You are not getting a proper blog post today - it's a holiday hereabouts.

I have, however, a link for you - which might be helpful, or interesting, or both in case you know somebody who is suffering from depression. It's hard to explain what depression is like to someone who never experienced it, and Hyperbole and a Half does it brilliantly here.

After several days of greyish weather, with plenty of rain too, yesterday was actually nice and sunny (at least for most of the day) - so I set out to get some wool washed. The dirty fibre in question? Walliser Schwarznase - a beautiful, relatively long-staple wool, white and with a pleasing curliness at the tips. The fibre is smooth and silky and yields a strong, shiny thread. In short: lovely stuff.

I had two fleeces, and there are actually shearers who still know what to do for shearing a fleece for the wool. Both fleeces were still hanging together so it was possible to roll them out, look them over, and sort the wool (which, in this case, was mostly removing the really dirty and the few quite felted bits) before washing.

I also used the occasion to fluff up and re-pack some of the lovely Rhönschaf-Wolle. Now I'm richer in clean fleece - and I will soon be able to offer the Walliser Schwarznase in my little shop as well. Yay!

Gender issues are a thing - not just a modern thing, but also a big topic in history and archaeology. Textiles often touch on the gender issue - was textile work just women's work*, as one famous book about archaeological textiles is titled? Or was it split between men and women? These questions, unfortunately, are very hard to answer - not least because the gender ideals of the 18th and 19th century still colour our modern perceptions, and our view of history.

With textile archaeology as a focus topic, the gender issue, for me, is coming to the surface quite often. So I was quite delighted about this essay - it's not about women and textiles, but women in war and fighting troupes. The quintessence? Women have always fought, but that might not be visible in documentation, and it's often just overlooked. I tend to think the same applies to men in textile...


* There are areas (and times) when men dominate textile trade - male weavers, male (professional) knitters, male dyers are all very well traceable. I am thinking more about the "typically female" textile activities like spinning, and the times before we have documentation about these crafts.

Just in case you would like to have even more archaeological on-line stuff to read: The archives of Fennoscandia from its first issue 1984 up to the 2011 issue are available online as .pdf.

Here's the link to the archive.

Enjoy!

It's finally Friday, and we're looking forward to a nice weekend (hopefully with okay weather too) for spending time with visiting friends and family. Bonus effect: The study is now much more orderly again. Added bonus effect: We will have yummy brownies. Next added bonus effect: We might be able to get some of the unknown plants in our garden identified by people who know them. (For the record, I have a very easy way to deal with unknown plants: I leave them in until they bloom, and then I decide whether I like them or not. I like them - they stay. I don't like them - they get ripped out, and off to the compost they go.)

And while I'm wondering over unknown plants here, I have a fitting link: A blog with medieval riddles, each one of them in the original Old English/Anglo-Saxon, then translated into modern English, and then the solution. There's also notes to each of the riddles. The blog is fittingly called The Riddle Ages.

I have never been good at solving riddles like these (probably partly because of little practice, riddles are just not so much en vogue hereabouts anymore), but for those of you who want to try their brains, beware of spoilers - the solution is directly below the last line of the translated riddle, and the comments or notes that are posted as blog entries after the riddles (so they turn up before on the blog) also mention the solution or possible solutions.

Somehow, the last few days, my schedule has been all over the place, and I'm not even sure why. I know that I slept way longer than usual today, and I all blame it on my furry biological alarm clock (aka the cat) - instead of insisting to get her morning treats, food, and being let outside, this morning she cuddled up to me for another almost two hours of sleep. No wonder this morning is so short, and this blog so late...

But on to things that might actually interest you. The first registrations for the Forum are in, and it looks like we'll have an in-detail look at some of the decorations on the Lengberg finds as well.Yay for decorated medieval bras!

Speaking of underwear, you are probably familiar with the Dove advertisements and their "real beauty" campaign? Here's an article about "the Problem with Dove". TL;DR: Dove is a part of Unilever, a company that is not about accepting different forms of beauty, and seen together with other stuff Unilever promotes, the campaign seems quite... weird.

Just in case it's raining where you are, too, maybe you are feeling like reading a nice poem from the 13th century... about Bèrenger of the Long Arse.

If you have not read any fabliaux before, let me recommend them to you - they are a very nice, and very funny genre. At least I think so... they are also, quite frequently, garnished with a little or a lot of sexual innuendos. Sometimes not so covert innuendos.