I am back from the fair, and it was really, really nice - a lot of people I knew (and some that I had not seen for ages), and a lot of people I enjoyed to meet for the first time. We had a nice and cozy room, friendly neighbours (the three closest were two ceramics ladies, a Roman painter and a Roman knife-maker, followed by several jewellery and textiles folks), a delightfully fun evening on Saturday, and lots of interested visitors.

And now, after all the stuff that happened and the places I went during the last weeks, I am in need of a day off - which is exactly what I will be taking today. There's a dentist appointment on my calendar in a bit more than an hour, and there's a package to fetch from the post office, and the rest of the day will be spent in delightful stupor, reading a book I have read a dozen of times before and drinking tea and doing nothing, nothing at all. That, my friends, sounds like bliss to me at the moment...

If you have never heard about it, the Mühlberg-Ensemble is a complex of buildings in Kempten, southern Germany, where lots of organic material from c. 1470 to 1580 were found in the dead floors and other fillable parts of the building structures.

They were excavated several years back, and now vol. 3 of the publication of the finds is finally out! 

Rainer Atzbach / Ingolf Ericsson (eds), Die Ausgrabungen im Mühlberg-Ensemble (Kempten). Metall, Holz und Textil. Bamberger Schriften zur Archäologie des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit 3 =
Mühlbergforschungen Kempten (Allgäu) 3 (Bonn 2011).
362 S., zahlr. (tls farb.) Abb., 1 CD-ROM, 30 cm. (Bamberger Schriften z. Archäol. d. Mittelalters u. d. Neuzeit, 3/ Mühlbergforsch. Kempten, 3) Ln,
978-3-7749-3756-7, € 59,-

The volume contains the results of excavations in the basement plus the evaluation and publication of the metal and wooden finds. In addition, Antoinette Rast-Eicher and Klaus Tidow wrote about the textile finds from the buildings. You can find a table of contents and a German/English summary here (pdf file).


The book can be ordered from the publishing house or via your local bookshop. I already have a copy, but have not yet managed to take a good look into it - some report about it will follow as soon as I find the time.

Today is setup day for the IRM fair on Saturday and Sunday... so I am occupied in shifting stuff around, repeatedly, and setting up all the things and materials and info materials that Sabine and I brought. It's the first fair of this kind for me, so I am pretty excited and totally do not know what I have gotten into - though I suspect I will know more on Sunday evening.

If you are in the region, why don't you stop by tomorrow or Sunday? It's the Roman Villa in Perl-Borg, and Sabine and I will be standing in Room 9, the Laubad.

It took most of yesterday to catch up with emails and get my brain back onto something resembling a track, and it feels like I should already start packing and preparing again - for the IRM on the weekend. This mostly means planning what I want to show and what I want to emphasise in my assortment of goods and services, making a list of things to take so nothing important will stay here by accident, and taking care of the urgent things to do around here.

(Now... is clearing the desk considered urgent if I still have enough space to type? Probably not. Though it feels like I should set aside a whole day one of these days to do some clearing, and sorting, and probably filing or discarding of lots of the paper around me.)

Plus I'm struggling with my youtube account which seems to have forgotten that I exist. Or that it exists. Or both. The channel is still there, but I cannot log on to it, and I don't even get a new password sent when I try. Should I be able to get it to run, I can decide how to edit the video of my talk in Vienna and how best to upload it. (It needs editing because, as a good soul just told me, I have made a horrendous mistake in a calculation that I put into the presentation. Uh. Oops. So no uploading it un-edited, and I will still have to decide how to fix the problem, which is present on two slides...)

I'm back - and it's nice to be home again, even if both my ventures were absolutely fantastic. The weather was fabulous, the people were incredibly nice, there was delicious food both in South Tyrol and in Vienna, and the conference in Vienna went very well.

It was, to my great delight, a different crowd from "the usual" - since I often go to archaeological or experimental archaeological conferences, or to textile archaeology conferences, you sort of start knowing a lot of the people who turn up there. Which is very nice and enables one to re-connect and catch up with each other, but on the other hand limits new input you can get. This was quite different this time, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. As well as the lovely reception we got given in Vienna town hall and the Grand View tour on the rooftop of the Natural History museum (with the most splendid weather imaginable) - and of course meeting some of my friends again.

And then I came back from the conference in Vienna to a garden that is slowly filling up with blooming spring flowers and fantastic weather. Now I only have to get through the gazillion emails in my in-box and get back on track for the things that need to be done urgently... which includes the fine-tuning of plans for the IRM the coming weekend. Which I might just do sitting in the garden this afternoon, since it is pretty warm and sunny! These are the joys of being a freelancer...

In spite of my giving sometimes a very different picture, I am not always a very orderly or organised person. Yes, I like to be prepared for stuff, but sometimes things escape me. And sometimes I just let a "that should work... somehow... possibly" solution go on way, way too long.

I have just finished sorting all the stuff I took home from the conferences of the past years. Usually, you get handed a little something - a bag or even a canvas bag or a folder - stuffed with a little info about the place you are, the conference programme, museum leaflets, an attendants address' list, and other papery stuff. Now, I have solved the note-taking-and-finding conundrum some years ago when I started to write down all notes from a conference in a single book I made just for that purpose. The papery stuff handed out? I had put them into a magazine file thingie to keep them all together somehow. I have now put all of it (including older notes and stray notes taken on loose leaf paper) into one large ring binder, sorted by conference, and gotten rid of all the old ad leaflets and brochures. And that made me realise... I went to a lot of conferences during those last years. I suspect I may have missed one or two, but during the last years, I almost always went to two conferences each year.

Now I only need to find all the printed-out or scribbled-down notes for the different presentations I gave at the various conferences and put those into a ring binder... and I will be all sorted and have a new, nice, relatively future-proof system. Whew.

I have managed to finally get some more of the nasty small things done - tweaking a few of the texts at the shop, getting bookkeeping stuff up to date, thinking about new products, settling a few date issues - and now the next things looming up on the horizon (or not so far off, to be fair) are both the conference in Vienna (where I'm still waiting for the final verdict on how much time I will have), a paper to finish for some other conference proceedings - relating textile production to daily life in the Middle Ages - and the IRM.

The IRM is a goods and service fair in a museum not too far from Trier, taking place March 31 and April 1 (and it's not an April Fool's joke). It's a fairly new project, this fair, and I am not sure what to expect. Since this is the very first fair I'm going to as an exhibitor, I am also not yet sure what to bring and how to do the presentation. Something nice and new would be splendid to bring there... but I'm not completely sure what. Maybe an embroidery package? There should be time enough for me to prepare a few, including instructions and background info. (Your input on this, as always, will be very welcome!)