The weather has been weird for a good while here now, with autumns so long and so mild that the rose in our garden is regularly going for a last flowering in October/November. So I figured that we'd might as well make the most out of global warming, and planted a fig bush three years ago. It's hardy enough to survive the winters here, though it has to be protected against late frosts, because it will otherwise just go pouty and mope around and not grow leaves forever (or until it is pruned back a bit again). 

This year is the first time that it actually made figs that managed to ripen, though! Last year it put out about two fruits, and those were a complete disappointment. But this time around, they are actually nice.

They are not very large, but (since the Most Patient Husband of Them All is not as fond of them as I am), they are all mine :)

Next one up to make fruits will be the passionfruit plants and the fig cactus. Though the latter might still need a year or two to grow...

 I'm off for a bit to attend a conference and workshop, thanks to the glorious opportunities the EuroWeb people are providing. Which means I will get to learn some more about Eastern European textiles and textile crafts!

As opposed to Germany and much of Middle and Western Europe, some traditions have kept alive much longer in the East. However, the Iron Curtain and then language barriers have played their part in keeping contact between eastern and western parts less than they should be. So I'm hoping to get a few more insights, and, even more important, some more contacts in the next days. And I'm definitely looking forward to seeing a bit of Europe that I've never been to before (and being further to the east than ever).

So I will leave you with these flowers, and I'll be back on the blog on Monday, October 9.

Well, it's yesterday's news (for a large timescale of yesterday, that is) but I only stumbled across it a few days ago, and it amused me a lot: A mosaic showing a skeleton was unearthed in Turkey in 2016, and the skeleton is holding a drinking cup plus there's a text around it that says "Be cheerful and live your life". 

That's good advice, I'd say. 

You can read more about the find here on the History Blog.

It happens so often that someone is researching about a topic, and others could help, or it would help them to know about it, but... well... it's just not visible enough. Same thing applies to conferences taking place, so a while ago, I've decided to also use the mailing address list of the European Textile Forum for announcements of these kinds. (If that sounds interesting for you, you can subscribe here, and that will get you news both about the Forum  and all the news about conferences and related things that I hear about.)

So here's a thing that wants to be spread:

Daniela Rosner, Associate Professor at the University of Washington, is searching for existing scholarship and related archives on the topic of textile bias ("the cross" as it might be known in the UK). She is particularly interested in locating materials that trace the development and use of textile bias across time; that probe the technical qualities of bias and its functionality within a textile or woven form; and that relate textile bias to other mechanical and electronic formats, woven or otherwise. She has been probing interactions between discourses of textiles and algorithmic bias across a series of experiments, including a recent article ( https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/37867) and a course (http://onthebiasthinking.com) co-developed with Afroditi Psarra and Gabrielle Benabdallah. If you have any leads on textile bias scholarship, please reach out to Daniela Rosner and let her know!

Back when I was a teenager, I was very, very much fascinated by the Wild West - probably for a good part because of the German author Karl May (who wrote stories about Native Americans without knowing anything about them, and never set foot on the other continent...). Anyway, little did I realise back then that being a cowboy also involved some textile work! But the Most Patient Husband of Them All recently found this little video gem, and you will hopefully enjoy it, too: 

We've recently seen the  "Ball im Savoy", which is something like a lightweight opera version (Operette) that was written in the 1930s. The version that we enjoyed (vastly!) was gently modernised and shortened, according to the information given by the theatre, and it was fantastic. (The Cologne ensemble did a guest staging at the Luisenburg Wunsiedel, which is a very lovely open-air stage.)

The reason for the cuts, by the way, was given too - some of the text and songs were rather "-istic" in some way. Racist, mysogynist, etcetera, so not really what one would want to have on a stage today, at least not in the theatre equivalent of a feelgood movie.

Afterwards, we looked up some more of it on Youtube... and stumbled across one of the songs that did not make the cut into the version that we saw. The English translation of the title is "when we Turcs kiss".

We listened to this, and we were really confused by the singer's accent. It sounds like the aim is to sound "foreign", but to our ears, it was all the wrong foreign, because he states that he's from Turkey. That's not a Turkish accent!

And that is when we realised... today's German people are all very, very familiar with Turkish accents, because of the influx of Turkish people in the 1950s and 1960s. But this was written and performed in 1932, when things were still quite different. Which explains why the accent is "generic foreign" and not "generic mock-Turkish" as it would be when a modern German imitated the typical accent...

Funny, and slightly weird, isn't it? And also an amazing example about how little things in art change, and how our perceptions and receptions change.

It is abysmally hot and humid here - it feels like a sauna, really. In spite of the heat and humidity, there is some cycling to be done for errands that have to be run, and there's also some apples waiting to be cooked into apple sauce and then canned. So... plenty of hot work ahead! I am already looking forward to my trip to the conference in Belfast, where it will probably be much cooler, due to the sea being close by.

The trick to cycling in this weather is, by the way, to go just fast enough so the airstream is cooling you down, but not so fast that the heat generated by the effort is more than the airstream can cool away. Which is especially hard to impossible if going uphill. Also: Traffic lights, the bane of airstream.

(Fun fact: Even paddling, which is a really slow way of getting forward, will generate some airstream that is actually noticeably cooling. We were joking once, when taking a break on a river, that we should get back to paddling again because of the nice, cool "Fahrtwind"... and then we started paddling and realised that there actually was enough of it to make things much more comfortable.)