First of all, thanks to everybody who commented with links or hints to medieval headwear on yesterday's post. I will go hunt all those things down and have a good look at them. And if anybody thinks of any more, please comment to yesterday's bleg - it really is helping me!

And today's post... is going to be something similar-but-different. I am preparing a workshop on historical wool preparation and historical spinning, and I'm very, very much looking forward to it. However, I have been mucking around with this and that and fibres and spindles for a good long while now, and my spinning skill was never acquired in the traditional teacher-to-student manner. Thus, I have learned many things differently. And I do not have good insights into what makes a switch to historical spinning difficult for somebody who has learned hand-spindle spinning the modern way. (If you need to brush up on the difference, the two most important bits in my opinion are that historical spinning uses a distaff for holding the fibres, and there's no slinging the thread around under the whorl before fixing it at the top. There's more, but those are two very common differences.)

Hence, I will make you an offer. Are you spinning with a hand-spindle? Have you tried spinning historically? Whether you are spinning historical or modern, I would like to hear about what problems or questions you have. Is there something you just can't get to work? Or something you wanted to try but cannot figure out?

I will try to answer your questions here in the blog - and use the material for my teaching. This way, everybody wins: I get to know common problems, and you will get an answer. And I will try my best to make it a helpful one!

After writing my PhD thesis (which will come out one day in English, I have not forgotten you - I am doing things towards it) I was quite happy to get going on some other writing/research topic. Unfortunately, though, that project fizzled out very soon in its career.

Then all those other things that will assault a freelancer and beg for time took over. Organising or re-organising things, getting smart about how to do invoices, keeping track of finances, sourcing goods that I could sell on markets, preparing workshops, flyers, business cards and so on. The decision to do a blog, and the time that went into it. Projects usually came (and still come) in clumps as well, tearing huge rifts into plans and schedules. And Textile Forum came into my life and took over for a few weeks each year (and will do so next year). In short, I did not get around to do much writing and research for the other book project that was still in my figurative desk drawer. And I sort of fell into a research hole.

Then came the opportunity to work again on that project. Let's call it... Dusty Old Bookproject, or DOB for short. I started, did some stuff, and ran against a wall because what I had thought would be a slight restructure and extension... was not. It needed a full re-thinking, re-working and re-structuring, and I could not see that yet. So I did some things on and off, but it really didn't come along very well. And there was still all the other freelancing stuff to be taken care of, which takes a huge chunk of time, continuously.

Then along came Exciting New (to me) Bookproject, and I suddenly rediscovered that research is such a huge heap of fun. Pure unadulterated fun in sitting in the library, going through books, taking up snippets of information and learning new things, new angles, new concepts. So now I am working on both of them, DOB and ENB, and instead of having a bad conscience... I feel good, because I am actually doing more work on DOB now than I did before ENB came along.

And I'm at a stage for DOB where I am looking for more material. More specifically, I am searching for links or books or hints on where some more extant headwear might be found. Date range is from about 500 to 1500, though I might narrow that down for the final book. Geographic range is Europe. And I'd be delighted if you could tell me of some, because just like the proverb says: Four (hundred) eyes see (much) better than two.

It's probably a good thing that I have been so eager to get some work done on the one big project that I almost totally forgot to blog - hence the very late blog entry.

In addition to being busy, and forgetful, and totally overdoing it with adding books to my to-read list (or at least to the to-check-for-interesting-parts list), I have nothing new to tell you. So instead I will leave you with this totally awesome flashmob video, because what can be more awesome than a flashmob with a harp?

If you've been more than marginally interested in the epidemic called "Black Death" that wrought havoc on the population in the Middle Ages, you may have caught that there was a (sometimes quite heated, I gather) dispute about whether it was the Plague as we know it today, or something entirely else, or a mutation of the Plague, or a combination, or whatever. And I confess I was leaning towards "something else", too, just like a lot of other scholars.

But now they did it. You know, those archaeologists and other scientists? These guys that poke around in old stuff, messing around with our nice familiar concepts of history, dragging home old bones and potsherds and lumps of clay and textile and rusty metals? They did it. They found the DNA of the Bringer of Black Death.

And it's Yersinia Pestis.

Their research is published in an open-access peer reviewed journal (oh, we so need more of those), and you can read the whole article for yourself. Good old Yersinia. Wreaking documented havoc on mankind since 541.

Since I seemingly promised you wool pictures and Heather reminded me of that, here they are. All were taking during the test runs for a washing wool procedure (and the test run was, by the way, quite successful).

This is Rhönschaf-wool before washing, laid out on a cloth.


All the wool was pretty clean, as wool worn by sheep hanging out outside goes. And I discovered during washing that a lot of the darker colour is due to dust and fine earth particles hanging in the fleece.



... nice and clean after rinsing. It's spread out for drying on my beating frame here. And yes, I have managed to wash a whole fleece's worth of wool at once, thanks to well-timed rainfall hereabouts.

On a modern textile blog (catering to industrial production mostly) you can find some facts about linen (drawn from a modern linen producer). The fact that is missing there is that while linen has very high tensile strength - which means you can hang a lot of weight from a thread - it is actually not very resistant against friction, wearing through relatively fast. Still, it's an interesting list.

If you're waiting to see the TARDIS in a cathedral, at least in a photo, go visit highlyeccentric's blog. I am officially stunned.

HistoriAnn and Notorious PhD blog about conference etiquette and the job of a panel commentator, respectively. If you're going to conferences or being in the danger of moderating/commenting a panel, I do recommend these posts and their discussion.

If you are wishing to learn about medieval beans and how to prepare a bean dish, go read Andreas' recounting of a cooking test run (he's giving a seminar in fall).

But if that all is not tickling your fancy, you can always hop over to the Yellow Press of Medievalist Studies* and learn about medieval flamethrowers. Yes, flamethrowers!

* I realise that this may be a bit harsh - but I get their RSS feed, and that is just what I sort of think when all the flashy titles pop up. Yes, I know that much of it is the scholar's own fault. Yes, I'm doing that myself. I discovered medievalists.net a while ago and was totally excited for a time, but learned soon that their offerings (as always, duh Katrin) has to be taken with some salt. It's a service that will dig up articles and stuff about the Middle Ages, but they are not a peer review organ, and there will be outdated or disputable papers on there. That said, I still like to get the feed, if only to learn about medieval flamethrowers once in a while. And now this footnote is almost getting longer than the rest of the post.

Though I'm furiously working on stuff, I don't have much to tell about it yet - I don't want to jinx the project and that means I will be keeping mum for now.

There are a few very nice and exciting things afoot, though, and I will soon be able to tell you more. For now, I enjoy that one project so much that I'm getting sidetracked into almost forgetting to blog, and the other has stolen me a bit of sleep the day before yesterday because I had to think about it.
And this second one is linked to a trip to England, which I am wildly looking forward to.

Finally, I have spent part of yesterday evening with legalese - turns out the German law regarding the right of withdrawal has changed again, and I thus had to change the legalese texts in the shop. Speaking of which, I have also made a good bit of progress translating the legalese for the English version - though those of you waiting will have to hold out for a bit longer still. Sorry for that! (I really need a duplicator so I can turn into three of me during the work hours... anyone know where I could get one?)