It really is amazing what kinds of spam and spoof can flutter into your home. Email spam and comment spam is something that you'd expect, sort of.

I've also almost grown accustomed to the occasional call from "Microsoft", who are kindly inquiring how they can help me with my Windows computer problems. (Hint: No techsupport on Earth will ever call you voluntarily. Ever. And nobody can tell whether you have computer problems or not unless you tell them - they just want your confidential data, your money, or probably both.)

Now, however, the schemes for quick money from people not paying close enough attention have reached the snail-mail stage. A while ago, the Most Patient Husband Of Them All received an actual on-paper version of the classical Nigeria Scam (he did somehow not feel inclined to write them back to claim the several million Euros that he could have because the original owner went off and disappeared or died or whatever). And  I received an extra special bit of funny spoofy spam yesterday:



This very officially-looking letter requests me to send back my information... to list my business, and especially my VAT ID Number (which nobody but other businesses for B2B-transactions ever need, or are interested in) on their website. For just under 400 € per year, plus VAT, and for at least two years.

Well. No thanks, guys.

... is turning small plastic things from looking like this:



into looking more like this:



These are minis from the boardgame "Space Cadets - Away Mission", where you're playing a group of human rocketeers who have to save our world from the evil alien invasion. The guy in the back right of the pic is a "Thrall", a subdued human that can be freed. The rest... they're all proper aliens.

Even though I spent a lot of time painting, I'm not all finished yet. There's still more aliens to do. This guy is about finished, apart from some minor works that still have to be done:



and he has lots of friends in a similar state:



...but there's about a dozen more of them who are still less finished and need to catch up. Plus there's another alien race (the bugs) and yet another group (the leaders) and, as the final and crowning project, the hero miniatures.

So I'll be having some more fun with these things in the next weeks - and I'm already looking forward a lot to the time when all these painted armies hit the table.



Brain in a Jar, anyone?

This year has really flown by, and I can hardly believe it's December 23 already. Tomorrow is Christmas! (The Germans get an early start, and we get to open our presents and start Xmas properly on the evening of the 24th... so for us, it starts tomorrow.)

The year 2015 has been a wild ride, with publishing the Beast, making the gold embroidery book and kit, a scarf kit together with Margit, several fairs that I had a booth at, and of course the redesign of the website and blog. There was an amazingly productive Textile Forum in November. Plus all the other, smaller, things that have happened this year. There was also time spent with friends watching films, going paddling, drinking tea and playing games. The cat was cuddled an incountable number of times... I'd say 2015 was a very good year.

And as it draws to a close, it's time for me to take my traditional winter break. I'll be spending more time with family and friends, celebrating the slow return of light in our part of the world as it hurtles through space twisting around itself (as you do when you're a planet) and winding down. I'll be enjoying well-loved traditions (to my great delight, we did manage already to watch "Love Actually" and another very traditional christmassy film, "Drei Haselnüsse für Aschenbrödel" with the friends that we always try to watch them with in the season), and good food, and generally hanging out having nothing to do but spend time in whatever agreeable way that offers itself.

I'll be back on the blog on January 11. To all of you, and all of your loved ones - I wish you some nice days full of happiness, whether you have already celebrated your season's festivity or whether it's still coming up or even if you don't at all, and a wonderful start into 2016 - may it bring wonderful and excitingly positive developments for us all!

You're getting a late blogpost today because I had slow internet today, and it even ate a half-written post... but you are getting one, and it is one with free stuff! (Very fitting for the season...)

First of all, as a reminder - free ebook in Aarhus Uni Press this month is Woven into the Earth. Go download it if you haven't done so yet, and tell your friends who are interested in archaeological textiles. This is a wonderful book, and it is definitely good to have.

You already downloaded it? You would like more books? Here you go.

On a completely different, and very much non-archaeological note - there is a free e-book about working with MS Word, "Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals" by Jack M. Lyon. A few years ago, the author's newsletter "Editorium" helped me a lot when prodding my thesis text into shape, as well as later when I had typesetting to do. If you're working with Word (as so many people in the social/historical/archaeological sciences do), you might want to give it a look.

And now on to the juicy bits.

I had the opportunity to visit Estonia for a few days, and I didn't only meet lovely fellow textile people and fellow archaeologists and got to see exciting finds in several museums and a good number of the Estonian textile finds, I also brought home some books (about, who would have guessed it, Estonian textile finds). Two of them are about the finds from Siksälä, which is a burial site used continuously from the 11th to the 15th century - the Estonian Iron Age and Middle Ages. Siksälä has yielded exceptionally rich finds, including textiles wonderfully decorated with bronze spirals. There's a publication in two parts, a text part and a catalogue part; both are in Estonian*, but anyone can look at the pictures and construction drawings. And if I say anyone, I do mean it - both the first volume and the second volume are available online, free of charge, thanks to the University of Tartu.

Another absolutely amazing Estonian find is the craft box from Lohavere (which should be written with a little ~ sitting on top of the o), which comes from the hillfort of the same name, dated to the 12th and early 13th century. If you know the Mästermyr find and have always dreamt of something similar, but related to textiles? Here it is. The craft box, made from birch bark, contained textile remains, prefabricated and half-finished products, bronze ornaments and tools, some of them neatly stored in smaller boxes or little pouches. It is an absolutely fascinating find and gives so much information about how the spiral decorations were worked... and it, too, is published in a little book, and that, too, is available online free of charge.

These finds absolutely deserve to be better-known - so feel free to spread the word, and of course enjoy the publications of these gorgeous finds!

*Estonian is a language belonging to the Finno-Ugric group, and more or less related to Finnish. A few fun facts: Estonian has fourteen cases. Yes, fourteen - because there are no words to signal direction (like "into" or "from"), and a case is used instead. More fun facts? Estonian has no genders, so there's no problem with being politically correct. Because there were a lot of Germans in Estonia in the Middle Ages (Hanseatic League was a reason for that, for instance) there are quite a few German words still around, which makes not understanding most of the rest even more peculiar. Final fun fact for today: as I'm easily amused, it diverted me no end that the greeting "Tere" sounds much like the southern German colloquial "Dere" (which is very short for "Habe die Ehre", I have the honour). If you're intrigued now, here are a few useful Estonian phrases, and here is a very interesting pdf with facts about Estonian.

Here we are, rolling inexorably towards the end of the year and the longest night of the year, so here are a few odds and ends if you're still looking for stuff to add into your personal mix of seasonal things.

First of all, there's this slightly different song (that has totally become an earworm for me this year), from the other hemisphere where it's cherry season now, and everything is nice and warm (or even hot) and summery:


If buying stuff and giving it to friends and family is part of your mix, you might still be looking for something? The Yarn Harlot, it seems, is way too swamped this year to give holiday gift suggestions (and good for her that they've cut down on everything they don't really love to do in this season)... but John Scalzi has kept up with his tradition and posted a five-part guide for holiday shopping that lives in the comments, where creators and fans tell you about their things:

Part 1 - Traditionally Published Books
Part 2 - Non-Traditionally Published Books
Part 3 - Creative Gifts (arts, crafts, music, ...)
Part 4 - Fan FavouritesPart 5 - Charities
Or maybe you'd just enjoy a gratuitous picture of the silly "stuff on my cat" variety? Here you go:

[caption id="attachment_2083" align="alignnone" width="689"] One cat was slightly irritated for the taking of this picture.

There's a stack of lovely links to share with you, so you're not getting an "Old Knitting" post today (wait for tomorrow, though...)

Instead, here is other stuff I hope you'll enjoy:

Uppsala University has a new database called "Gender and Work", where you can search and find different sources regarding, well, gender and work. While the title sounds very international, it looks like the database interface and the base itself are Swedish only. Still, if you are looking for sources and can read Swedish, this might be a lovely tool for you.

The next one is definitely in English. I know this, because I have helped making it myself... as you might know, I am a fan of the wonderful Escape Pod, so when I met with Alasdair at LonCon, I volunteered, spur-of-the-moment, to be one of their narrators. Well, though my first story is not for Escape Pod, but for Cast of Wonders (which is a YA podcast, soon to be part of the Escape Artists flock), I'm very excited that it is live now. You can listen to me narrate "Fairy Bones" by Guy Stewart here. (My voice is a little nicer usually, those were the last dregs of the Cold of Doom that had me in its claws for a while.)

If you read German and are interested in material culture of the Middle Ages Roman Age, there's an interesting (and textile-/clothing-related) article at Archaeologik, titled "Von Menschen und Kapuzenmänteln oder Wie kommuniziert eine Gesellschaft mit Alltagsgegenständen?".

You prefer more English? Here you go. There's a long poem listing an incredible amount of weird pronounciation rules (or exceptions) in English, called, fittingly, "Chaos". Sometimes, people attempt to read it, and here's one of the many youtube videos of it:


In final news, I'm hard at work getting the new European Textile Forum pages finished and online. I've kept records of how the old pages did look (which included the programmes, well, at least mostly!) but there was no real, proper archive. This will change now for the better, and it will also make administration and preparation of the Forum easier for me in the future (at least I hope so).

Today is Friday, and it's also November 20. Which means that five years ago, the Most Patient Man Of Them All became the Most Patient Husband Of Them All (by saying "yes" at exactly the right moment).

[caption id="attachment_1910" align="alignnone" width="640"] That was five years ago. The weather was much better than it is here today, though!


 
So today, he's having a day off, and we will be quietly celebrating our fifth wedding anniversary. Time really flies by - I can't believe how quickly these years went past.

Finding that special someone that you can share your life with? It really is the best thing that can happen in a life, and I consider myself a very, very lucky woman. Here's to the next five years - may they be as wonderful as the last.