After thinking about it for weeks turning into months, and trying to put off the inevitable, I've finally succumbed and faced the facts: There will be no European Textile Forum in 2020.

I'm really, really sad about this, as this week of absolute textile research craziness is one of my highlights each year, but the situation worldwide is still insecure, and there's no way to predict where we'll be in November, and what things will be allowed, or possible, or sensible. In addition, though it's a small conference, it is one where we are a very international crew and work closely together - including physically close. This, together with the shared space to eat, sleep, and work, are part of the charm of the Forum, and play a large role in making it as effective and special as it is.

With all the tools and materials, sometime quite exotic, that are brought either by myself or by other participants so that everyone can work together on a project, and with the hands-on approach to so many things, there is no good way to just lift this over into virtual space either (as many other conferences have done). My own personal ample experiences with video meets and webcams have also shown that they won't be really suitable to showing things in high detail, which means that sharing ongoing work with each other would be much harder than just handing over the thing, or having someone else come over and take a look.

So rather than bending our concept and trying to make something work that is not suited well for the virtual space, we'll take a break, and hopefully everything will be under control enough for a normal Forum in 2021.

I'll miss it, though. A lot.

 

There's a second "Mittelaltermarkt Online" tomorrow, starting at 11 am German time - and I'll be there!

This is a funny little thing: You register (free), then you can click yourself along the market paths (which reminds me of a simple game dungeon), look at the stalls left and right, and chat with the stall owners, look at their goods, and maybe buy something.

I was there last month for the first one, and it was curious, but also fun, so of course I decided to go there again. Stop by if you wish, and have a chat with me, either typed at the stall or via Jitsi Meet as a video meeting!

I spent a wonderful weekend, here at home and at the same time virtually at Lauresham, learining a lot about draft cattle, hearing about the pit houses, and connecting with a lot of fellow experimental archaeology people via Discord. That was definitely the first conference where I was able to learn about pit houses by listening to the discussion while at the same time tidying up in my kitchen, or removing some old leaves from plants in the wintergarden.

It was very new (and very exciting!) for me to connect via the voice channel, answering questions regarding the Albecunde reconstruction project, but I think it went quite well (and hope I did not ramble too much in my answers). I was also very amused by textile people taking over the channel with their discussion at one point... well, as we tend to do.

If you missed the weekend, you can still watch all the videos on the Lauresham Youtube channel, and I'm told that EXARC (who graciously hosted the event on their Discord channel, and who did an absolutely splendid job with all the tech in the background) are planning to make the voice discussion parts available as well, once they've tidied up the files.

Speaking of EXARC - do check out their website for the #FinallyFriday events, where an archaeological topic is discussed every last Friday of the month, and where you can find a list of virtual events and tours to keep you amused.

I'm a little random-brained today, so you're getting random links.

First of all, amid all the cancelled conferences, EXARC will be holding theirs as a digital conference, live-streamed and later on available as well.

[caption id="attachment_5136" align="alignnone" width="864"] Note the genius symbol thingie in the bottom right corner. I take off my hat to whoever made this.


Tune in on their official website to learn about Documentation Strategies in Open-Air museums, free of charge, on March 26 and 27. (There will even be a Discord pub get-together, because there's no archaeology conference without a drink and a chat with the colleagues!)

The open-air laboratory Lauresham (where the European Textile Forum took place last year) has started a youtube channel where they plan to show clips of various places and activities taking place. Text is in German, but you can enjoy a view of that beautiful place no matter your language:


If you're looking for something else to do, you could try yourself in folding proteins - basically playing games for science. Relevant games, too, because there are puzzles related to the proteins in the Corona virus. You can download the programme on the official website (no phone apps available yet) and get going right away.

And that's it for today... different stuff tomorrow!

The Corona Scare has probably reached almost every corner of the world now, and things are definitely starting to get interesting in Germany. Bavaria has cancelled all events with more than 1000 people until April 19, and other federal states are following suit - among them Baden-Württemberg, though I couldn't find any dates on how long this ban will be in effect.

The cancellation of events in Ba-Wü will probably directly affect me, as there are two fairs there, one in mid-April (18th and 19th) and one at the beginning of May (8-10). At the moment, I'm not counting on either of the two actually taking place; the first because it's still just within the "ban time" that Bavaria has called out, and I'd guess that Baden-Württemberg will go for a similar time period, if not for a longer one; the second because though it is a good bit later, it's also a (substantial) bit larger, with more than 10 000 visitors during the three days of the fair, and it might well be that events in that size will still be banned then, depending on how things develop.

There's also a bike fair we were planning to go to, which is on the last weekend in April, in Rheinland-Pfalz. It's (unfortunately, in this case) also a very large one, with about 10 000 visitors, and a rather international one... so while the status for this is still unclear, I won't count on it taking place. Which would be rather sad, just like the wool fairs being called off. I do get that cutting out large gatherings of people, especially if the crowd comes from all kinds of places and will spread back out afterwards, will be helpful in slowing the virus spread.

NESAT is not before mid-May, and not very large - I'm keeping my fingers crossed that nothing dire will happen to put this in danger.

So. Things will develop as they will, and there's nothing to do right now than wait and see (and hope, of course, that the virus spread will peter out quickly). The virus has caused enough madness all around the world already - panic shopping included, which meant that hospitals and doctor's offices ran out of disinfectant and other necessary supplies, and could not get more because of people hoarding the stuff. That, obviously, is not a good thing at all. Especially since for most people, going a bit easy on the hugging and keeping up a good basic hygiene (washing hands, first and foremost) would be more than sufficient to keep risk down in normal life. We still know relatively little about the virus, including the real mortality rate, and panicking will definitely not help anybody.

Has the Corona Scare arrived in your area yet? Or are people still relatively relaxed?

It's 2020... which means it is three years since the last NESAT conference. Which means that it's time for the next one. I already wrote about trying to get things done early this time around, and testing my demo. The conference is in May, so there's still a good bit of time until things get seriously deadline-y, but nevertheless I'm quite relieved that I have figured it out now.

I played around with the demo setup a bit more, cutting the number of tablets down from 12 to ten (which is just, juuuust enough to show the twill pattern rhythm, and the block that forms when a diagonal is cruising its way across the stack of tablets). I've also changed the sequence a bit, including a tiny strip of double face now, then diagonals, then diagonal patterning, and finally a little bit of patterning on 3/1 broken twill (which includes the crux of the thing, the direction change in twill background).

Cutting down to only ten tablets did make a difference. The larger difference was probably made by me abandoning my lovely, trusty weaving knife in favour of just the finger, and not bothering about the fact that my band width is not so even, and the wefts are sloppily tightened.

30 minutes is still a very, very short amount of time. It also still results in a very short bit of weaving:



However, the new sequence means I can explain things better as I go along, and that I can, miraculously, squeeze all the important bits into my time slot. Hooray!

Now I only have to make a suitable warp for the conference demo (as I've used up the one on the picture), make sufficient notes of what to do and what to explain at which stage, and then do another practice run or three shortly before the conference.

Which means that I'm now free to work on the other NESAT presentation - also about tablet weaving, but entirely different bands in an entirely different structure. Fun things!

 

NESAT is coming up - well, not utterly urgently and soon yet, but it is looming enough for me to think about it. Especially since I've registered to give an explanatory demo about my method on tablet weaving twill patterns without a pattern draft... and that, in turn, means I will have to aim for an explanation plus demo in about 20-30 minutes. Probably 30 minutes - since my two test runs that I made, quietly mumbling things to myself, took about half an hour.

So here I am, once again with the usual question of "how do I squash as much information as possible into X minutes while still keeping things understandable?" Which is the challenge I'm more or less facing every single time when I give a presentation, or a demo. (Or a workshop. I tend to fill workshops up with lots of info as well.)

For this specific problem, it starts with finding the perfect number of tablets. I have tried things out with a  dozen - which is enough to show the patterns when doing twill background, and how a pattern block moves across the band. For speed purposes, a few less would be even better, so I might cut the number down to ten.

I've also found that the best I can do in the demo is to explain what twill is based on (the diagonals) and show how to do a twill direction reversal. All the rest of how this makes it possible to weave basically anything on the fly will have to be explanatory only - probably with some additional demo bands and printed out pictures. Because this entirely unspectacular looking bit of diagonals and twill weaving, measuring a puny 5 cm, takes me half an hour to weave:

With talking about what I'm doing, and explaining, and showing some things to the empty air. (The cat refused to stand in as audience... she much preferred to nap somewhere else. Ah well.)

So... I'll fine-tune some more, and do it again, and make notes on what to print out in addition, and notes on what I want to say in what sequence. And then, I hope, it will eventually result in a nice little demo that will make my colleagues happy!