... I am still at Leeds conference. Today's the last day, and I'll be travelling home tomorrow, and since I ran out of links and ideas when I pre-blogged this on Sunday morning, you'll go without a proper blog post today and without a blog post at all tomorrow.



I'll be back on Monday, and after almost a full week at the IMC, I am pretty sure there will be some stories to tell.

The week before last, I had a nice evening with a fellow textile person who is researching about Peruvian backstrap weaving (connected with a find of a woven band). During our evening together, we scourged a bit of the Internet for weaving patterns and instructions, and stumbled across this:

Introduction to Backstrap Weaving

It's a nice, concise and very well-made introduction, and in case you are interested at all - go check it out. A few lightbulbs went off over my head during the course of the evening and the reading of the article, and that's always something nice to share.

There's been a sensational find done in Italy: A church burial place where an entire community of people was buried in a church crypt - and a lot of them mummyfied. Which means that they are still fully dressed in their burial garments - practical, no-nonsense clothes.

You can read and see pictures about this find from the Italian mountain church here. Go have a look - the pics are spectacular!

Either I'm getting told about more of them, or this year is especially conference-heavy... no matter which of this is the case, here's another conference call blog entry for you.

Aarhus University of Denmark celebrates 40 years of Medieval Archaeology with a conference 26 to 28 October 2011, and you can find info and the conference programme on their conference website here. The conference will be in English, so no need to speak or understand Danish really well.

Another conference in October is the annual EXAR conference, this year taking place in Schleswig, northern Germany. You can find information on the exar.org webpage; the conference is from 13th to 16th of October, and it includes an optional excursion to Nydam (to see the Nydam ship). Deadline for registration is the 15th of July - still a few days left! -, and if you are interested in giving a paper, there seem to be still a few paper opportunities left. If you are not speaking or understanding German, please be aware that though the official languages of the conference are both English and German, the years when I attended the conference consisted mostly of German-language presentations.

For those of you who are waiting for the pallia online shop to finally pop into life, here's a current account of how it stands:

I have finished listing most of the wares - all the often-requested ones are in the shop - and they "only" need their photographs taken to get things going. So there's a photo session in my near future.

I have also made good progress on the legalese part of the thing; the necessary legal texts are all written and linked into the shop surface, and I'm full with knowledge about a few legalese details and how to solve them once the shop really starts rolling. There's one issue left to solve, but that is for a special still very secret extra of the shop... and won't delay the rest of it from going online.

What is going to delay the online release (apart from me being in Leeds next week, for example) is that I still need to do some testing and, before that, a good amount of template-jogging for it to look remotely like it should. While I have done a very little work with .css before (see the new, re-vamped pallia.net website), I am still finding my feet with Joomla!, the basic structure for the shop module that I now have. I did spend my evening yesterday working on baby simple things like adding a second menu and removing unwanted information - things that just eat up a lot of time until one has learned how things roll and what the logic behind the structure is.

This is the curse of doing all things single-handedly: You have to do it yourself. All of it. Yes, there's technically the possibility for me to have somebody else set up the shop and do all the prelim stuff, but since I will have to work with it later on, I have to know stuff about the backend and use of the shop scripts and underlying scripts anyway... so I might as well learn it right now.

That's how I am currently doing with the online shop - just to keep you up to date and from wondering what ever has happened to that project. I'll give you another update once I'm in the testing stage, and I might need some testing help then. If you cannot or do not want to wait anymore, though, please just e-mail or phone me to order things. I can still handle orders - luckily, my shop frontend is not me!

As my departure to Leeds IMC is creeping closer and closer, I checked back on Jonathan Jarrett's blog about the Blogger meetup. And true to his word, he and Magistra from the magistraetmater blog have decided on a time and place: It will be Tuesday evening, 18 to 20 o'clock, at the Stables pub.

Here's the full article on Jonathan's blog, where you can find a picture of him for identification. I'll be there, too - so maybe we meet at Leeds?

At the moment, the winter garden is feeling quite sheepy - with Rhönschaf sheep fleeces hanging out to air, dry out completely and be sorted (and probably partly combed).

Rhönschaf is a sturdy, rather large sheep with white, longish wool that has a nicely defined, wavy crimp. I have four fleeces; one of them will be put on hold for a workshop on historical wool preparation and spinning, and the rest of them...

Closeup of one of the fleeces

The fleeces are very good quality, with little to very little dirt in them; most of that falls out when combing the fibres. The sheep come from a good, sheep-friendly home and spent most of their time outside. The wool is not felted and very easy to comb, even without prior teasing or beating to loosen up the fibres; there's a pleasant amount of lanolin in it, but not too much.

The wool, when combed in the grease, has a chamois or light eggshell colour; it washes up into a clean white with water and maybe a smidgen of soap.

One lock after rinsing.

If you now feel the strong need to get your hands on some of that wool, you have several possibilities: I will sell you wool prepared into these lovely nests of hand-combed top:

Hand-combed top, in the grease, for spinning worsted yarn.

... which is ideal for worsted yarn - smooth, thin, strong yarns for your weaving or sewing needs.

If you have never worked with hand-combed top before, let me tell you: It will be much more expensive than industrial preparations, because we're talking about serious time investment here* - but it's also vastly different from industrial preparations. The short fibres are removed, there's still all the lanolin in,  there are no felted bits due to washing, and since I started working with those historical preparations, I don't like to touch the modern industrial stuff anymore.


If you prefer to do your prepping yourself, you can either get raw wool from me to use your own equipment. Or come to my stall at Tannenberg, where I will have a nice combing station, and you can use my combs to prepare wool for yourself.

* and you all know how I feel about fair pricing in crafts, right?