It's time for a link again, and today I have a very non-textile link. There is a new (German-language) online mag about stove ceramics and their history, complete with gallery and quite a lot of info. You can find it at www.furnologia.de, and you find its navigation links in the blue bar on top of the page (my screen shows it as blue writing on blue-ish background, so it took me a while to find it).

If you're interested in this sort of thing, go check it out. You should also go and have a look at the gallery if you are not interested in ceramics, but like to see pictures of dragons, half-naked ladies, men and women wearing 16th century headgear, men on horses and nice ornaments. (In this case, click on "Galerie" and enjoy.)

If you are looking for some place to test your fibre identification skills, you might want to take a look here - and see if you can recognise these cellulosic fibres.

For those of you not only interested in squishy soft textiles, but also in hard stone, there is a Flintknapper Symposium on May 30 - June 2 in the Archaeoparc in the Schnalstal (click link for pdf with info).

And finally, I found out yesterday that Wikipedia (while it can be really, really useful to quickly get a basic idea of something) seems to be a quite not-so-friendly place behind the scenes, editing wars and all. There's an article on Sue Gardner's blog about why women do not edit wikipedia (there are less than 15% openly female contributors to English wikipedia), though the reasons given would apply not only to women, but also to men.
I find this sad. It also makes me think that maybe it would be helpful to do some wikipedia editing... but I have absolutely no desire at all to enter into editing wars, or to work hard at something and then see it disappear again.

A few days ago, I stumbled across this sprang object in the Met museum, dated to 1450-1500. Late medieval sprang again, isn't that nice? And patterned too...

And if you are more into tabletweaving: Amalia has posted photos and information about a tablet-weave from Estonia. It's the border of an 13-14th century shawl or stole, a beautiful piece, and you should totally check it out.




(You should have clicked that link. Really. Not only because it's a beautiful textile, but also because I have nothing more to say here today.)

If you've ever wished to take a walk along the Bayeux tapestry, but you are not getting to Bayeux for now, you can do so virtually - the full tapestry is on the internet.

Now usually, I'll be one of the crowd that says horizontal scrolling on webpages is evil - but in this case... it's just cool.

I have finally updated the homepage at www.pallia.net - and for those of you in Germany (or at least reading German) who are interested in getting all the news from pallia, you can now sign up to a newsletter that will make sure you get all the interesting announcements.

Since most of my news-announcing is done via this blog, and this blog is English, the Germans who are not really at home with a foreign language always got to be a little disadvantaged. And while I will go on with this blog as usual, there's now a German language way to get the updates - including those not too interesting for an international audience.

Signing up is, of course, easy: Just go to www.pallia.net, and you can sign up right on the front page of the (German language) site. The newsletter will be used to announce workshop dates and the occasional larger shop update or places and dates where you can find me (and the market stall, probably).

As promised yesterday, here are a few things that might be of interest.

First of all, there's a blog out there with (among other things) a collection of 60 pdf files with papers or articles on experimental archaeology. Go visit http://experimentalarchaeology.wordpress.com/papers/ if you are curious now - and enjoy!

And there's more nice stuff on the net. Quite recently, the Historisch Centrum Overijssel has made all the back issues of the Textielhistorische Bijdragen available online.  This is lovely! Even more lovely is that Isis of Medieval Silkwork has made a selection of all the articles of interest for the late medieval and early modern period, with links. And if you don't know her blog yet, this is a good opportunity to check it out as well.


And another article has gone online: Fragmenter av kvinnedrakter fra vikingtiden –Metode for identifikassjon av gamle tekstilfunn. This is a Norwegian article with a short English summary, available via Bergen University as pdf file. The paper is about textiles from three Viking Age graves owned by Bergen Museum. They were analysed and evaluated using reconstructed micro-stratigraphy (reconstructed because the textiles had been separated from the metal objects in the past).

In more personal news, the collection of addresses of people interested in getting my book in English has started out extremely well, and I am very happy about all the feedback I have gotten both in emails and comments here on the blog. Thank you all very much for your support, and please keep spreading the word by email, facebook, twitter, your blog, forums you frequent - I would love to have a truly impressive list when I check back with the publishing house in two weeks.

If you are looking for a convenient way to search for Open Access archaeological journals, there is a database where you can search by geographic area, subject area, peer review and whether or not it's still publishing: Just go to Open Access Archaeology Journal Search.

In other news, I am slowly catching up with all the backlog that ran up here, and that really feels good! (Though there's more than enough work for the rest of this year hiding in corners here and there...)