prior knowledge about archaeological textiles) about the world of textile archaeology? What does one really need to know, even if one knows nothing else at all about medieval or historic textiles?

If you had to pick one single thing as the most important message about textiles and textile production in history and archaeology - what would that be?

Your input would be very, very welcome while I go on to wrack my brains. (With coffee support. I think I need coffee now.)

There are a few never-ending things in my life. The Neverending Spinning Experiment, for instance. Or the Neverending Quest for a Publisher for the English Version of my thesis (though there is some movement on that front recently, I have not given up!)

Now, I'm thinking of adding one more item to the list: the Neverending Skew Socks. Skew is a pattern that was published in Knitty back, oh, about four years ago.

It clicked with me straight away. Now, I'm not a big knitter, and I'm not fast, but I like socks. So I ventured out to knit me a pair of Skew socks... and found, quite quickly, that they do not fit my foot. At all. My instep is way too high for them as written.

However - I wanted those socks. Really badly. So I ripped back and fiddled and thought and measured and math-ed some and then some more, and at last I came up with a method that worked. I knit a pair of socks and placed the instructions to the side - for later use.

Time passed, our vacation came up, and I wanted to take some knitting - something small, half-mindless, and nice. I typed off the pattern and took a ball of sock yarn. I knit and knit... and there was that bit in the pattern where I wondered, huh, that looks a bit weird... but I knit on.

Back home, I found that I had skipped into the wrong line when typing the hand-written pattern into the computer. So I ripped back... both socks (two-at-a-time magic loop). Quite a bit. And I knit that part again... correctly, this time. And progressed into the part that I had had almost finished before.

Then I proceeded into the heel part. I knit a bit, and then some more, and then some more... but not much more before I realised that something was decidedly wrong. I was missing stitches. Not only 6 stitches (as before) - this time, it was twenty of them. Now, 20 stitches at sock gauge... that's a lot. A freaking lot.

I went to look for the missing stitches. Had I skipped a section when copying the pattern? Nope. After a goodly while of checking, I found it... I had written a sequence of pattern lines into my hand-written notes, marked them and smeared something like "This!" at their side... but not crossed out or corrected the old version. The old version that had, you guessed it, 20 fewer stitches. And when copying the notes, I had not looked beyond the valid-looking set of instructions...

So the next step in my Skew journey: Correct my digitised instructions, print them out again, and rip back both socks (again, gah!) to where the mini-gusset increase starts. Sigh. The Neverending Skew Socks. If only they weren't so funny...