It has snowed again - a deep, white, totally beautiful cover on everything. It looks really nice and soft and fluffy and almost cuddly from inside here.
The cat, it seems, has finally come to the conclusion that she will really be allowed back inside even when there's snow on the ground, and has gone off for her morning round in the usual length of an hour or more.

She was abandoned sometime during last winter, and found last year in February, and would not go out into the snow at all at first, and then not  for more than a few minutes at a time - so we speculate that she had bad memories connected with the snow. Accordingly, we took extra care to both encourage her to go out and let her back in again as soon as she wanted to come inside. Which sort of still holds on, so now I'm getting up and checking for cat ears in front of the door rather frequently.

In non-weather-related news: there is progress on the writing front, for both projects. Not much of that is due to yesterday, though, because I had a rather nasty headache and did not get much done in consequence.

I have also done some more spinning on the Great Wheel. This has led to me coming more and more to appreciate how absolutely and enormously crucial the quality of the fibre and the quality of the fibre preparation is for flawless spinning on the wheel, at least if you are not really proficient at it. The search for the perfect-rolag-making technique is still going on here, but I feel like I have gotten much closer.

Since I started spinning with the Great Wheel, I have read about carding techniques and looked at carding instructions and people carding quite a bit, but the up to now best set of instructions is "Handcarding with a Light Touch" by Carol Huebscher Rhoades. It's available as part of an e-book offered by spinningdaily.com; the .pdf can be downloaded for free after you register with the site. (I did, and I do not regret it due to this article. They have a few other free instructional e-books as well. There is also a (not-quite-but-almost-daily) newsletter that they send out with info about new free e-books, though it also includes (and is mostly) advertisement for courses, dvds, books and other things they would like you to buy.)

I have (of course) made use of the Cambridge Journal offer, but regrettably did not find much of interest for me in the 2012 yield of articles. (Though admittedly my topics are a bit special.)

There is also the journal "Internet Archaeology", a peer-reviewed online journal that has its back issues under an open access policy since this month. My check yielded no textile-related stuff, but for those of you who do not have such a narrow focus, here's the link. Enjoy.

I have finally caught up with the time-critical links on the blog (at least I hope so), and now I can move on to diminish my list of links to stuff again.

So, exciting stuff on the web right now...

- The V&A is still working on establishing the Textile and Clothing study collection at its new centre, and the opening date is (probably) summer or autumn 2013. They do have a lot of their collection accessible and searchable online. Though it's not the same as seeing the stuff up close, you can head to their digital catalogue and search the whole collection.

- Less pictures, more text: the Textile Conservation Centre offers a list of all the thesis titles and abstracts written in connection with their institution on their webpage. The institution has ended its life in 2009, but has a successor: The Centre for Textile Conservation and Technical Art History in Glasgow.

- The Germanisches Nationalmuseum (GNM) is planning a new exhibition on early modern clothing and textiles, probably starting in 2015 (see the German info page here).

- And finally and totally textile-unrelated, there is a new adaptation of Pride and Prejudice running at the moment. It's in form of a video blog made by Lizzie Bennet (plus some blogs from her sister Lydia), plus Twitter and tumblr story bits, and I think it's an awesome and thoroughly well-done adaptation of the story to modern times. You might want to click this link to get to the official page with all the story... but then, if you have work to do, you might not. (Not want to click the link. Because it will eat up your time. Ask me how I know.)

The last few years that I've been at conferences, I have seen quite a few different ways of handling conference name tags.

Name tags are a wonderful thing. Not only are they a wonderful help for those who have trouble remembering faces, names, or both (where both is obviously the worst possibility), they also can serve as an icebreaker help (such as "Oh, you are from ... - I always wanted to see Museum X (or whatever else) there). (Yes, I know, not the smartest opening of them all, but still) or they can help finding someone you have always wanted to meet.

What has irked me, sometimes, is the labeling for those who are not affiliated with a Uni or similar institution. I then went around as "Independent Researcher", and somehow I felt like a sore thumb. Or something else that sticks out.

Being independent does, obviously, have its plus sides - there is no uni politics or uni programme making you do things that you don't want to research, you can pick which conferences you go to, you are very free in how you schedule stuff and who you team up with. On the other hand, it means that you lack a lot of opportunities and a lot of support, because it really can make a difference having an institution or a Big Name behind you - or not. And in the worst case, if you do not have (good) access to a library, you have to pay for all the literature access yourself.

On that note, here is something that is nice for everyone, but especially for independent folks: Cambridge Journals is having Free Access weeks for everything published in 2012 if you register at their site. The free access is available until March 5, so there is quite a bit of time to make use of it. There's a promo code you have to enter during registration for the free access, so do not forget to do that if you take up the offer!

Here are some more stacked-up notes and dates and things...

- There is a conference about Castles at War, AD 1000-1660, taking place the 29th and 30th April 2013 at Nyborg Castle, Funen, Denmark. More about it here.

- On February 9, the King's College London is offering a course called "Constructing Clothing: Exploring the Making of Dress". More info here.

-Just in case you did not know, there is a manuscript/picture search possibility of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, called Mandragore.

In other news, the cat was even less fond of getting her medicine this morning. Sigh. It's hard to stay patient and upbeat when it seems to be not at all appreciated... She also seems to think that we are running out of food, since she got us some yummy (in her opinion) fresh prey and gave it to me (only reserving the cat rights to play with it some more, of course). Cats. Says it all, right?

I have about a thousand tabs open in my browser at the moment - because I tend to leave one open to remind me of something I should do, or of something I could blog about, or both. Or it's something I want to read, but had no time for. Or something that I'm thinking about (such like conference call-for-paper pages - they are often open for more than one week while I decide if I want to go there and if so, if I want to offer a paper, and if so, what).

And there are times when there are so many tabs open it gets on my nerves. This is one of these times... so now I will give you links. Random links. Only linked by the fact that they have been open in tabs for a while now...

The always interesting TechKnitter is de-kinking yarn with a steam iron. (Post before that? Grafting sock toes while avoiding those dog-ear corners.)

I had not known Ben Caplan nor Katzenjammer before that - but here's a video from those two covering "Fairytale of New York". Very Xmassy!

There's a new page with 18th and 19th century flea-market finds on the Textile Group page of Uni Innsbruck. They are textile-related, of course.

There's a Science article on a 30 000 year old flax find .

An interesting article about the plaster casts from Pompeii dead.

An info-page about "Fashioning Change" by Andrea Denny-Brown, with the possibility to download excerpts from the book. If I understand correctly, it can be ordered as electronic copy as well, for a very fair price of about 15 USD.

That's it. Now my browser is feeling much slimmer!

While Maney sells its journals and journal issues at prohibitively high prices for a mere mortal such as I, they do hand out open access stuff now and then - very nice! Apart from them having a "Journal of the Month" with lots of free access to back issues of said journals, there's an occasional extra free access thingie.

Such as the one I got an email about today - some of the top articles for a stack of archaeology or archaeology-related journals are available for free online. And since there is no info page for the offer on Maney's websites (at least not where I could find them), here's the relevant bit of the email copied for you, with a little table-tweaking so it all fits onto the page:

Click on the images below to view a selection of the journal's best content and download any articles highlighted in green. Be sure to close the lightbox on each journal page before clicking on the next journal link!

Arms & Armour	Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites
English Heritage Historical Review	Environmental Archaeology
European Journal of Archaeology	The Historic Environment: Policy & Practice
Industrial Archaeology Review	Journal of Conflict Archaeology
Journal of Field Archaeology	Journal of the British Archaeological Association
Levant	Medieval Archaeology
Palestine Exploration Quarterly	Post-Medieval Archaeology
Public Archaeology	Studies in Conservation
Tel Aviv	Terrae Incognitae
Vernacular Architecture	Yorkshire Archaeological Journal

Have fun!