There's a number of conferences coming up, and I thought you might be interested, so here they come:

African Experimental Archaeology Conference, March 20-22, Johannesburg. More info and registration here.

The 12th North American Textile Conservation Conference will take place in Canada, September 23-29, 2019. Their CfP is now open, and the topic is "Lessons Learned: Textile Conservation - Then and Now".

There's a conference on experimental Music Archaeology, April 12-14, in Brandenburg; more info and contact information here.

The CTR in Copenhagen is running a Saxo Summer School programme: "Textiles and Fashion in Theory and Practice through 3000 Years". It's a 10-day programme, more info on the CTR homepage.

The Dombauhütte Paderborn will have a bell founding event June 23-29, where a bell of 11th century style will be cast using 1th century methods. More info can be found on the facebook event page and on the Dombauhütte website.

 

I'm back at the work desk, trying to battle my way through stacks of paper that needs to be taken care of, as well as stacks of email that has to be dealt with. It's amazing how many mails can run up in just a few days of not-really-in-the-office time!

The symposium last weekend, by the way, was an utterly wonderful thing - not only did I get to meet a lot of lovely people again that I meet way, way too rarely, there were also a number of new faces to finally connect with the names I've been reading here and there, over and over again during the last years.

Add to this a number of really interesting and well-presented papers, a concert featuring medieval music in the beautiful Marienkirche with its astounding acoustics (and I still have a selection of earworms from that), a wine tasting with wines made from old grape varieties (including the wine that saved Oswald von Wolkenstein's life as he held on to the barrel when shipwrecked, and a wine that has been processed following exactly the instructions in the Capitulare de Villis, down to reconstructed tools), common meals both in the conference place as well as in the evening, and you have a wonderful event that I would call wildly successful - and I do hope that it will not have been the only or last one of its kind!

Now, though, the season of events and conferences is finally over for me, and there's hope of things becoming a little calmer again. Which includes a chance of actually getting back on top of the things stacked here, both physically and virtually...

My bags are packed and I am off again once more - the celebratory conference of IG Wolf is taking place this weekend, starting this evening, and it's promising to be a really interesting programme. The conference includes a concert and a wine-tasting evening with old grape breeds, plus a variety of different papers during Saturday and Sunday, and I'm very much looking forward to meeting a whole lot of old friends, acquaintances and colleagues there that I only get to see quite rarely.

My own presentation will be on Sunday morning, I'll be back home on Sunday night, and then I am just as happy to not be travelling for a while. If it feels like you've been living out of a bag for weeks, it's probably time to slow things down for a bit and not rush around through half of Germany for a while!

There's two events coming up where I will give a presentation or paper: the European Textile Forum in November and, shortly after that, the Symposium to celebrate 30 years of Living History by IG Wolf, and I'm really excited about both of them.

The European Textile Forum, as a dear child of my heart and Sabine's, will be focused on silk, that lovely luscious material, and the preliminary programme is already rather lovely and varied. There's still a good bit of organising work to do for me, scheduled to happen during the next few days (whenever I'm not busy preparing for the fair at Bielefeld), but so far, everything is fine and I'm already really, really looking forward to it. The presentation I've planned means that I will have to sit down and do some more nice, brain-bending tablet weaving, too... something I'm also looking forward to. Yay!

The second one - IG Wolf is one of the groups doing Living History, and LH demonstrations, with lots and lots of attention to detail, and lots of love and enthusiasm to go with it. They have been going strong for 30 years now and are celebrating in style: not with a party, but with an actual symposium for a whole weekend, featuring a number of papers under the motto "Theorie trifft Praxis". I'll be talking about spinning and fabric reconstruction/recreation, with all the many problems that can (and probably will) come up.
You can have a look at the programme here - and if it tickles your fancy, there's good news: they still have space available and take registrations until September 15, so you can register here and join the fun!

 

Speaking of things from NESAT, and continuing the blog from yesterday - Beatrix Nutz, Rachel Case and Marion McNealy, who did a presentation about the Lengberg finds at NESAT, have also put their presentation online for you to watch (in fact, they were a lot faster than me!), and they even re-made the audio part as the audio quality from their recording was not brilliant.

So here's a little bit more of NESAT for you to enjoy:

The NESAT is still lingering on for me, not only because I got new ideas and new contacts that I have not yet followed up on completely - it also is still lingering as I need to finish my paper writeup.

I like to give my presentations freestyle, with no written script, and I very much enjoy doing that. It means preparing the presentation so I get all my prompts from the Powerpoint, and doing multiple test runs (but then I guess everybody has to do these). For those test runs, I really like to use the "rehearse timings" function ("Neue Einblendezeiten testen", for the Germans among you). This gives me a running count of how long I've already babbled to myself, and in the overview pane in the program, I can see how long each slide took me to narrate everything I wanted to say. This makes it easy to see if a slide has too much babbling done, and I should probably split it, or lets me see at one quick glance where I might be able to cut something. (Just be aware, if you are planning to try this out, that PP will automatically adjust the settings for the presentation to automatically advance the slides according to the rehearsed timing; make sure you set your presentation to advance manually before you save the final version, or you will be irritated no end as your slides advance without your doing, and probably just a little out of sync with your talk.)

The upside of this? I only have to concentrate on the presentation, and I can speak freely, and if necessary speed up some part or go more into detail in another one. (This, obviously, is mostly the case when it's a longer presentation in a lecture setting and not at a conference, where the usual 20 minute time slot does not allow for much deviation from the rehearsed durations.) The downside of this, however, is that when it is time to write the presentation up in form of a paper, all the writing still needs to be done - there's no presentation script to build up from.

So this is what I am currently doing - writing up my paper for the NESAT conference publication. There are clear author guidelines for it, with a very clear hard deadline, and also hard limits on the number of pictures and words - and I'm sort of half-happy and half-sad that both are rather low. It means less writing, but also less space for thoughts and considerations and explanations, and some of my points are rather easier to show with pictures - so I'm wrangling with that.

And while I'm doing that... maybe you would like to see my presentation? I have kind friends who filmed my paper, and with kind permission from the NESAT organisers, I have put this recording on Youtube - so here's a little bit of the conference for you to enjoy, even if you couldn't be there in person:

 

Here's a stack of things you might enjoy... first of all, the children's quiz show that I was filmed for in January is online for four more days, and you can watch the episode here. (It's the second question in.)

Here's an article about the hatpin in the early 20th century and its use for self-defense.

Looking for something less martial? Here's a 14th century recipe for doughnuts, courtesy of the British Library.

If you are interested in studying Experimental Archaeology, the UCD is offering a new course for a MSc in Experimental Archaeology and Material Culture. Application deadline is on June 2, so if that sounds interesting to you, you will need to be quick.

Speaking of programmes, the Nobilitas Akademie this year will be 10-12 November on Burg Hessenstein. As usual, there's a variety of different topics, all sounding quite interesting! Their programme is online, and you can register for it; if you do it soon, you'll get a bit of an early bird discount, too.

Finally, here is a blog article about a spinning technique with hand spindles that I have on my list of "things to try and figure out how to do" - rotating the spindle in the hand, but not with the hand and finger position similar to short suspended spinning, but more or less horizontally. I've seen this a good while ago for the first time and have since dabbled some with the motion (which is totally intriguing), but as I said, it's still on the list.

Hope you enjoy one or more of those!