It's hard to believe how time flies by - it's January 10 already, and tomorrow evening, Karina Grömer will be visiting Erlangen to give a presentation about the Hallstatt textile finds and their reconstruction.

In case you are interested, it is a public lecture starting 18.15 in the Kollegienhaus in Erlangen - more information about the lecture series, place and time can be found on the website of the institute.

I'm looking forward to this!

I'm back from spending time with family and friends - and now I will be dropping right into the task of catching up with all the mails I received and the usual beginning-of-a-new-quarter stuff.

I hope that your festive season was as wonderful as mine was, and that you are energetic and well starting into this new year - which will surely bring interesting things. And, of course, mistakes. (Nobody does the New Year Wish like Neil Gaiman.)

And I will be delighted to share the happenings of 2012 with you, over this blog!

2011 was a crazy year, with lots of good stuff happening, but also a few unexpected setbacks. It saw the start of my online shop, for one thing; way too little knitting; the death of several persons that I knew and the birth of several new persons in our circle of friends, plus a few illnesses of people near and dear that are mostly overcome, and we hope for the best regarding the rest. For me, it was a good year; not always easy, but what would life be without its challenges?

It was a good year, and so much of this is due to the people I know. Friends, family, dear colleagues - there is a bunch of human beings that make my life awesome by sharing a bit of their life with me. They make me feel as if I can never really fall, because there will always be someone who will catch me. And if I need a hand - I can be sure to find somebody who offers me help, and support, and pitches in with some additional ideas about how to solve my problem. They are people who will share their food with me, spend their time with me, give me a boost when it is needed and space for myself when that is necessary. I have friends that I can trust so much that it's no problem to show a weakness or to say that I'm down and depressed about something. And this is making me ridiculously happy, and wonderfully content, and makes me feel incredibly lucky. And if I had a wish free for the rest of the world, it would be that everybody could have wonderful persons in their life and really, deeply appreciate them.

And now I will have two weeks off, in which I will spend a lot of time with a lot of friends and family, and I am so much looking forward to this. I will thus not blog until January 10, when I will be back and hopefully totally re-energised by having had to eat way too much delicious food and having laughed enormously often.

So to all of you, wherever you are and whatever you may celebrate in the coming days:
Have happy holidays with lots of enjoyable moments, and have a really good start into the new year!
See you on the flip side!

The deliciously white and fluffy layer of snow that covered everything yesterday is gone overnight. I miss it - it really looked totally beautiful, and there's been way too little snow this winter.

In other news (probably more interesting for you), the Call for Papers for the Textile Forum is out via the newsletter as well (which means that the new newsletter list does work), and I'm still working on the thread thickness analysis. The system works, and now it's more or less only (hah!) a question of getting the data read in, formatted, and evaluated. Which means more work on that stuff - but work that will eventually yield more interesting data, and I am very, very curious to see if it will be possible to trace yarn unevenness back to influence of fibre/fibre preparation, spindle or if it's more or less a personal thing depending on the spinner again.

Apart from this, I'm wrapping up the last things I really want to finish before going on a break for the holidays - and as every year, I am looking forward so much to spending time with family and friends. Only a few days left! It's already the twenty-first!

We have finally wrapped up all the prelim discussions and clarifications, and now the Textile Forum homepage is updated.

As previously hinted and announced, the Forum 2012 will be held at the brand-new Laboratory for Experimental Archaeology, a new research facility of the RGZM. Our focus topic will be "Metals in Textile Crafts", and we are looking forward to an exciting time with this very wide and fascinating topic. You find the Call for Papers and more info about registration here.

As of now, you can also register for the event, which will take place September 10-16, via our registration page. And please spread the word about the Forum!

To be exact, less than one more week, since it's December 19 today already. Good thing my ImageJ macro now is working soundly, since there are only four days left to go before Christmas!

For those of you who don't know (or are wondering about my counting skills), I did not count today, and German Xmas starts on December 24. The evening of this day is when celebrations begin, and it's also the time when presents are given (and unwrapped). No waiting until Christmas Day in Germany.

And now a little bleg: I have been wondering yesterday about how widespread the tradition of baking Christmas cookies really is. I know there's some baking in America, and I know it's a firm tradition in Germany, but I really have no clue about the rest of the world. Will you let me know in the comments if seasonal baking is done in your place of the world? In exchange, I will let you know how to get really sticky fingers and a really sticky knife.

Buy a packet of marzipan paste, a packet of dark chocolate (or two) and a packet of dates (or two). I like to buy the "raw marzipan paste" with less sugar in it, and the black very sweet and soft fresh dates (not the drier Deglet Nour, which are the most common dates hereabout).
Cut the dates open and replace the pit with a date-pit-sized piece of marzipan. Press date closed again (the sticky fresh dates are malleable, making this easy) and dip the date into molten dark chocolate, covering it completely. Set aside to set. Enjoy.

Or is it only three? Anyways, here's the news on three things I'm working on:

The Textile Forum. We are in the process of wrapping up the planning stage, and I'm already working on the update of the web pages so we can go live. And yes, that includes the call for papers, which will officially be sent out when the website is updated, and a brandnew registration form. Said form or rather its making and adapting, by the way, ate a good chunk out of my workday yesterday. Because I do basically not know how to do php stuff.

Connected with the Textile Forum, I have also finally changed my newsletter-sending software arrangement, which will hopefully end the weird formatting that newsletter recipients have had to endure the last few times. If you wish to subscribe to the Textile Forum Newsletter to receive announcements and the call for papers (and that's about all that is going over the list, so you won't be inundated at all), you can do so via this form.

And also connected with the Textile Forum, and the famous 2009 spinning experiment, I have further developed the method of how to measure thread thickness variations. The good news: Yes, it works, and will so very well. The bad news: I have to do some filter-testing and script-writing and macro-wrangling to really make it work, and my programming fu is about as nonexistent as my fu in all the other things that I actually don't really know stuff about but try to fumble my way through them anyways. (In German, I would call it "herumeiern", which is more or less wobbling around somewhere and not getting to the point, or traipsing around more-or-less-aimlessly. Just like an egg does when you roll it. And I love that word.)

At least it's Friday! So once my brain is in shambles due to too much pressure on the logic circuits, I will have all weekend to relax and recuperate.