After spending all of last week, including the weekend, with what technically counts as "work" and having only had Saturday the week before the Forum week as a "mostly off" day, I've decided to not work today and instead have a three-day weekend. All those mails in my inbox can wait until Monday (sorry if you're waiting for a reply from me), as can all the other stuff waiting for my attention - sometimes, a girl needs to do what she needs to do.
So I'm finally getting around to relaxing, doing the washing, hopefully meeting a few friends in their coffee break from work, and spending a bit of time meandering through the town aimlessly. Somehow, having a 12-day-workweek really, really makes you look forward to having a day properly off, with nothing important, exhausting or time-consuming on the schedule.

And even the weather is fine outside... which means that in a few minutes, I'll close down the computer, stuff th necessities into my bag and I'll be off to the town. Hooray!

I'm quite happy that with coming back on Monday, my first regular work week is not full-length, but slightly shortened. Hooray for it being Thursday already - and I'm actually thinking about taking half a day off tomorrow to get some household stuff done and relax a bit.

But while I'm pondering that, you can ponder whether you would really like to have any of the York Archaeological Trust books that are out of print - because there will be a discussion about doing another print run for those in demand. Here's the "call for interested people" that reached me via the MEDTC-Discussionlist:

Next month, I will be at the York Archaeological trust and discussing their reprint policies. Knowing what volumes people would like to see back in print and how many people will buy them would be of great value in my conversations with them. If there are any volumes you would like to purchase, please send me a message off-line so that I can add you to the list I am bringing with me to indicate the market.

You can find books they publish at http://www.iadb.co.uk/pubs/pubs.php. Clicking on a particular book will take you to a page of additional information, including whether it is in or out of print. The two books most often mentioned so far are:
Textiles, Cordage and Raw Fibre from 16-22 Coppergate by Penelope Walton
http://www.iadb.co.uk/pubs/pubs.php?Action=Details&PID=54

Textile Production at 16-22 Coppergate by Penelope Walton Rogers
http://www.iadb.co.uk/pubs/pubs.php?Action=Details&PID=61

Please let others know of this. Thank you very much.

Cheers, Folo Watkins

 Please contact Folo via e-mail; the address is folo1(AT)sbcglobal.net. (For e-mailing, replace the (AT) with the appropriate thingie - I do not want to be the cause of excessive spamming of others.)

Needless to say, I have already expressed my interest in these two textile books...

I have spent a wonderful, exciting, intense and incredibly exhausting week at the Textile Forum in South Tyrol, and it was more than a little hard to pack up all the things and leave - even though I missed the comforts and quiet of home during that week.

Our landlady, Erna, did her very best to make us all Schnals Valley addicts by cooking the most wondrously delicious meals. The good Hannelore added to that addiction by serving the best Latte Macchiato there is, and all the rest of the museum staff were also totally lovely and incredibly helpful. Saturday evening saw most of us slightly tipsy and in the best of spirits - after a wonderful dinner that the village Unser Frau had invited us to, with typical sheep stew (or cheese, for the vegetarians) and a traditional sweet dish called Schneemilch (snow milk, literally) as dessert - and of course the famous regional wine.


Now that I'm back home, it's also back to work, all the various kinds - spinning, book-keeping, sewing, ordering fabric, all the usual things. But I'm still all buffered by the wonderful memories of the week - spinning with Lena, watching Martin work at the Gunnister Man jacket, Heather spinning with the stroopwafel spindle, just to name a few of the highlights. And oh, did I have a ball!

It is September, and somehow I have a very hard time believing that yes, a full year has passed since the last Textile Forum and yes, I'll be leaving this weekend for the (hopefully warm and sunny) South Tyrol.
And I am so much looking forward to this event - meeting old colleagues and seeing new faces, chatting about textiles, learning about a bunch of old techniques, hearing about new research and reconstruction projects - exciting prospects all.

South Tyrol, here I come!

(Which for you, gentle readers, means that blogging will resume not before Tuesday week after next.)

I'm packing my paper presentation with nice colourful graphs now (and videos! I've been making screenshot videos to "leaf" through the different spinners), and I'm faced with the typical problem of somebody having stared at one set of data for a long time:

Do I present everything that everybody needs to know, or am I leaving out a too-large chunk at the beginning? Is it possible for others to see the things in the graphs I show that I see, or do I see the things because I have looked at other graphs before that made it clearer? And can I explain the sometimes rather complex graphs well enough so that they are legible and understandable?

We'll all know in a little less than a week. Or at least I will know, and then let you know on the blog. For now... I will go play with colourful graphs a little more. Pasting them into Powerpoint. Hoping that the video-stuff will work during presentation as well.

Unfortunately, I think we consumed the rest of our chocolate yesterday while looking at graphs and fiddling with axis setups (the most patient man of them all and myself). Good chocolate. Good graphs.

And not only have I graphs, I also have visual survey cards of all the spinner's threads. Which you already know from one of the photos I posted a while ago - but now I have them all. And they are all scanned in and available digitally.

And they are huge.


This has already been resized - generously, I might add, because it did not fit into the blog otherwise. It's Spinner C, by the way - our not too experienced spinner who delivered valuable comparison data to the experiment.

After weeks (or what felt like ages, at least), rainy mornings, there is actually blue sky above today. And the weather is supposed to get a bit better during the next days. Whew!

Apart from that, I'm making things like this:


which, in this case, shows the ten thread samples Spinner E spun. E's data points lie in a group underneath the trend line for wraps per 3 cm compared to tex (which compares the weight of thread per metre to its diameter, giving a hint on how tightly spun it is).

And that tells us that E spun a bit looser than most of the other spinners, and did so consistently. Incidentally, E also has a quite "flat" spinning angle, flatter than most of the other spinners. Which perfectly fits together with soft, fluffy threads.