Just this weekend, I found myself in the middle of a discussion about changes the pandemic has made to our working life, and the pros and cons of home office and company office. The verdict (at least for me) was - a lot of things very, very much depend on individual circumstances. There's people who find it much easier to stick their head in a colleague's office and ask a question, or ask around at the coffee machine and water cooler, and others find it easier to quickly type a question into a group chat or send an email around.

There's people who can work comfortably from home, having enough space and enough of an internet connection, and there's others who can't. There's those who are on the phone with faraway colleagues most of the time anyways and those who need to handle things that can only be handled in person on site. So - it very much depends.

One thing that the pandemic has changed, though, is the openness towards online-only and hybrid events - and I, for one, am still utterly delighted that a lot of conferences now offer online participation or online streaming. I'm especially delighted if said online participation is free (or has a very low fee) because it's often been the case that a conference had two or three presentations that sounded very interesting to me, but for those it would not have been sensible, or affordable, to travel to a medium to very distant place and do the whole conference. With the hybrid events, I can now tune in to what I would like to see in those cases - and that's just utterly, gloriously wonderful.

And all that is a very wordy lead-in to tell you that the Experimental Archaeology Conference in Torún, Poland, will also be a hybrid event. Online participation is free; the list of sessions and presentations is now online, and you can register for it to keep updated and get info material:

The conference website is https://exarc.net/meetings/eac13 and session 3.B is a textile session - plus there's a lot of other interesting papers about all kinds of experimental archaeology topics. 

There's an online symposium about "Thy Father's Instruction: Reading the Nuremberg Miscellany as Jewish Cultural History by Dr. Naomi Feuchtwanger-Sarig", hosted by the Goldstein Centre, on September 14. It's to celebrate a book launch and starts at 18:00 Israel time, so you might want to check your timezone if you'd like to attend; it's free but you will have to register. Read more about this on the Centre's website, where you can also register. 

Not online, and not free, but well worth it if you're in German Living History and interested in the topics covered: the Nobilitas-Akademie. Nobilitas is a group to preserve old crafts - which means they also organise crafter's markets, or events at museums that involve historical crafts. They also try to spread knowledge, and help people exchange knowledge and network, and one of the possibilities to do that is their Akademie. 

It takes place in a castle-turned-youth-hostel, and this year's academy is on November 11 to 13. There's talks about medieval cooking, fighting, Cisterciensians, technical knowledge of the Middle Ages, and more. Apart from the presentations, there's time to talk and network with the other participants, and the last time I've attended, there was also some medieval gaming. Check out their programme on the Nobilitas website, where you'll also find their registration form.

I'm back from my gallivanting across the countryside, all the way down to the boot heel of Italy, and it was glorious.

I hadn't realised how much I had missed meeting up with colleagues for a conference and working together until I went to Vienna for a EuroWeb workshop and now to Italy. It was a three-day workshop about embroidery, and two days of travelling there and back each, and almost every minute of it was pure bliss.

Travelling took a while since I was not going to fly if avoidable at all, and it was avoidable by using a night train. As the direct flight connections to Brindisi or Bari were not convincing for her as well, I joined up with a friend in Munich and we travelled together, which just added to the fun. We had a night train from Munich to Rome, and then it's several hours again to get to Lecce and then Muro Leccese, where our workshop took place.

We had wonderful warm and sunny weather, delightfully delicious food, lots of Italian coffee, and incredibly nice people. There was a workshop on filet netting and embroidery, an exploration of Bronze Age embroidery stitches, an introduction to Punto Maglie (which is a kind of needle lace, which is something I'd wanted to do for ages and had never gotten around to), a number of presentations about embroidery-related research projects, many chats and discussions with colleagues, and oh, did I mention the food? I was in food heaven. 

I also worked on my appreciation of coffee without milk, or with very small amounts of milk - as I didn't want to be one of the touristy Germans who order cappuccino after breakfast. (When, on the last day, I discovered there was hot milk with the coffee break supplies, though, I did have a cup of coffee with lots of milk. And then a second one straight away. Due to remaining little bits of sense left in my brain, I didn't have a third one, though...)

I also learned a great deal and finally got to meet, in person, a few of the people I had met over Zoom beforehand, plus some new people. 

All things taken together, and the great hospitality of the local conference team (which even organised a little evening sightseeing trip to Otranto for us) added up to utter bliss for several days in a row. Utter, extreme, perfect bliss.

That was, by the way, the first time I've been to Italy. (I've been to South Tyrol before, but as both Italians and people from South Tyrol will tell you, that does not count as Italy. It's basically an extension of Austria where you can speak Italian, if you so wish, but German is spoken and understood about everywhere too.) I couldn't have wished for a better place to fall in love with the country.

My only problem now? My new favourite café is very, very far away from home...

I'm back home, and back at work. There's tea, there's the very helpful cat (who has now moved to her cat bed again and stopped putting her paw onto the touchpad at the most inopportune moments), there's things with deadline to take care of. 

But first - let me tell you that Vienna was glorious, and wonderful, and really exhausting. It was so good to meet with colleagues again and discuss things in person, with hands-on materials to try out what cannot just be described, and to mingle and chat and have all the extra networking opportunities that you just cannot get over online get-togethers or online conferences.

The organising team did an utterly splendid job at filling our three days with exciting and stimulating tasks. There was discussion of the papers and articles that we all had read in preparation; there were presentations putting those theoretical aspects into context of our own research and projects; there were clothing reconstructions that we looked at (and tried on) from different aspects, and two excursions to see garments - some secular ones preserved in a crypt underneath St. Michael's church, and some very spectacular old ecclesiastical garments still in use in St. Stephen's Cathedral.

There was also an entirely adequate number of coffee breaks, with coffee and tea and biscuits and chocolate and cake. Plus the continued discussions, and extra discussions, in those breaks. There might also have been some hanging out together in the evening, getting food and some drinks.

On the last morning, I felt like there's not enough coffee in the world anymore to get my brain up to the wakefulness and speed that I'd have liked it to be at. There was enough, though, to get me through the day and thoroughly enjoy it up to the last minute, when all those of us who were dead tired did do the adult and reasonable and sensible thing and went home, or into the hotel room, and to bed.

I spent my last morning in the beautiful city having a relaxed breakfast, buying food for the journey home, and getting a bit of bouldering in (there's a gym very close to the main train station) before sitting on my butt for several hours on the train. Where there was wi-fi, and theoretically the possibility to catch up on work, but - see above - there just wasn't enough coffee in the world anymore.

So let's see if I can catch up today, and actually get all the things on my list done...

There's conferences coming up, and CfPs are out - here's what I found in my diverse feeds:

Dressed, The Widespread Role of Clothes, Textile Production and Clothing Concepts in Society. June 22-24, via Zoom. Deadline for submissions is April 20. Find out more at dressconference.org. 

Also looking for contributions: The conference "What's in a Name?" taking place in June this year in Braga. Deadline for contributions is April 15 - yes, that's short notice, sorry.

Finally, the conference Interwoven Society takes place November 14-17 in Lübeck, Germany. This will focus on the impact of textile industry on society; CfP is open until April 17. You can find out more, and find links for submitting abstracts, at H-Soz-U-Kult here. 

I will definitely not be able to attend the last conference mentioned - we have a date for the European Textile Forum this year, and it will be November 5-13. More about that soon, here and on the Forum website!

There's an online workshop on Friday titled "RECONSTRUCTING TEXTILES AND THEIR HISTORY: Egyptian Fabrics from the 1st Millennium AD at the National Museum of Denmark". It starts at 11:00 Copenhagen time, and there's a number of interesting topics covered - including some nalbinding, which is how I heard of it: Anne Marie Decker is giving a presentation there.

The workshop is open to the public, but you will need to register today or, at the latest, tomorrow in order to join in. You can do so via an email form that Anne has set up. She also posts the programme on her blog, and some additional information about both the workshop and its background. Go to her post at nalbound.com to find out more, and register if you'd like to do so, and I hope you have a lot of fun!