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!

I'm back from a wonderful trip to Ireland, where it was comparatively cool - and now I'm back to baking in the German late-summer heat. (Way too warm for the season, actually.)

The conference in Belfast was easily and by far the largest archaeology conference I've ever been to, with about 3000 participants altogether (online and on-site combined). I don't know how many people there were in Leeds when I attended it, many years ago, but it felt similarly huge. It's fascinating, and certainly has its pros, but personally I do prefer smaller conferences where I have less decision-making issues (what session will I go to?) and there's a little less noise in the common functions, and fewer people so it's easier to find somebody.

The programme was also very, very tightly packed, which meant that any of the (unavoidable) technical issues that could occur would throw the plan, and meant less time for questions and discussion. But these things aside, it was just wonderful to go there and experience this huge get-together of archeologists!

My own presentation was in the very last panel time slot of the conference, so everyone was already a bit tired (myself included). Nevertheless I think nobody fell asleep on me.

A friend made this photo of me during the presentation. As usual, I had a lot of fun doing the "dance" (I tend to hop around when presenting), and it was so nice to show the results of our membrane thread process reconstruction to other interested people! 

I'm off to the EAA conference in Belfast! Which means that a) today has been a whirlwind of getting things sorted out so everything is ready for me to leave, and b) I will be off the blog for a while.

However, to keep you amused while I am gone, you can check out the brand-new publication now available as pdf about "Fashioning the Viking Age". That was a research project that included reconstructions of Viking Age textile tools and Viking Age garments - and the first two volumes are finished and downloadable for free on the project's web pages. 

And with this, I'm off to conferencey adventures, followed by some family stuff - so I will be back on the blog on September 12.

Belfast and the EAA are drawing nearer and nearer - so I'm packing and preparing. There was a bit more spinning of membrane thread today, to have a little more of a sample to show around at the conference, and some more packing and writing of lists and so on. 

 I've also done a little more other spinning - cotton this time, trying to reproduce a cotton yarn used in some non-European fabrics. It was very nice to return to cotton spinning (which I have not done very often), and a bit of a challenge to hit the right thickness (hint: it was not very thick) with the high twist required. It definitely is a rather slow process. Now the thread will go to my colleague, who will take a look at it and see if that would match her requirements, and then we'll see.

There was also some Textile Forum planning stuff (the preliminary programme has been updated, and you can find it here). I'm already very excited about all the workshops, we will be exploring so many aspects of the colour red.

And now it's time to wrap up the day, get some more packing done, and update the lists of things that have to be done before I leave for Northern Ireland. The presentation is already finished and only needs another practise run or two, the materials to show are prepared, and hopefully there will soon be a login for the conference app so that planning which session to attend where will be a little easier... because that, of course, is a challenge with about 40 sessions running in parallel, and a lot of interesting topics to choose from!

To our great delight, Jessica Grimm, fellow archaeologist and professional embroideress, has agreed to do some testing of the membrane silver threads we made. 

(Jessica also teaches embroidery, both in-person and online. Do check out her page if you're interested!

And... we got first results! One of the sample batches was, as expected, not holding up too well, but shed some silver. (I think we messed up with that membrane, as there was glue on it....) Another one also shed some silver - that was a sample silvered with no glue at all. The others all held up rather well, and the test also showed that these threads are much more supple than if they were done with solid metal strips. (Also not entirely unexpected, but then you never know...)

That is a very nice result to get before the conference in Belfast. Now I'll have to think about how to shoehorn in one more sentence without going over time!

Summer break is over - and with the weather in the last few days, it almost seems as if summer itself were over, too. We were lucky to have nice weather for our little holiday trip, though, when we went paddling down the Moselle river, with lots of vinyards to look at.

There were quite a lot of boats and ships on the river - freighters, river cruise ships, small sport motorboats, plus the medium-sized day-trip-cruise ships. Almost no paddlers, though. We had a very nice time and went home right before the weather turned bad (there was the forecast of thunderstorms and strong winds, both not really suited to canoeing). 

Now it's back to work, catching up on the things that have accumulated while I was on the break, and preparing for the upcoming exciting things, such as the EAA conference in Belfast (I have to finalise my presentation for this) and, of course, the European Textile Forum in November. So it's motivational hot drinks today (which, with the hard drop in temperatures, are quite welcome not only due to their motivational properties, but also due to their warmth) and, of course, getting started on sending out the orders that came in during the last weeks...

Summer break is almost upon me, and for a change, I am not frantically doing a hundred thousand things that have to be finished before the break - there's only one thing with a deadline left to take care of, but it's not a huge task, and two that should be taken care of but where it's not crucial to do it before the break, and otherwise I'm more or less set. Which is a nice change to some other years where I was really getting a bit of extra stress before the break... so it feels a bit like I'm winding down now, and that is very pleasant.

Which, mind you, does not mean there's not a lot that could be done. It's just that nothing will explode if I don't manage to do it before - and a lot of the other things are stuff on the "when I finally get around to it" that have been on said list for way longer than I'd like them to be anyways, so they are well used to waiting, and nothing bad will happen if they don't. But, after enough years of doing this job, I have come to realise that there are always things that would be so nice to do, or to have, or to start, or to make... and then there's something that does not line up, or stuff happens, and it's plainly not possible to do all the things one has ideas or plans for. Which is kind of sad, if you look at it one way, but on the other hand... imagine you only have so few ideas and plans and find so few things exciting or interesting that you get around to doing all of them? That would be a totally different, but at least as sad situation.

And to give you a picture, because they are nice, here's a complete non-sequitur that is not sad at all: 

This  is another case of a project that has eaten more time than initially planned - but oh, it has also delivered. I don't regret a single minute invested in the membrane gold thread project, as it brought me a lot of new knowledge, some new skills, a good amount of new contacts and pleasant time spent working together with wonderful people. 

And the result, as of now, is a method that would be absolutely workable for production. Plus some beautiful thread as the outcome - even though my skills in wrapping the membrane around the core are still not where they could be, it's gotten much better. There will be the EAA conference in Belfast at the end of August, where I'll do a little presentation about the project, and I am planning to do a bit more silver spinning before that. Overall, though - very, very content with the current state of things.