Time to tell you about the things I was up to while I was away - first of all: the MEDATS study day.
I was utterly delighted to be invited to the study day, with its topic "Learning through Reconstruction". It was a day full of interesting presentations, about various topics.
I finally got to meet, in person, Geeske Kruseman, who talked about the differences between hose and trousers, from the constructional point of view. Her classification included a look at body geometry and garment geometry; though I had been sort of aware of these differences, it was very nice to have it all spelled out so clearly, and made me realise things in a different way.
The second presentation that stuck really out for me was Alex Makin's paper about her embroidery project - of course, since I was involved in sourcing the silk and some of Alex' needles, and helping to get colours sorted out. It was wonderful to see pictures from the work in progress.
I also particularly enjoyed Ninya Mikhaila's stories from behind the scenes of reconstructing the Arnolfini gown - which was done for the BBC series "A Stitch in Time", and accordingly had its very own, and very special challenges.
I thoroughly enjoyed meeting up with everybody (and I finally got to meet some more people in person, in addition to Geeske, that I only had contact before via the Internet). We had a table to place items related to our presentations, so there was additional things to look at during the coffee breaks. All in all, the day could have been much longer for me!