The date for the 7th Experimental Archaeology Conference has now been set - it will take place on Friday 11th-Saturday 12th January 2013.
The 7th Conference will be hosted jointly by Cardiff University and St Fagans National History Museum, Wales. This year’s conference is also supported by EXARC.
The first day of this conference will be held at Cardiff University and will focus on papers and discussion. The second day will be hosted by St Fagans, and will offer more papers as well as the chance to explore one of Britain’s oldest open-air museums.


This sounds lovely - Cardiff! St Fagan's! (Cardiff, especially - I've been hooked to Dr Who for quite some time now, and Torchwood. Though the conference also sounds really nice.)


The call for papers will probably come out in July, and the conference especially welcomes papers regarding the connection between experiential and experimental archaeology. Hmmm... now I should maybe do some scheming...

At the Uni of Exeter, a project to build a Bronze Age boat is under way - and they now have a time-lapse video of the first four weeks:



They're planning to publish another video in a few weeks' time - so everybody can sort of keep up with the process.

We're back from the weekend, and we now know that our cat is of the "happy you are back" sort, not of the "you left me so I will ignore you for at least a week as retaliation" sort.

For ten years now, I have gone off to do some book-binding over the Ascension day weekend, and it's usually also a little work-related. This time, I managed to bind three slim copies of book parts for my own library. The biggest bit of work-related binding, though, was something else.

Since I started to carry slate embroidery frames this spring, I have a demonstration frame that is all set up with a small bit of embroidery started on it. This, naturally, means that I am stuffing it into the car together with all the rest of my gear and wares - but a large frame with a fully installed embroidery on it is not something you can just toss anywhere; it sort of needs some kind of protection. So I made a box for my demo frame. It took several sheets of paper and two sheets of cardboard and all the (large) rest piece of extra-sturdy plastified fabric that I had, and a whooping amount of time, but it turned out really nice and is now drying on the living room floor... and I won't have to fear for the embroidery's safety again in the future.

It's a long weekend - and I will enjoy it with friends, doing fun stuff.

I hope you have a nice weekend, too - regular blogging resumes on Monday!

Boydell & Brewer is having a promotion and special offer - there's a discount for the Medieval Clothing and Textiles series (including pre-orders of the next volume).

And even more spectacular: They offer free shipping for online orders at the moment, globally (which is really nice for those of us not from the UK) and there's a special list for reenactors with 25% off (remember to enter the promo code when ordering online during the checkout - code's to be found at the very end of the .pdf).

Now please excuse me while I look at those books...

This is the 700th post in my blog!

I started the blog in December 2008 - now I have a hard time to believe that I actually kept doing this, Monday to Friday, for more than three years. (And I'm even more surprised that I managed to remember that today would be post 700 - and not forget all about it, as I tend to do on blogiversaries.)

This means I've blogged for, realistically counted, about 3.5 years now (even though the calendar says it's the fifth year that the blog is running) - since I started in December and it's May now. This means about 200 posts per year, easily explained by the amount of weekends, conferences and other away-times like long weekends.
The blog has 151 followers (thanks, guys!) and Feed Stats say it's 306 subscribers on average who get it per RSS feed (thanks, folks!). And in the year 2011, the blog saw more than 36 000 page loads!

I'm still enjoying my blogging life very much, and I'm happy to see that so many people like my blog. Thank you all for reading!

The cat is getting more accustomed to her new life here - slowly getting used to the new feeding times (as we are), and occasionally doing something to figure out if it's ok or forbidden. She's also starting to play more, and without looking totally uninvolved when she thinks someone has seen her pawing against a ball. Now she's chasing them through the whole living room sometimes, and she's obviously enjoying it. Paper balls, by the way, seem to be the favourite toy for the moment - smallish, lightweight, they scoot over the laminated floors very nicely, and - bonus for the humans - they are really, really easy to replace with the reams of packing paper that I have here for the mail order stuff.

Meanwhile, my tax works preparation is almost finished, and it looks like I'll be able to start filling out the forms via the programme soon. Yay!