Just in case that you are in the region of Mannheim this weekend and don't know yet to do with your time, I'll be at the Reiss-Engelhorn-Museum on Saturdy and Sunday together with Nobilitas. From 11 to 18 o'clock, you can not only see us at work doing historical crafts but also try your own hand at these things.
Now... it's still February, which is usually not the warmest month of the year. Weather forecasts say it will be warmer towards the weekend, with up to 10° C in Mannheim, but I have nevertheless planned to bring cold-weather-compatible work (also suitable for having others try).

Unfortunately, this cold-weather-compatible work means that I will have to build some stuff for it today. So if you're looking for me... I'll be over there, with the saw and the hammer and the drill.

The V&A, the museum with the wonderful public study room for textiles, has cut down on accessibility on the frames and will close the public study room completely on March 1, 2011; after this will follow the closure of all the other textile and fashion-only rooms during the course of the year.

Bad news, but it's followed by good news: The closing down is just to move all the precious items into a new facility, the Textiles and Fashion Study and Conservation Centre at Blythe House in Kensington Olympia. It's scheduled to open late summer 2013, so we'll have to wait two years for full accessibility again - which is a very short time to move one hundred thousand individual museum textiles.

If you want to learn a bit more about this, you can read ThistleThreads' blog entry, where I first got the information, or get your information fix straight from the Horse's mouth at the V&A website.

A few days ago, Merriam Webster had "togs" as word of the day, and I got sent the link. Word of the Day is quite fun to read, and if you are looking to improve your English vocabulary, it might not be a bad thing to just take a look at it now and then (or daily, even).

If you would like to read the "togs"-WotD, go here. But be warned: There's word games and stuff on that site, it can act as a time sink...

York Archaeological Trust has made several of its out-of-print volumes available for free download, including the volumes 17/14, Finds from Anglo-Scandinavian York, and 17/15, Finds from Medieval York. Hooray!

You can download the files from this Resources page of the York Archaeological Trust website. Enjoy!

January is a good time to stock up wares, resupply and order exciting new stuff - it's already this year, April is looming on the horizon already and with end of April comes the season's start for me.

And that means I'm currently working on acquiring yet another craft-related skill: Cutting quills. Those are textile-craft-related because drawing with ink and quill is the traditional way of preparing an embroidery design, and the tools and materials for the full process of embroidery work are something that I wanted to offer for a good while.  After hunting for proper medieval ink for a good while, I have now found somebody that will make it for me and ordered some, so it's about time to hone down my quill-cutting skills.

There are several "scriptorium" suppliers on the market that offer writing implements. Quite often it's a biro tip set with a (brightly coloured) feather on top - which is about as un-medieval as you can get, since the first thing you are going to do is to cut the barbs from the rachis (I looked those terms up in Wikipedia, and so can you) - that is, you cut the interesting stuff that makes a feather look like a feather from the boring central stem. Why? Because the stuff gets into the way otherwise.
A very few suppliers also have proper quills (unprepared, hardened, or hardened and cut), but the cut ones are always intended for writing. What I need is however something else: I need a tip that will reliably (and without blotting) draw fine lines on linen cloth.

So I sat down yesterday and tried several different feathers from different birds, with varying preparation steps. And that's the result:





 I'm still figuring out what makes a cut a successful one, but at the moment, it looks as if I'm getting way better and more reliable results in cutting quills from reed than using feather quills. So what will be on sale next season will probably look like this:


I'm not yet sure whether I will test each quill or not - though I'm heavily leaning towards testing each one even if they will not look pristine and unstained on the table then.
Would you prefer unstained and untested or stained and tested?

Via the MEDTC-List, I received this info about K'zoo:

Forty-sixth International Congress on Medieval Studies
May 12–15, 2011
Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo, Michigan USA
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/

A 'preview' of the program is available here
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/Assets/pdf/congress/Schedule11.pdf

I had a look at that programme. Oh my goodness. How on earth are you supposed to choose which sessions or papers to attend? That conference programme has a freaking two hundred and ten pages! This really, really boggles my mind, which is used to small or medium conferences only. Must be really nice to have such an enormous group of medievalists all together in one spot! (Though I still think it must be awfully hard to choose what to listen to...)


For those of you interested in textile stuff, I will just repost the list of of-interest-sessions that also came via the list. I had planned to go through the pdf myself and list the page numbers with the textile-related sessions, but I'm afraid I will get lost in that document and never find my way out again. Do I need to say that I would love to hear those papers? Alas, K'zoo is far away...

Thursday 7:30 p.m. Session 157 (Schneider 1280)
Vair, Able, Phoenix, and Kitty-Cat: Desire and Reality in Medieval Fur Fashions
Sarah-Grace Heller, Ohio State Univ.

Friday 1:30 p.m.Session 243 )Fetzer 1010)
Dress and Textiles I: Documentary Evidence
Sponsor: DISTAFF (Discussion, Interpretation, and
Study of Textile Arts, Fabrics, and Fashion)
Organizer: Robin Netherton, DISTAFF
Presider: Gale R. Owen-Crocker, Univ. of Manchester
Textiles and Dress in the Household Accounts and
Inventories of Lady Margaret Beaufort (1443–1509)
Susan Powell, Univ. of Salford
Histoires and Misteres: Understanding Medieval Tapestry
Tina Kane, Tina Kane Textile Conservation and Restoration
“Translating” a Queen: The Wardrobe of Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots
Michelle Beer, Univ. of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign
Juana of Portugal’s Farthingale: Rumors of Scandal and Shame
Emma Lehman, Independent Scholar

Friday 3:30 p.m.Session 301 (Fetzer 1010)
Dress and Textiles II: Implications and Interpretations
Sponsor: DISTAFF (Discussion, Interpretation, and
Study of Textile Arts, Fabrics, and Fashion)
Organizer: Robin Netherton, DISTAFF
Presider: Robin Netherton
Lanval’s Lady: An Uncovering
Monica L. Wright, Univ. of Louisiana–Lafayette
Cosmographic Coverings: Textile Language in Alan of Lille’s Plaint of Nature
Jonathan Abresch, Univ. of Toronto
Late Medieval (Chiefly Middle English) Attitudes towards Dagged Clothing
John Block Friedman, Independent Scholar
To Be or Not to Be Medieval: Costuming Maid Marian for Film and Television
Sherron Lux, Library, San Jacinto College–North Campus

Friday 5:45 p.m. Fetzer 1055 Medieval
Dress/Textile Arts Display and Demonstration
Sponsor: DISTAFF (Discussion, Interpretation, and
Study of Textile Arts, Fabrics, and Fashion)
Organizer: Robin Netherton, DISTAFF
Presider: Robin Netherton
A display of reproduction textile and dress
items, handmade using medieval methods and materials. Items
will include textiles, decorative treatments,
garments, and dress accessories. Exhibitors will
demonstrate techniques and be available to
discuss the use of historical evidence in
reproducing artifacts of material culture.

Sunday 8:30 a.m.Session 523 (Fetzer 1005)
Recycling Clothing in Late Medieval Paris
Kathryn J. Kelsey Staples, West Virginia Univ.

Sunday 8:30 a.m.Session 543 (Bernhard 210)
Dress and Textiles III: Techniques
Sponsor: DISTAFF (Discussion, Interpretation, and
Study of Textile Arts, Fabrics, and Fashion)
Organizer: Robin Netherton, DISTAFF
Presider: Robin Netherton
Loopy Clues: Unraveling Errors, Omissions, and Assumptions in Loop Braiding
Instructions
Cindy Myers, Independent Scholar
Early Knitting Techniques and Tools: Clues from Extant Middle Eastern Socks
Jackie Oppelt, Independent Scholar
Cornettes: Variation and Change in a Fourteenth-Century Hairstyle
Barbara Segal, Independent Scholar

Sunday 10:30 a.m. Session 576 (Bernhard 210)
Dress and Textiles IV: Armour, Dress, Textile
Sponsor: DISTAFF (Discussion, Interpretation, and
Study of Textile Arts, Fabrics, and Fashion) and
the Brill Encyclopaedia of Medieval Dress and
Textiles of the British Isles, c. 450-1450
Organizer: Gale R. Owen-Crocker, Univ. of Manchester
Presider: Julian Deahl, Brill Publishing Company
What’s In a Name? Identifying Textiles
Gale R. Owen-Crocker
Textiles and Thomas Becket
Elizabeth Coatsworth, Manchester Metropolitan Univ.
What’s the Pourpoint?
Karen Watts, Royal Armouries
Padded Protection: The Rothwell Jack
Maria Hayward, Univ. of Southampton

This blog post is late. Not just because somehow I fell asleep again and woke up much later than I had intended to, but also because I had not the shade of an idea about what to blog today. This lead to me totally having to do this and that little chore before sitting down to blog - and then I found the mail where somebody told me that one of my followers was a porn spammer. And can you believe it took me a good while to figure out how to block that guy? (Turns out that you have to click on "Followers" from the dashboard listing of your blog, and not from the blog itself. Gah.)

So now I'm back to 98 followers, a bit smarter on how to block somebody from the list (though I hope it won't be necessary often) and still out of an idea for something nice to blog about. So instead you get a gratuious photo from out of my private life:



Yes, that's from the wedding.

Oh, and almost one hundred followers - anybody up for a bet on when it will reach three figures?