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!

Here I am, slowly unpacking all the lovely stuff brought home from NESAT. Extra slowly, as most of my worktime yesterday and today is eaten up by doing the tax paperwork. Which is due at the end of this month - anyone hear that "whoosh" sound the approaching deadline makes? (I had wanted to do the tax stuff before NESAT, but with all the other things happening, that had not worked out, so I had planned on spending the start of this work week on it. Progress is according to plan, more or less, so all things are good.)

Anyway, let's return to unpacking, and I will give you a glimpse of the things I brought home from the conference. First of all, stuff from the conference bag - there was the book of abstracts, and the usual info material (a map and information about the city, and about Prague as preparation for our excursion), plus a nice little pen, a pocket programme (glorious idea!) and, woven in the university:


a cloth bookmark with the NESAT emblem, hanging out on the abstract booklet here.

With a bookmark, it is obvious that at least one book has to be bought, right? I made it two:


The one on the left is in Czech, but with a good English summary, and it has lots and lots of photographs of the finds from Prague... which include garment details (buttonholes, for instance). The second one, Chrystel's PhD thesis, contains a lot of meticulous research about early medieval finds from the Netherlands, and those include several hats and headdresses, which makes me really happy, and I'm looking forward to having a nice cup of tea and a read of this thesis.

Now... buying books at a conference is rather normal. It's also not entirely unexpected to find something nice in the conference bag, in addition to the usual things. What came as an utter surprise to me and all the other speakers, though: We, as well as those chairing one of the sessions (which means you are the one introducing the speakers and making sure they finish on time, plus, if necessary, keeping the discussion from getting too short, too long, or too hot), all got a present.

One woven in the university. After a find from the second half of the twelfth century... a piece of samite with gold thread pattern. (Made, in this case, from artificial gold thread and viscose, and not one hundred percent the size of the original, but very close.)

So I now have this:


and I am endlessly delighted with it! It will get a nice spot on one of the walls here, looking utterly beautiful!

I'm back home from NESAT - and it was utterly, utterly glorious.

This was my fourth NESAT conference. The first three had all been splendid, breathless experiences full of interesting papers and posters and with many, many lovely people and brilliant weather and good food and nice surprises, and I was hoping for something in that range - and I'm happy to tell you that NESAT XIII was no exception at all to what seems to be the rule for this conference. Time just flew past, with a (modern) loom presentation and posters and reconstructions to look at in the breaks. There was traditional Czech food, there was coffee galore, there were intense discussions about textiles and many, many other exciting news of what people had done or were planning to do. One of these things that made me totally geek out? The CTR in Copenhagen is working with Motion Capture technology to record and analyse textile techniques, and they are planning to link this up with neurological scans, to see which brain areas are firing when you are, for instance, spinning on a hand spindle. Isn't that awesome?

To give you an inkling of how packed that programme was - we had 48 papers over the course of three days, there was a festive lecture, there was poster presentation time, there was a festive evening. On the fourth day, we had an excursion where we got to visit three exhibitions (one specially made for us in the textiles depot, one in the Hrad, and one in a beautiful museum in the city).

I managed to only buy two books - one about the Early Medieval finds from the Netherlands, and one about Czech finds. I also brought home a bit of Czech chocolate - and almost a sunburn from the one and three quarters day in Prague that I spent with four other conference participants, having an inordinate amount of fun (and coffee). We also managed to walk more than 21 km on the excursion day altogether, which means we slept really, really well that night!

Now, my coffee, water, and exhaustion levels are all slowly settling back towards a normal range. The place for the next NESAT, in three years' time, has also been settled: it will be in Finland... so I now have three years to save up and two-or-so years to come up with something exciting to offer for a paper. Because, you know... after NESAT is before NESAT!

My bags are packed, tickets are bought and printed out and sit where I will not accidentally leave them, I have pens and paper and something to read and something to knit, and - the most important thing - my paper is done and polished and hopefully I will manage not to talk about too many extra things on the spur of the moment and in all the excitement and run over time. (It's amazing, by the way, how much prep time a 20 minute presentation can take. I think it's about the same amount of time as a one hour presentation, as you need to compress so much into so small a timeframe that every slide needs to be polished and scrutinised and polished again. And then sometimes cut after all...)

On Monday, it's off to NESAT, and I can't even begin to describe how excited I am. It's so nice to get together with so many other textile archaeologists, meeting again and chatting and catching up and learning oh so many new things. With one of these glorious conferences only every three years, there's also quite a lot to catch up on, and it's always a rather long wait for the next one.

So I'll be spending the next week in nerd heaven, and for me, the conference will even start earlier, as I'll be travelling together with three more colleagues going there. Hooray!

For you, though, this means no blog posts during next week - I'll be back blogging the Monday after, though. See you then!